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1.a
Here’s the thing: my name has lost its meaning for me. It has palled on me. Every time I empty my postbox and see my name on an envelope I think to myself: someone is writing to this person again! Why don’t they leave him alone? And what’s he to me anyway, why should I read his letters? Do the writers of these letters have any idea who they are addressing? Well, maybe they do, but I don’t. All sorts of people can go by the same name, but I’ve got fed up with dancing to just any tune that might pop into someone’s head.
I know what the person they have in mind looks like but I don’t identify with him. If I caught sight of him in the street I would cross over to the other side.
1.b
If, as the saying goes, every person is unique, their name ought to be unique too. Except that it doesn’t work like that. What is unique about, say, Štefan Kováč, whose name is about as common as Stephen Smith is in English? In this country, no first name can ever be truly unique – the Church and the clerks at the register office have seen to that – and if your surname happens to be Kováč to boot, you’ve had it: you’ll end up being known as Kováč Up the Valley, or Kováč the son of Lipták, or Kováč the Potter, as opposed to Kováč the Shepherd. Slovak is a garrulous language, we don’t mind throwing in an extra word here and there, but even with that additional piece of information, does a name convey anything unique about a person? And even if we domesticate Štefan, what unique information do we glean from that? The familiar form ‘Števo’ conjures up the image of a blond, pink-cheeked softie, always willing to chop wood for the old lady next door, while someone known by another common form of the name, ‘Pišta’, would be a swarthy cunning prankster, maybe with a moustache, who will go far. Not to mention ‘Kováč’ who I will always imagine forging his own lucky horseshoe. There would be no point looking for anything unique in such images.
The purpose of a name is to help us pigeonhole a person. It makes life easier.
1.c
If we ever came to truly understand someone, to know them completely as a unique person, a unique name for them might just occur to us of its own accord. But who would be prepared to make this kind of effort nowadays? It would be easier to give people numbers instead of names. There are official bodies that do exactly that, though for their particular reasons.
To be unique means to be beautiful in one’s own way. Official bodies are not interested in beauty, all they want is to keep an accurate record of us. They don’t see us as unique beings, only as numbers.
1.d
My name is not Štefan Kováč. My name is Čimborazka. I am a self-declared Čimborazka.
2.a
Here’s the thing: whenever I look in the mirror while shaving, I recognise some feature of some distant relative in my face. A cousin, say. Or an uncle or, even more likely, my grandmother. Or perhaps I am