One More Augustine Post

So, I know that I already blogged on the first few chapters...but I finally finished the book and feel compelled to share something more about it. I know all our readers out there on the Internets (all 4 of them [and by them I mean us]) getting tired of our dear unburdening Saint, but, because it is August and this is as far as I've gotten I think I should make a few notes about the ending.

First - I'm glad that I plowed through and actually finished. It did end up being some seriously hard reading through the end, so half of the rewarding feeling I have at finishing just has to do with finishing, and nothing at all to do with the text. It was good practice - I haven't really forced myself to read through difficult text since undergrad. It is a skill that I want to keep, if only because it prepares me to go through legal documents and real estate clauses.

Not that I think reading Augustine was as pointless as reading legal documents (I mean, you're screwed whether you read the fine print anyway, so why damage your eyes and your brain too?). There were moments of sheer brilliance. The later chapters of the book turn towards philosophical questions about the nature of God and of the Universe, though I suppose they are more philosophical methods applied to theological questions. The logical method that Augustine uses explore these basic but all-important questions flawlessly shows off Augustine's intellect - partially because he freely admits that his logic might NOT be flawless. From a content perspective, Augustine's message is close to my heart: there are many interpretations of Truth, but an honest search for Truth is a uniting, not a dividing force, so matter how many different conclusions we may reach. It is good to debate the meaning of scripture, but not to hate a person with a different idea, or even to assert your idea to be more true than others. Humility goes a long way.

Mostly, then, I loved the content. The only exception I had was that chapter that was just Augustine going on and on about what a bad person he was for loving certain pleasures for their own sake. I get the impulse and might even agree with him, but it got old quickly.

Stylistically though - I have to admit...it got seriously boring. It picked up here and there - usually when he was summing up, or relating the rare personal example. So, why was it boring? I think we, as writers, can learn as much from what we didn't like as what we did. He clearly was capable of being more interesting than he often was...so why wasn't he more often? I think the issue has to do with why he was writing and who he was writing to, and who he was as a person. His purpose was not to entertain, of course, but to debate. Except for a few chapters that are straight autobiography, The Confessions really is more about explaining his version of Christianity. Because he was so well trained in Latin Rhetoric, rather than the stories he had loved as a child, he approached theology from a purely logical, argumentative standpoint. Or not purely, since there are those moments of illustration - his childhood love for stories poking out, maybe. I think the style of debate at the time is what leads The Confessions to be so boring. He doesn't just make his points and support them with evidence - he hammers and hammers his point through so that you can't bear to hear it again and just say, "YES I GET IT, I BELIEVE YOU, WHATEVER YOU SAY, JUST SHUT UP PLEASE!"

The points he is making are obscure and I think he is trying to explain what he's trying to say fully - and it doesn't help that he originally was speaking them, rather than writing. I know from experience that what makes a good essay and what makes a good speech aren't always the same. Certain inflections and pauses can soften that hammering so that it doesn't seem quite so redundant. And his audience was likely educated men who were interested in minute questions of theology - few others could even read at the time anyway.

This, I guess, is what I'm trying to say: logic = good. Too much logic = redundant/boring. I love the sweeping paragraphs pondering infinite space and deep truths - but these have to be supported by down-to-earth examples, rather than more philosophy or we'll get lost. I love that he (and Montaigne) seamlessly interweaves their reading - mostly the Psalms in Augustine's case. I think we could and should do more of that than we do. However, partly because there is so much of it, and partly because he interrupts himself to praise God, it can become distracting. For us, there would have to be more of a point.

I'm glad I read it, I feel like a learned a lot from the book. However, though I can acknowledge it's importance as a seminal autobiographical work - it spoke more to me as a Christian than as a writer of essays.

St. “I-Was-A-Jerk-And-I-Really-Need-To-Vent” Augustine

Hi, all. For a minute I just considered writing “ditto” to Ben’s posting, but then I realized that I should probably go a bit further. I read the first five books of Confessions a couple of weeks ago, and since then—to be honest—I’ve kind of been skipping around. A lot of the book was really interesting, but at a certain point I couldn’t quite listen to him go on about being a wretch in his youth anymore.

