One's Name

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the renowned philosopher whose strict stringent strictures about language inadvertently destroyed my youthful interest in philosophy, wrote in one of his less rigorous moments that "a man's own name [should be] sacred to him. Surely it is both the most important instrument given to him and also something like a piece of jewelry hung round his neck at birth." Wittgenstein's name at birth was "Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein" -- his Jewish origins concealed behind a string of echt-German Christian names.

I've never thought that my own name was a piece of jewelry -- but if it were a jewel, it was entirely a counterfeit.

My surname is an accident. My grandfather, according to the story, was born into a family named Middlebank or perhaps Middlebrook. Because a sole male child was exempted from the draft in darkest nineteenth-century Ukraine, he was surreptitiously adopted into a childless family. As a result, the name that he brought to America in 1895 was a merely a useful fiction. And then there's my middle name, Hessel. The only Hessels I've ever been able to trace are almost uniformly Danish. My grandmother on my father's side was born Eta Hessel and it's from her that the name descended. But am I to believe that a troop of Danes wandered into eastern Ukraine sometime before 1850 and left progeny behind?  I doubt it. In any case, I don't feel any more Danish than I feel anything else. And then my praenomen was borrowed out of the book of Job. Why my atheist parents, who never ever attended religious services of any kind, would have elected for me an obscure Hebrew name will always remain a complete mystery. So the whole parcel is a fabrication, a construct, without integrity or authenticity.

What name should I have had, a name I could finger like a rich jewel about my neck. Something that would suit me?  Suggestions are welcome. I'm thinking "Rocco" for a first name (it's so appropriate), but I'll need help on the middle or middles and the family name.

Comments

[Rutland Barrington]

Rocco Bomma

[Chris Kyrle]

Rocco Fabrizio Pantalone

[Miles Blankenship]

Everett Charles "Buzz" Schoonmaker