'A Hundred Words for the Word Brother'

One of the stranger events recounted by Montaigne: 

“[I]f I must bring myself into this, a brother of mine, [Arnaud, Lord of] Saint-Martin, twenty-three years old, who had already given pretty good proof of his valor, while playing tennis was struck by a ball a little above the right ear, with no sign of contusion or wound. He did not sit down or rest, but five or six hours later he died of an apoplexy that this blow gave him. With such frequent and ordinary examples passing before our eyes, how can we possibly rid ourselves of the thought of death and of the idea that at every moment it is gripping us by the throat?”

 

I’ve never played tennis, that deadly game, for which I’m grateful. Montaigne is writing in an early essay, “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die.” His theme is the capriciousness of death, its unpredictability coupled with inevitability. “How many ways,” he writes, “has death to surprise us!” Never assume Montaigne or any of our forebears is without a sense of humor. “Haven’t you seen one of our kings killed at play?” he asks. “And did not one of his ancestors die from the charge of a hog?”

 

Thursday was the two-month anniversary of my brother’s death. The cause was more conventional than a tennis ball or rampaging hog: cancer, likely self-induced. Ken started smoking cigarettes at twelve and lived to age sixty-nine. I think of him daily, often as part of a memory of some stunt we pulled as kids, like the time we set up a nine-hole golf course in the house, using drinking glasses as holes and breaking three of them. We knew as little about golf as we did about tennis.

 

David Kubal was a friend of Henri Coulette’s in the English department at Cal State. Kubal published a study of Orwell in 1972 and died at age forty-five a decade later. Coulette (1927-88) dedicated “Night Thoughts” to his friend. Here are the opening lines of the fourth stanza:

 

“Now you are elsewhere, elsewhere comes to this,

The thoughtless body, like a windblown rose,

Is gathered up and ushered toward repose."

 

Coulette’s two brothers, both his junior, had preceded him in death. He addresses Kubal as “brother,” a precious honorific:

 

"The priest wore purple; now the night does, too.

A dog barks, and another, and another.

There are a hundred words for the word brother.

We use them when we love, when we are sick,

And in our dreams when we are somehow you.

What are we if not wholly catholic?”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957). “Night Thoughts” can be found in The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette (eds. Donald Justice and Robert Mezey, University of Arkansas Press, 1990).]