George Washington’s Teeth - The Monday Morning Memo

“There’s a sort of decay or mutation of language at work. Vanitas is Latin. It means emptiness and is related to the word vacant. The Latin Vulgate Bible, the standard version for most of Europe for a thousand years, derives from the Greek Septuagint, where the word that occurs thirty-eight times in Ecclesiastes in mataiotes, which means emptiness, meaninglessness, but also transience. Does transience render all things meaningless? The Hebrew word in the original of Ecclesiastes, unavailable until modern times, when scraps of surviving manuscript were found in dry caves, is hevel. It means breath or vapor, and the sense of transience is vivid but the condemnation of the transient is nowhere to be found.”

- Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, p. 90

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