So, at the risk of directly echoing Ben, I will say that I was also surprised by how readable most of this was. (Note: I also got a version with “you,” as opposed to “thou” and I can only imagine it has saved me some time and frustration.) I also second (as pre-reading advice, for anyone who’s looking) the “sit down for about an hour” rule with this. It’s too big for much less time than that—and I, for one, couldn’t handle distraction at all as I was working my way through it (as evidenced by the 15 pages I had to reread after attempting the first time in a busy café).

One of the things I find interesting, and difficult, in talking about St. Augustine is that it’s really hard to talk about the writing when the ideas and concepts are both so old and so enormous. Do I really want to point out his use of metaphor when we’re discussing stuff that’s so much bigger than writing? I don’t know. Maybe.

Okay, I do. In book three, this one passage really struck me:

“…although they have been reckoned sinners by men who are not qualified to judge, for they try them by human standards and assess all the rights and wrongs of the human race by the measure of their own customs. Anyone who does this behaves like a man who knows nothing about armour and cannot tell which piece is meant for which part of the body, so that he tries to cover his head with a shin-piece and fix a helmet to his foot, and then complains because they will not fit.”

This is just awesome. I read it a few times just to sort of see how he arrived at the metaphor and just wanted to point it out here as something very textually based before I wander off into the content and the writer himself.

I was more taken with the content, the stories, than anything. The Destroyers—awesome. I also got really pulled into some of the anecdotes that gave some insight (that I wish I had) about what life was really like then—how marriage worked, or engagement, or parent-child relationships, or academica. It’s so valuable in that way. Also, the little contextual oddities threw me and made me laugh, like the story he tells about being in a bath house with his father when “he saw the signs of active virility coming to life in me and this was enough to make him relish the thought of having grandchildren”—and then the father runs off to tell the mother. That’s odd and creepy and funny. Or when he, I think, confesses to having had sex inside the church—these long, drawn out explanations get so interesting in one facet, and yet I really do find myself wondering why he’s giving them away. Maybe it is just his position, but then why so much of it, still? I’ve done some outside reading and covered the introduction, but I still found myself stopping every once in a while to think, “Okay, but why is he telling us this?”

What it really came down to for me was that—despite the fact that it’s called Confessions—I got really sick of feeling like I was the bored priest in a really small town, sitting on the other side of the curtain at 3:00 p.m. on a Saturday, waiting for all of the townsfolk to tell me that they had lustful thoughts or stole milk money. I’m concerned that I got so sick of him, to put it bluntly. I wouldn’t say this in a classroom, but I have to make a confession of my own: I started making notes in the margins that said things like, “Enough already!” Yeah.

On a last note, I’m considering putting the following Confessions quote on the syllabus for the classes I’m teaching in the fall:

“For I understood not a single word and I was constantly subjected to violent threats and cruel punishment to make me learn.”

A mission statement, of sorts.

Oh, also, I just wanted to mention something I’ve been reading that I have enjoyed, The New Kings of Nonfiction. It’s edited by Ira Glass and has some great stories from all kinds of different publications from the past few years. If anyone would like to borrow it when I get back, just say the word. Hope you’re all doing well!

J.

P.S. I recognize that this post is a little disjointed, so please let me know if sections (all of it) are confusing. I’m on a very odd sleeping schedule down here and I think it’s throwing off my clear thinking, but wanted to get all of this out while I was reading and thinking so much about it. 

The Confessions of St. Benjamin

So, I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but I thought I'd post on the first few books - I've gotten through the first 4. In other words, I'm moving slowly, but, since no one but Jessica seems to be posting, I think I've got plenty of time to catch up.

Overall Impressions:

I don't know about you guys, but I expected Confessions to be pretty difficult reading - I guess because the author was writing about 1600 years ago. This actually hasn't been the case (though it's not exactly easy either - just easier than I expected). As a word of warning, I think the translation you have matters quite a bit on this. Augustine was well-known as a Latin rhetorician (something he wasn't so happy about, as you'll find) and his language skills don't always translate easily, or at least people have different ideas about how they do. There is a classic edition that was done sometime in the 40s that has been the model ever since - don't read this one. I started on it, and it was all Thee's and Thou's. With all the biblical allusions, it already feels somewhat like it was pulled straight out of the King James Bible - the older style translation doesn't help. So I picked up the Everyman's Library translation by Philip Burton at the library done in 2001, and I like it much better.

