Tonight I re-read Michel de Montaingne's essai, Des cannibales. I can't count the number of times I have read and researched and re-read this essai, and yet tonight I caught and learned things that brought new life to it. I chose it as a topic for the final French paper of my undergraduate degree for a reason; it spoke to me, as I expressed in a prior post. It spoke to me about the arrogancy of assuming the culture we know is "perfect" and all others are "barbaric." It spoke to me of what we can learn of our own selves and culture through observation and appreciation of other cultures.
But tonight I found lines I don't understand how I could have missed! Entire passages, pages even, have changed how I see the whole piece.
Montaigne tells us how Plato said that all things are produced in one of three ways ~ through nature, fate/fortune, or art. He said that the best and most beautiful are those that come from the first two, and that we find the lesser and most imperfect things in art. How opposite from what our culture seems to believe! We assume that all things man-made, all things "artistic," or all things within our sphere of recognition/understanding/knowledge, are the best things. The paintings, the buildings, even clothing, fashion, film . . . yet we overlook what is truly the best, the highest of what actually exists . . . that which is natural, or, as we would say, "barbaric." Wild flowers. A deep, passionate kiss. Cats tumbling together or one dashing up a tree in fear of a dog. Do we appreciate the real, most beautiful things around us? We think we appreciate art when it makes us reminiscent of these things, and yet we live in cities where we can no longer even see the stars in the night skies!
I am looking forward to crafting an essai of my own, hopefully learning in the process how to weave something beautiful and artistic in a language other than my native one. It is humbling to know that anything I may weave will be, in Plato's words, "imperfect," regardless of my attempts at artistry.
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This is a beautiful insight. I'm looking forward to reading your final French paper.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Dad ... so am I.
ReplyDeletei am reminded of the complex simplicities of living in some Crimethinc lit, in particular Fighting For Our Lives:
ReplyDelete"We stood or knelt in emptying concert halls, on rooftops under lightning storms, on the dead grass of graveyards, and swore with tears in our eyes never to go back again...We fell in love in the wreckage, shouted out songs in the uproar, danced joyfully in the heaviest shackles they could forge; we smuggled our stories through the gauntlets of silence, starvation, and subjugation, to bring them back to life again and again as bombs and beating hearts; we built castles in the sky from the ruins of hell on earth."
http://thecloud.crimethinc.com/pdfs/fighting_for_our_lives_lo.pdf