To you, whose spirit is as sturdy as the cypress and as blooming as the cherry tree, you who endure all my words even when they’re charged with unfair emotion, and whose affection forgives all my lapses, I know you will be able to discern the truth of what I am about to tell you.

This is what I believe on the subject of the first names of our times, of times past, and of times yet to come. Naming is the most important duty that is entrusted to us: the just and precise attribution of names. The very movement of thought is nothing more than an endless race to name the smallest things, material and immaterial. But can we ever sufficiently measure the gravity of a gesture that consists of attributing a name to a human being, so full of his own soul ? Well then, know that I must resign myself to doubting it, for never, otherwise, would the first names I hear when I join the noise of the world have been assigned so recklessly.

Every day I encounter splendid children who run and play in the pure perfection of themselves, wriggling with all the vigor and malice that God has granted since the origin of life. And every day, alas, I hear them called names of an irritating strangeness that has nothing to do with the strangeness that God himself encourages to flourish, so that the mind may experience the world’s inexhaustible and unexhausted meanings. Alas, no, it has more to do with a strangeness that in all likelihood is driven by a desire for distinction. The child is endowed with a name that passes itself off as pure invention, but which is intended to break with any form of ancestral tie, or to invent another connection, crudely linked to the new laws of this world. The first name floats above the head of the child like a little cloud containing neither rain nor sun. In this way, the child is to be liberated from all the unfortunate determining factors that might attach him to a genealogy, a country or a history that preexists him. People would say of him that he is free, and that his parents are the prudent architects of this liberty.

I don’t think that’s the case at all, and I’m even inclined to think that it’s the expression of a miserable ambition chased by those who have lost their way, hoping to assure their progeny not a place in the world, as would be reasonable to wish for, but a place above the world. I won’t conceal from you the disdain I feel for such an aspiration, as I feel for all those who believe they can raise themselves above the infinite intelligence of the world. I despise these first names, but above all—and I know you will believe me, because you know the generosity I lavish on the lost—I am seized with fear, with great fear, for these children who are so badly named.

— Would you be kind enough to share a few of these names you despise, so I can get a better sense of the weight of what you’re telling me?

I could, but I won’t. Because I want you to understand the fundamental principle of things, not the accidental appearance they borrow to reveal themselves to us.

— In that case, I beg of you, explain your reasoning. What is this fear?

I’m afraid for these children because it seems to me that their vulnerability is exposed to the open air in brutal weather, from which their parents wrongly believe they are protected. You must have complete peace of mind, an infinite confidence in the life you lead and the world in which you lead it, to name your child as if nobody would ever come one day to grab him by the neck, and snap it like a thread, to explode his organs, reduce him to dust, rip him without warning from the arms that saw him born, and surrender him to fools; or to see him drown in a sea full of corpses, which he must traverse if he wants to live. You must believe that nothing could ever come along to disturb the moral and physical island you’ve built for yourself. These parents, is it possible that nobody had informed them? Is it possible that the news had never reached them? Is it possible that they remain unaware of the goal of the world that rumbles in the distance?

— What world are you talking about?

This world, my friend. Those who think there are others are lost.

— So what do you advise them to do?