DARE TO KNOW

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Yesterday at Redfern Cemetery, the deputy mayor, Peter Dreyfus, held his annual service at the gravesite of his great-great-grandfather Haworth Dreyfus, one of the earliest settlers in the region and a founder of at least two neighboring towns. As in past years, the living Dreyfus paid homage to his ancestor by reading from Horace's Epistularum liber primus, and particularly Epistle II:  “Dimidium facti qui coepit habet: sapere aude.” The beginning of the line is usually translated as “He who has begun is half done,” but Peter Dreyfus has his own gloss on the text, as he explained this year—and has, in fact, explained every year he has conducted his memorial at Redfern. “Latin is a dead tongue but we must make it live once again,” he said, “And so I read it as ‘He who does well would do well to begin’ or ‘Half the battle is taking up arms’ or ‘If you don’t start, you’ll never finish’ or ‘Getting a fish in your hand is a foregone conclusion once you have stepped into the right stream.’” Yet again, it was not clear what this quote has to do with Haworth Dreyfus. It was not a text known to him—he was illiterate—and he hated the name Horace with a passion, as a man named Horace Terwilliger stole his first love from him. That woman, Mary Winston, became Terwilliger’s wife, and the two of them became patrons of the arts in the early days of the region, supervising the construction of an opera house, while Haworth Dreyfus succumbed to drink and died penniless. Even Peter Dreyfus took no liberties with the translation of sapere aude: “Dare to know!”