So, my boy, it turns out that one of the things that you must do after you have created a life is to give it a name. It would be a difficult thing indeed to participate in these societies that have emerged from the chaos of people without anyone being able to address you with a semi-unique identifier. It seems to be one of the first things people want to know about you in almost all situations. So it falls to your mother and I to attach to you an appropriate handle with which you can reply to the many incarnations of that most important and basic of inquiries,
"And your name is?"
"Milan."
Milan. That is the response we have decided to bequeath you, in all our wisdom in the role of parents. All 6 months of it. So don't be too harsh in your evaluation of our efforts, we are very new to this activity of giving names. Most things in our life up to this point have come with their names already attached.
Here is my attempt to explain how we came to chose that particular moniker.
It started with some lists. Originally the lists were for both girl and boy names. Some names did not make those original lists because of how they sound in Spanish or in English. Some were struck off because both your mother and I were working as teachers at the time and so certain names came with psychological baggage. The fat whinny grade 10 kid who never took responsibility and tried to cry his way out of any situation was never destined to share a first name with such an example of perfection as our first born son. I participated in your mother's lists and we began to look at names that had just one spelling and similar pronunciations in both Spanish and English. It was not imperative for you to have a bilingual name, but when the potential list of names is in the thousands, we needed some kind of strategy to reduce the choices.
Then, one day I could no longer avoid the responsibility and I sat down to write my own list. I choose to put on my list the names of people who had made an impression on me during my time here on this rock of ours. Maybe their ideas, their story, their work. On that list, along with Darwin and Bertrand and Douglas, was the name of a Czech writer who had written a book called Slowness.
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.
A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.
Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.
The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness
Reading that book was one of life's pleasant moments for me. Pleasant enough to get Milan Kundera, its author, on my list. The job of choosing from that list I left up to your mother. I think she had earned the right to reject or accept any suggestion of mine on naming the person that she had given her body as its place to grow. By that I mean you, Milan.
So you are named for the writer, Milan Kundera. I wonder if that will inspire you to read any of his books? I am named from the fact that my brother is called Leon and that there was a musician called Leon Russell whose work my parents enjoyed at the time of my birth. I have an album on which he plays. I love it. Lucky me!
The meaning of the name was not why we choose it, but it certainly helped us to enjoy our decision. There are meanings from Latin and Sanskrit, but you are named for the Slavic root. There it means:
One who is dear and beloved. From the Slavic element "mil" which means "gracious".
So your name labels you as dear to us, as beloved. That this is true should be obvious to you. If we do not make you feel the truth carried in your name each and every day, we are not the parents we planned to be. So you do not need your name to know that we love you, but what a pleasant way to be able to introduce yourself to all those curious people that you will meet in your life.
"And your name is?"
"Beloved."