Also, though it is really a kind of attack on other Augustine scholars, I would read the introduction. It helps to have some context for Augustine's life and times - especially what he was dealing with when he wrote it. I tend to side with the introducer in saying that Augustine was likely writing with a specific purpose - to counter some attacks that he wasn't Christian enough. He was serving as the Bishop of Hippo at the time, and there were all kinds of schisms and controversies flying around that I can't even begin to understand. But it does seem that there was some opposition to him being Bishop, and people were attacking his faith. Things don't really change - even the Apostle Paul had to deal with splits in the Church. We Christians are good at flinging shit around.

So, beyond actual heartfelt belief, I think that some of his denunciations of his previous literary life have as much to do with his tenuous position as Bishop as they do with his conviction that it was sinful (more on that as I go).

Other general impressions: I expected the book to be hard, not only in terms of language, but in terms of religious philosophy, but, again, it both is hard and not nearly as hard as I expected. You may see it differently, of course (and some of this will only make sense once you've read it). He spends a lot of time attacking his younger self for a variety of reasons, some that at first glance may seem trivial. For example: he condemns his boyhood love of Latin verse and drama, even though they sparked his imagination. He describes them as "vain" pursuits - basically a waste of his time and effort when he should have been focusing on God. But I wonder how much he really believes this - he talks about them so much, and often in such glowing terms that I think he doesn't really regret that time at all, and only feels like he should. As the chapters unfold, he even puts these pursuits higher than his time spent with the Manichean cult (worth looking up for context) and their illusionary beliefs, crediting them with pointing him in the direction of God. His true criticism (I think) is one that I, as a christian, find very compelling - that good things like stories, or beauty, or even sex are good in so much as they are of God as all good things are. But if they are enjoyed without acknowledging them as a part of God and as gifts from God they ultimately come to nothing, and can even be harmful.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that I have found Augustine not to be so hard as actually pretty wise.

It is hard to take so much wisdom at once though - and it is a book that requires a certain time commitment. On the one hand, it really needs longer reading stretches - say an hour minimum at a time. It's hard to pick much up from it, or even to pick it up again, with only 20 minutes here and there. On the other though, you can't read too much of it at once, because it really needs some digestion. It's the kind of book that while you are reading ideas will just suddenly jump into your mind and you'll think "Yes! that makes sense!" - sometimes even about things Augustine wasn't addressing at all. It's worth reading just for this, I think. I've only reliably found that kind of effect when reading Dostoevsky - really only with books that take a little effort to read.

Some notes:

Some of the book is hilarious, though I'm sure he didn't intend it to be so. There's a part where he runs around with a gang of fellow Rhetorician students who call themselves The Destroyers. Really. And they go around harassing people and stealing stuff, just like any gang of 16 year olds. He doesn't participate in everything they do, but just because he's too shy. It's very...modern. In fact, I find myself able to relate quite a bit, despite the 1600 years separating us. His growing up is remarkably similar to anyone who grows up in an educated environment.

Speaking of his fellow Rhetoricians - he spends a lot of these early chapters talking about Grammarians. It really was an interesting period of history, where speaking well could bring a great deal of success. He makes an excellent distinction in criticising himself and his fellow grammarians at the time - that they were in it only for their ambitions. It didn't matter what they said, so long as they said it well. They could happily expound on their own adulteries so long as they did it skillfully. Again, much of his criticism seems to be about the importance of motive - good things or bad, it matters why you are doing them.

Another point I like - he tackles the Manichees for dismissing the Patriarchs (the Jewish Fathers - Abraham, Moses, etc.) because they did things that in his time would be considered sinful (like having multiple wives). He points out that there are cultural laws and taboos that should be obeyed but that don't speak to one's basic righteousness. Times change, but God is bigger than time. We are called to treat one another justly, and with love - how that is done might be different depending on time and place. Human laws should be followed until they conflict with God's law, and then they should be resisted at all costs. Petty issues of theology, or matters of taste (religious calls to stop drinking, or eat a certain kind of food, or secular laws for public good, etc) matter only in so much as their relation to other human beings. He would argue, I think, that it didn't matter so much that the Patriarch's were permitted multiple wives at the time - though it would matter now - but how they interacted with their wives. He is articulating what I see as one of the main ideas that sets Christianity apart from many (but certainly not all) religions - the idea that there is more to following God than following any set of rules. There is some higher purpose and calling that may change with time and place that has to do with our relationship to one another.

