To Tame a Word: Wither

I picked it up at the beginning of A Midsummer Nights' Dream of Shakespeare. When King Theseus was eager to marry his captive Queen Hippolyta, he cursed on the moon, which was waning too slowly:

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in

Another moon. But, O, methinks how slow

This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires

Like to a stepdame or a dowager

Long withering out a young man's revenue.

It's cruel to relate the old's lingering to the young's withering, for revealing a brutal truth: The slower the old dies, the less fortune the young gets. Withering, as the old moon waning, is a process nobody could escape from. The word "wither" probably originated from "weather": "to affect with sun, wind, rain, etc." What is sarcastic is that people always regard it as unpredictable, unknowable as the moody weather, while it's indeed an unvaried, unchangeable physical process (both for plants and human beings). We pathetic species reject to accept the moon is waning at a fixed pace or the life is withering in a settled program. Everyone is too special to admit that the road to death is universal. Death is never a scary ending compared to watching our body and soul gradually losing their weights day by day.

Besides the meaning of wilting, wasting and fading, there's still another meaning of "wither" about humiliating, abashing people. I was confused on this meaning at first when the dictionary refers to "a withering look" as "a scornful look". How do they fit? How do they explain each other? How could one scorns another on withering while they are both experiencing it? But then I realized, observation is a skill that is too burdensome for our fragile selves. It's always simple to discover the regularity as long as we lift our head to look at the moon and others, to observe how old people or ill plants struggle to value their shrinking time, to have the knowledge that we are also decaying in the same way. But we always choose to ignore them. We could only see ourselves as an unique existence. When we see a withering look on a face to us, we feel scorned, despised, and humiliated, not because another person's attitude, but because when we reliaze we're being watched, it was the time we finally couldn't deny our own withering.

Still, the moon's waning is more acceptable when it's none of our business. "wane" originated from German, related to the Latin word "vanus": vain. How cold and rational people could be when we don't need to face ourselves, naming others' struggle with empitiness, as if it's a meaningless battle without any substance on the field. Or when it relates to another meaning of "vain" and "vanity", when you lifeless phenomenons in the world dare to claim your dying with significance, then you must have too much ego about yourself. Go pity yourself. We just don't care. With this considering, when I found the phrase "wither on the vine" (if something withers on the vine, it gradually ends because it is not given enough support), I misread it as "wither on the vain". And I almost laughed out loud.

As thesauruses of "wither", there're still "wane", "waste", "wilt "... Indeed, how much burden those British wanted to put on the W alphabet's shoulder? Leafing through those words, I gradually felt exhausted and withering page by page. Then I put down my device, letting a sigh slipping out of my mouth, which sounded like we, or when, or why.