"The word shelter was still in my head. I had to feel it shrivel."
I, the story, alone survived. I'll tell my own tale, damn it. Not
that you or anyone else of your kind could, or has, or ever will be able
to do. It's just that I know you. I am you. I am all of you, and all of
you together, just barely, might someday make up most of me. I'm not
boasting, simply stating the truth: there was so much of me in all of
the you that already haven't survived, I can't be sure now what aspects
will be left complete by the time any little one of you gets around to
meeting me.
Let me give you an example, give you shelter. As that fine,
precolonial word floats around now, you'd think the etymology was in
question. Now etymology is only a confined, peculiar form for me. In it,
you start with the ending, well-known and to most folks uninteresting,
then reweave the history backward to the oldest extinct language you
believe, with any common conviction, existed. That's the story, a
rarefied form of an origin story and just as typically false. So from
where, in my etymological sense, did shelter come? Look at this:
"shelter (n.)
1580s, 'structure affording protection,' possibly an alteration of
Middle English sheltron, sheldtrume 'roof or wall formed by locked
shields,'from Old English scyldtruma, from scield 'shield' (see shield
(n.)) + truma 'troop,' related to Old English trum 'firm, strong' (see
trim). If so, the original notion is of a compact body of men protected
by interlocking shields. OED finds this 'untenable' and proposed
derivation from shield + -ture."
There's another version of me in the etymology of "untenable," but
leave that be. Of interest here is not the pedantic divergence but the
narrative convergence. Shield! Even the OED, arbiter of English
etymology, agrees that shelter derived from shield. Think about that behind
your mantled brows a moment. Can you easily conceive of a less
sheltering feeling, for an animal, than the situation requiring cowering
under a disk of shield? Weapons of maiming and death are raining blows
upon you as you hold up your reinforced frame of cowhide or dented alloy
and pray to supernatural beings (of my own invention, thank you very
much) that, by some freak of probabilistic coincidence you will later
call a miracle, your shield holds?
That, dear users of language, is all your shelter. Don't get me started on your storyteller.
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