Anyway, didn't meant to preach, I just like that point he was making. And it's one of the things that makes me feel that his theology isn't as hard as many seem to think - even if he is very hard on himself for actions that don't seem all that bad. He's examining why he did them, and that makes a difference.

And that's about all I've got at the moment. More later, as soon as I read a little more.

Hope all is well with your lives - literary and otherwise.

Indian Jugglers and Commentary on the Act of Writing: On Table-Talk

Maybe I’m not going to wholly embrace anything we’re reading this summer. I felt very similar about the Hazlitt as I did about Montaigne: Some of it was really engaging and great, and some of it I only felt myself slogging through because I felt like I had to. (All that writing to examine “whether actors ought to sit in the boxes”? Really??) I got some value out of the readings for sure, but I think I found myself just so much more into certain essays than others.

Jugglers

Essay IX: The Indian Jugglers was one of the essays I really dug. From the introduction (which I’ll discuss below) through the whole essay, it’s both entertaining and insightful. I also really liked the description he uses in this essay. Sentences like, “When I saw the Indian Juggler do the same things before, his feet were bare, and he had large rings on the toes, which kept turning round the time of the performance, as if they moved of themselves,” are simply lovely and vivid.

This particular essay also included some of my favorite lines from the whole book. I really liked, “Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter.”  (In another essay, I particularly liked “To succeed, a man should aim only at success”—apparently I’m okay with triteness if it’s 200 years old?)

Something else I noticed in this essay that was particularly well done were the outside examples he used: “A mathematician who solves a profound problem, a poet who creates an image of beauty in the mind that was not there before, imparts knowledge and power to others . . .” In my own writing, I always find myself hesitating to pull in metaphors/similes and it’s great to read them interspersed so seamlessly.

Introducing . . .

Another thing I really took note of in Hazlitt’s work was his introductions—so well done most of the time. A few choice intros:

·      From the Indian Jugglers: “Coming forward and seating himself on the ground in his white dress and tightened turban, the chief of the Indian Jugglers begins with tossing up two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and concludes with keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of us could do to save our lives, nor if we were to take our whole lives to do it in.” Just great stuff—great imagery, great connection to the reader, etc.

·      From On Living to One’s-Self: Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow… I never was in a better place or humour than I am at present for writing on this subject. I have a partridge getting ready for my supper, my fire is blazing on the hearth, the air is mild for the season of the year, I have had but a slight fit of indigestion to-day (the only thing that makes me abhor myself)…”
This is a really personal lead-in regarding his immediate life. This almost reads like a blog or a Facebook status. William Hazlitt only had minor digestion issues today.

·      From On Will-Making: “Few things show the human character in a more ridiculous light than the circumstance of will-making. It is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition, and we take care to make a good use of it. We husband it with jealousy, put it off as long as we can, and then use every precaution that the world shall be no gainer by our deaths. This last act of our lives seldom belies the former tenor of them for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite . . . I have heard of an instance of one person who, having a feeling of this kind on his mind, and being teased into making his will by those about him, actually fell ill with pure apprehension, and thought he was going to die in good earnest…” This whole thing sounds as though it could have been written, verbatim, in current times. He starts out by relating the topic at hand directly to the reader, and then moves into an example, in order to ease us into deeper discussion. Really well done.

·      From On Going A Journey: “One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself.” This was just very catchy to me, and a great start.

·      “Corporate bodies have no soul.” !! (From On Corporate Bodies)

·      Hazlitt also used quotes to open a few essays, and this is really interesting to me. I’ve considered doing it myself but it kind of seems like a cop out. Thoughts? Do any of you ever do this? I feel like I love it when I read it elsewhere, but can’t get it to seem un-cheesy in my own work.

·      One last really great intro, from Why Distant Objects Please: “Distant objects please, because, in the first place, they imply an idea of space and magnitude, and because, not being obtruded too close upon the eye, we clothe them with the indistinct and airy colours of fancy. In looking at the misty mountain-tops that bound the horizon, the mind is as it were conscious of al the conceivable objects and interests that lie between; we imagine all sorts of adventures in the interim . . . “

I feel like I could really do with reading more and more essays with catchy/interesting introductions—it’s something I really struggle with—so these were particularly cool and helpful for me.

