Michel de Montaigne's Essays are turning to be refreshing and revealing. Quite an interesting chap, Montaigne, he would love this blogging thing. He says: "Whether they happened or not, in Paris or in Rome, to John or to Peter, there is always some turn of the human mind about which they give me useful information. I note and draw profit from these anecdotes, whether they are shadowy or substantial". That is, for sure, the most transcendental and interesting feature of his writing. His source of insight and inspiration, to an important extent, comes very well from the common episodes of common people. Montaigne is well rooted, I can see that, in the devoted culture of Aristotle -Seneca and Plutarch, in his case- and the whole Roman tradition, before the revolution. And that's what makes the fact so interesting. The old fathers seem to have done so. Not only his 16th-century writing sounds modern to my ears, much unexpected, but it is also striking that "to vindicate the supreme power of our will", the great St. Agustine "claims to have seen a man who could command his bottom to break wind as often as he wished". That's what I am talking about: did he really wrote that?! The Philosopher! If St. Agustine had been married at the time, his wife would have shouted at him from the kitchen: "it is the last time, my dear, that I ask you to come downstairs and clean the stable!".
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Recently, I heard that someone working for a small company got fired and, despite being smooth and soft at the time of departure and farewell, he came back in retaliation with all the fury and sued the company and the chief of personnel. And it comes so handy the juicy story of Montaigne, the first one the reader gets: "King Henry the Seventh of England made an agreement with Don Philip, son of the Emperor Maximilian -or, to give him a higher title, father of the Emperor Charles V- that the said Philip should deliver into his hands his enemy the Duke of Suffolk of the White Rose, who had fled for refuge to the Netherlands, but this on condition that Henry should make no attempt on the life of the said Duke. But when the English king came to die, he commanded his son in his last will to put Suffolk to death immediately after his decease.
Montaigne's stand is as certain as beautiful: "I shall see to it, if I can, that my death makes no statement that my life has not already made".
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Montaigne makes a claim against his bad memory and puts it in simple words: to be a bad ass and burned brilliantly with ambition, memory is a must. I, like him, have a short memory for the injuries received, which is my perdition. Sometimes, the sun even shines on the prairies of my memories, although I know it is a vile mirage and I know that it was rather a dark and damp moor. "Like Darius", king of Persia, we "should need a prompter (...): Sire, remember the Athenians". Montaigne finds some consolation in the pleasures of unending novelty but, as I said, I don't.
And who has never had this experience?: "(...) At the expense of those who profess to suit their speech only to the advantage of the business in hand" and, perhaps, "to please the great man to whom they are speaking". O, vast truth! Now, take a few, the liars, of short memory. Montaigne puts in words what is a tangible experience of all: "The circumstances to which it is their wish to subordinate their faith and their conscience being subject to various changes, their language has also to change from time to time; and so they call the same thing grey one moment and yellow the next, say one thing to one man, and another to another".
It sounds quite a modern complaint, but it is the same stitching-and-bitching about of the primitive times, the times where good many thousands have already gone through the forests of life, before every new generation, blind-folded and tam quam tabula rasa, call it anew.
(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).
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Recently, I heard that someone working for a small company got fired and, despite being smooth and soft at the time of departure and farewell, he came back in retaliation with all the fury and sued the company and the chief of personnel. And it comes so handy the juicy story of Montaigne, the first one the reader gets: "King Henry the Seventh of England made an agreement with Don Philip, son of the Emperor Maximilian -or, to give him a higher title, father of the Emperor Charles V- that the said Philip should deliver into his hands his enemy the Duke of Suffolk of the White Rose, who had fled for refuge to the Netherlands, but this on condition that Henry should make no attempt on the life of the said Duke. But when the English king came to die, he commanded his son in his last will to put Suffolk to death immediately after his decease.
Montaigne's stand is as certain as beautiful: "I shall see to it, if I can, that my death makes no statement that my life has not already made".
**
Montaigne makes a claim against his bad memory and puts it in simple words: to be a bad ass and burned brilliantly with ambition, memory is a must. I, like him, have a short memory for the injuries received, which is my perdition. Sometimes, the sun even shines on the prairies of my memories, although I know it is a vile mirage and I know that it was rather a dark and damp moor. "Like Darius", king of Persia, we "should need a prompter (...): Sire, remember the Athenians". Montaigne finds some consolation in the pleasures of unending novelty but, as I said, I don't.
And who has never had this experience?: "(...) At the expense of those who profess to suit their speech only to the advantage of the business in hand" and, perhaps, "to please the great man to whom they are speaking". O, vast truth! Now, take a few, the liars, of short memory. Montaigne puts in words what is a tangible experience of all: "The circumstances to which it is their wish to subordinate their faith and their conscience being subject to various changes, their language has also to change from time to time; and so they call the same thing grey one moment and yellow the next, say one thing to one man, and another to another".
It sounds quite a modern complaint, but it is the same stitching-and-bitching about of the primitive times, the times where good many thousands have already gone through the forests of life, before every new generation, blind-folded and tam quam tabula rasa, call it anew.
(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).
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