Houynihim
My dad, Robert auf der Horst, died seven years ago. He was a successful doctor, and for most of his life he divided the world into two categories: what he thought useful (science) and what he thought frivolous (almost everything else). It wasn’t that he disdained other things — art, for instance. It was that he couldn’t see the point of pretending that knowledge, the fruit of science, was comparable to entertainment.
For the most part, we were in agreement about this. But he was disappointed when I decided to study math, at Amherst. Math was tricky ground for him: it could be useful, but was often frivolous. He saw math as the thin edge of the entertainment wedge, as if, once you engaged with Fermat’s Last Theorem, reality TV was not far behind.
I mention Dad’s preference for evidence-based reasoning not because I have any grievances to air. I loved him, whatever our differences, and I never doubted that he loved me. It’s just that I’d like it to be clear, from the outset, that my dad was a rational person.
That being said: like many serious men, my dad could at times be playful. For instance, when talking about his lifelong fascination with horses, he would point to his — and, of course, my — family name: auf der Horst, a German name, though my dad was born in the Caribbean, to Black Caribbean parents. The name isn’t interesting in itself, but “auf der Horst” sounds like “auf der Horse,” and this homonym allowed Dad to suggest that it was inevitable he would own horses.
And own horses he did: five in the course of his adult life.
And I assumed it had something to do with his playful side when, shortly after buying his fifth and final horse, a nameless gelding that he’d saved from slaughter, he called me into his office at home and asked me to do him a favor.
“Paul,” he said, “I want you to make me a catalogue of the most famous horses in literature.”
“In literature? I thought you said that literature’s useless.”
“It is, mostly,” he said. “But I’ve got my reasons. I’ll pay you for the trouble.”
I almost asked if he was joking, but that would have been pointless. My dad could not tell a joke to save his life. The last time I remember him telling one was sometime in the eighties: Three logicians walk into a bar. The barman asks, “Would all of you like a drink?” The first logician says, “I don’t know.” The second one says, “I don’t know.” The third one says, “Yes.” I also recall my mom forbidding him to ever tell jokes again, a ban we both thought necessary and thus forced on him in a kind of intervention.
In any event, I was happy to create a catalogue of horses for him. It was the first time he’d asked me to do research, and it pleased me to be useful. Of course, I hadn’t realized how exhausting the task would be. Literature is so replete with horses, I could have written a full thesis just to give him a sense of how influential horses have been in the human imagination.
(Some fifteen years later, I don’t remember much about the research I did, save the intense boredom I felt as I combed “The Poetic Edda” for mentions of a horse named Glad or perused Celtic mythology for stories about kelpies, demons who take the form of horses. It was a relief, back then, to write about Frou-Frou and Rocinante, Black Beauty and Cigarette — literary horses I was already familiar with.)