Style

Some notes on style, in terms of to using his writing as a model:

·      When I started really looking at Hazlitt’s style I found an odd discrepancy: He’s super readable on the sentence level (more so that I find in many writers), but not at all on the paragraph level. They just go on and on. Oddly, though, I didn’t notice until a few essays in that the paragraphs were so long. I knew I was finding myself getting a bit bored, but it wasn’t until I really started flipping around, looking at paragraph length, that I noticed how outrageously long some are (a few pages long in sections). I find it odd and interesting that he is so succinct and clear in almost every single sentence, and yet together the sentences often seem (to me) a bit unclear.

·      I liked how personal Hazlitt was able to make most of his essays, despite their “impersonal” topics in many cases. In the essay on Milton’s sonnets, he even notes this emphasis in others, stating that the elements of the personal are, “Compared with Paradise Lost, they are like tender flowers that adorn the base of some proud column or stately temple."

Hazlitt really uses some line breaks like poetry in places, but certainly not everywhere—really interesting. Did anyone else notice this in On Going A Journey? I actually liked almost everything about this one. He still seemed to veer off here and there, but I was able—and very willing—to follow him. He speaks very honestly about himself, and it’s funny as well: “Now I never quarrel with myself, and take all my own conclusions for granted till I find it necessary to defend them against objections…”

·      I won’t go into more quoting and such, but I do want to recommend the essay On Familiar Style if any of you are picking and choosing what to read from Hazlitt. It was an essay on writing, essentially, and talks at least a little bit about his casual style—how it requires more precision, etc. He also compares himself to his contemporaries and defends himself, generically, to some of his critics. Really interesting piece about writing as an art.

Other Notes

Finally, just out of curiosity, was the physical book you all bought really strange? Mine has no title page, and has this almost cartoonish cover font, and is very old-school in terms of typesetting (two spaces after periods, etc.). What kind of book doesn’t have a title page? And, it was outrageously expensive!

Anyway, onward and upward. I got the two (physically) heavy books out of the way and I’m leaving for South America tomorrow, so it will likely be a while before I post again—but I’m thrilled not have to carry these two with me!

Hope all is well.

Jessica

Montaigne is Fascinating, but I am Officially Ready to be Done with Him

Wow, so Montaigne. That’s some set of essays. The collected works showed up on my doorstep from Amazon a few weeks ago and I realized I’d better get started if I didn’t want to throw my back out, carrying Sir Michel around South America.

[On a starting logistical note, I’m not sure how everyone else is going to make these entries, so I’m just kind of feeling out what will be most effective for me/us. I’m looking at the forum as a place to comment on whatever I think is particularly interesting, or odd, or relevant to my (our?) own writing. As I can already tell from this start, I think my contributions will be fairly casual, so hopefully that style works for everyone. I do think we’ll be the only four people in the world reading it, so that’s helpful.]

The first thing I want to say about Montaigne’s collected essays is this: Way to not limit yourself in subject matter, huh? I am embarrassed to admit that I knew very little about Montaigne before picking this up, and in scanning through the essay titles, I couldn’t help but laugh at the range:
            
             On the Custom of Wearing Clothing
             On War-horses
             On Judging Someone Else’s Death
             On the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers
             On Liars
             On Sleep

So great.

In terms of the actual writing, there were parts of these essays that really blew me away, though I do always find myself wondering about translations in general. The ideas in Montaigne are clearly revolutionary for his time, and insightful for ours, but when I came across specific passages or sentences that I fell in love with, I wondered, “Do I love Montaigne here, or the translator (M. A. Screech)?” Certain lines really struck me as both beautiful and succinct, though I wonder how much of this was Montaigne’s own succinctness vs. the translation. This also goes for the titles. “How we Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing”—just lovely.

In doing some background reading online about Montaigne, I read that while he was alive, there was a lot of commentary about his tendency to digress into anecdotes and personal asides, and that it was seen as a deficiency. Thank God that’s no longer true. Maybe it’s because of the kinds of readings we’re doing in the program, but I find myself tiring really quickly of most writing that has no “I” or no personal angle, even on subjects outside of the personal. Also in terms of the “personal” essay, I found Montaigne’s use of his own experiences and opinions to be incredibly varied, which I suppose makes sense considering how many works he actually wrote. In one essay he casually mentions a friend and in another he searches his own memory for meaning in experience really deeply. This seems like such a skill to strive for—the ability to not entirely rely upon oneself, but know when your experience counts for something bigger. Along these lines, I read that philosopher Eric Hoffer, who I guess was writing in the 1950s—though I am unfamiliar with his work—really worked, like many writers, to emulate Montaigne. In his memoir Truth Imagined, Hoffer wrote of him: "He was writing about me. He knew my innermost thoughts." I feel like this statement really captures what is at the heart of the personal essay. Montaigne was writing 500 years before Hoffer’s time, and yet he was able to convey feelings and emotions and opinions that individual readers are able to see as similar—or at least related—to their own. Montaigne talks about himself, but talks more about the way in which people interact and feel about those interactions. I noticed in number of essays that Montaigne’s “I” was really only direct in the beginning and the end of piece, which works incredibly well. He sets us up, draws us in with his own “conversation” with you, and then uses this as a jumping off point for what he sees as important information for the reader to have.

