As some of you have noticed (and prodded me about), there’s been a bit of a break in Limns posts. However, don’t fret! Limns will be continuing in a slightly different format—stay tuned to see. In the meantime, I thought this would be an appropriate moment to pontificate briefly on the word ‘hiatus.’
Hiatus comes from the PIE root *ghieh, “to yawn, gape, be wide open.” It travels through Latin to becomes Hiatus, in this sense meaning “aperture, opening, rupture, or gap.” The meaning we have today, of ‘taking a break’, developed later, in the 17th century. If you look it up, you will find an exquisite definition from that time period:
“[the] space from which something requisite to completeness is absent."
Here are the questions this etymology leaves me with:
What is the connective tissue between the verbal meaning of “gaping wide open,” the noun meaning of “gap or opening” and the sense of “taking leave, temporarily, from something”?
The philosophical question I see is: why do we assume that what exists on the other side of an opening, gap, or rupture, shares continuity with what came before?
Why are we so attached to wholeness? When we look at the 17th century definition, we see hiatus as that which disrupts completeness. But isn’t it also true that absence is a kind of presence, albeit of something else? Isn’t the question of completeness dependent on where in space and time you stand to judge it?
Put another way, haven’t we all experienced a greater sense of understanding by leaving something, just so that we can return?