ESCAPE

One of the most mysterious moments in the New Testament, at least to me, is when we’re told that there was a young man or a boy who was hanging about the garden in the company of the apostles on the night when Jesus was arrested. And when the guards came to take Jesus, the boy ran off — he escaped, and that’s what literally happened, as we’re going to see. But he wasn’t wearing much, so when they grabbed hold of his linen robe, they ended up with the robe and not him, and he fled away naked (Mk. 14:51-52). It’s one of those eye-witness details that the Gospel of Mark is so rich in; details that somebody includes just because it happened that way, or because it jogs the memory, because otherwise the author doesn’t make anything of it. Some people think that Mark himself, who would have been pretty young at the time, was the kid, and that’s why he mentions it. There’s a bit of justification for that. Tradition has it that Mark was close to Peter and that what we get in this gospel are a lot of Peter’s memories, and with less emphasis on Peter personally than in any of the other three. That’s because Peter wouldn’t want to show himself to any advantage, and certainly Mark doesn’t show to advantage here, running away. But he did escape, which is our Word of the Week.

Now, a couple of things seem necessary for a real escape, rather than a mere exit. There has to be either a threat you’re trying to elude, or a prison you want to get out of. Nobody escapes from the Bronx to Brooklyn — well, at least I don’t think anybody does. Nobody escapes from a pleasant conversation, or from true love, or from heavenly bliss. The sense of danger has to be present, or at least great difficulty and uncertainty. So even if you’re getting sleepy at a birthday party, you don’t say that you escape it. You just say, “Well, everybody, I think I’d better be getting home.” Unless maybe it’s a birthday party for the Soviet commissar, and you’re a Slovak who wishes the man would go back to Minsk or Pinsk. But that’s another kettle of borscht.

To escape is, in late popular Latin, excappare, which means that somebody grabs you but you slip out (ex-) from underneath his grasp, leaving only your cappa, your cape, behind! It’s what also happened to the boy Joseph, when the wife of his master Potiphar had eyes for him, but Joseph got out of her clutches, leaving only his garment in her hands, so that she accused him of attacking her, which landed Joseph in prison. But God did not abandon him there. He made his escape from prison — I guess you might still call it an escape — by being a prophetic interpreter of dreams. From slavery to being the Pharaoh’s most trusted advisor — and, as he had dreamed long before, the greatest of all of the sons of Jacob. I guess that Jacob too had his hair-breadth escape from Esau, the brother he cheated, though the two were eventually reconciled. And then the children of Israel, after Joseph died and a new Pharaoh came to the throne, perhaps an ethnic Egyptian after the interregnum of foreigners in charge of Egypt (foreigners who, by the way, might well have spoken a language in our big family, as the Hittites did), had to make their escape from bondage in turn.

When I was a boy, we heard a lot of stories about people who made their escape to the west from behind the Iron Curtain. I remember a commercial for Radio Free Europe, in which the disk jockey was speaking a foreign language, probably Russian, and then suddenly as he was putting a new record on, he named the title of the song — it was “On Broadway.” I remember reading in school a story about a mother and her son trying to escape on a train from Czechoslovakia to Austria, with falsified papers. My dear friend Alice von Hildebrand described, in her biography of her husband Dietrich, how he and his first wife (he was a widower when he married Alice) got on the last train from Austria to Switzerland with a Swiss passport, just as the Nazis were taking over, and Dietrich was first or second on the Nazi list of people to be assassinated. That’s because he had been inveighing against their wickedness and stupidity since 1921. And that too was an escape, pretty literally: the Von Hildebrands were the gentry; Adolf von Hildebrand, Dietrich’s father, was the great sculptor of public works in Munich in the late 1800’s, as you can see here from his famous Wittelsbach Fountain. Dietrich and his wife got out of there with but the clothes on their backs.

About the word escape: it comes into English through the Norman French, as so many of our now common words did. There are a couple of interesting things to say about it. The first is that when the Normans came to England, the Latin prefix ex-, reduced in the Romance languages to es-, was still pronounced as such. It’s one reason why some English words are closer to their Old French ancestors than the modern French words are. The Anglo-Normans never stopped pronouncing the es-, but the French did. So the Anglo-Norman escaper became English escape, while the French dropped that s, so that it’s modern French échapper. Quite a few other English words follow that same pattern: estrange, esplanade, escutcheon, esquire, escheat.

“Aeneas' Flight from Troy,” Federico Barocci. Public Domain.

Then there’s the word escapade, which suggests some fancy trickery, some mischief, something wild and crazy and unpredictable, and if there’s an escape in the escapade, so much the better! That word comes to us from French, too, but the French got it circuitously from Italian or Spanish: a scappata in Italian is an escape. See, the Italians kept the s- sound from ex- but lost the e-. And now I’d better make my own escape from this Word of the Week, now that you’re dizzy with history!

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add their comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!