When you presume you make a “pres” out of “u” and “me.” The root is the Latin sumere: to take. So, presume, to take as fact or take liberties. Resume, to take up again. Assume, to take on—to carry or don but also to feign—and to take for granted. One thinks of the idiom a take, which reminds me I met a guy last night who worked on It’s Complicated and told me that Streep could do take after take of “spontaneous” laughter with uncanny consistency. She is simply the best we have.
Alvin, capably voiced by the same Justin Long who represents Macintosh in the Apple company’s popular and long-running ad campaign, cares only about himself. Fundamentally true of anyone, but when we formulate it this way we mean: his way of taking is too naked and shrill, it humiliates the empty space it should hallow, the space from which we ought to take the thing precisely in order to render the subsequent void a thousand times more full.
I missed the first one. But “squeakquel” is a nice portmanteau to remind us that, when we reach the afterlife, we will go before God as a small and terrified creature whose voice will barely register at the scale of His greater terrain. We may be offered assumption—ascent to heaven—or resumption, with honor, into the earth. I take it that presumption, then, represents the final option, a descent into the frozen works. A labyrinth crowded with handtrucks and library carts and blockaded at every third turn with copyright applications stacked a mile high. We consign our own small portion of lovingkindness to hell, we damn it when we force it through that maniacal apology apparatus—our stupid voice.
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