I didn't read the piece at the time, knew nothing about it. If I had known, before I knew Elster, what would I have thought? Word origins and covert prisons. Old French, Obsolete French and torture by proxy. The essay concentrated on the word itself, earliest known use, changes in form and meaning, zero-grade forms, reduplicated forms, suffixed forms. There were footnotes like nested snakes. But no specific mention of black sites, third-party states or international treaties and conventions.
He compared the evolution of a word to that of organic matter.
He pointed out that words were not necessary to one's experience of the true life.
Toward the end of the commentary he wrote about select current meanings of the word rendition-interpretation, translation, performance. Within those walls, somewhere, in seclusion, a drama is being enacted, old as human memory, he wrote, actors naked, chained, blindfolded, other actors with props of intimidation, the renderers, nameless and masked, dressed in black, and what ensues, he wrote, is a revenge play that reflects the mass will and interprets the shadowy need of an entire nation, ours.
I stood in a corner of the deck, out of the sun, and asked him about the essay. He waved it away, the entire subject. I asked him about the first and last sentences. They seem out of place in the larger context, I said, where crime and guilt don't get mentioned. The incongruity is pretty striking.
"Meant to be."
Meant to be. Okay. Meant to unsettle critics of the administration, I said, not the decision makers. Flat-out ironic.