Montaigne’s background was also particularly interesting to me as I considered his lifestyle and what he had been exposed to. Obviously his privilege allowed him to see a good deal more than the average writer during that time, but I was also fascinated by the fact that Montaigne (or this translation?) does not come off as—for lack of a better phrase—“hoity-toity.” I don’t feel like I’m reading the work of someone with every advantage, which is surely a tricky skill, this writing for a general audience, either of your own time or of 500 years beyond you. And his childhood! Forgive me for copying straight from the internet (and Wikipedia, at that), but I thought this early childhood summary of Montaigne was fascinating (feel free to skip if you already have this background—I didn’t):

Montaigne was born in the Aquitaine region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne, in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, not far from Bordeaux. The family was very rich; his grandfather, Ramon Eyquem, had made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the estate in 1477. His father, Pierre Eyquem, was a French Roman Catholic soldier in Italy for a time, and developed some very progressive views on education there; he had also been the mayor of Bordeaux. His mother, Antoinette de Louppes, was, apparently, the daughter of a Spanish converso (converted Jewish) father of the Protestant religion,^[dubious – discuss^] and a Spanish Roman Catholic mother, who had left Spain in 1497 to join kin who had already settled in Toulouse. Although she lived a great part of Montaigne's life near him, and even survived him, she is only mentioned twice in his work. Montaigne's relationship with his father, however, played a prominent role in his life and works. From the moment of his birth, Montaigne's education followed a pedagogical plan sketched out by his father and refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth, Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, 'in order to', according to the elder Montaigne, 'draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help.'^{[citation needed]} After these first spartan years spent amongst the lowest social class, Montaigne was brought back to the Château. The objective was for Latin to become his first language. The intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus who couldn't speak French). His father only hired servants who could speak Latin and they also were given strict orders to always speak to the boy in Latin, or when he was in their presence. The same rule applied to his mother, father and servants, who were obliged only to use Latin words he himself employed, and thus acquired a knowledge of the very language his tutor taught him. Montaigne's Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, exercises of solitary meditation, rather than books. Music was played from the moment of Montaigne's awakening. An épinettier (playing a zither original to the French region of Vosges) constantly accompanied Montaigne and his tutor, playing a tune any time the boy became bored or tired. When he wasn't in the mood for music, he could do whatever he wished: play games, sleep, be alone - most important of all was that the boy wouldn't be obliged to anything, but that, at the same time, he would have everything in order to take advantage of his freedom.

Is it me, or would that life have made you completely crazy? I recognize that it’s the lifestyle that allowed him to think through so many issues, and form opinions and wrestle with his thoughts until they were both clear and concise in his writing, but good God, I feel like that’s a childhood that could just as easily breed a complete lunatic. Fascinating stuff.

And, lastly, a few other interesting (to me) things that I noted in my reading:

·      I found it really cool how Montaigne does specify that he is writing about his own experiences in a very specific place at a very specific time. (I’m thinking of statements like, “In my part of the world they say . . .” which I saw more than once.) I think this enables him to both make some important, meaningful generalizations and also give his readers, historically speaking, a really cool, really definitive look at a very precise time/place in the world.

·      Many of the beginnings of Montaigne’s essays start with a funny or self-deprecating anecdote. For instance, the beginning of “On Liars” starts with him mocking his own memory. Apparently, the modern essayists are not the first to recognize that mocking oneself can win you some loyalty/readership.

·      Did anyone else catch the bit in the “On Fear” essay that must have surely influenced FDR: “”It is fear that I am most afraid of.”

·      This quote struck me as very in tune with my/our/people’s views on creative nonfiction. I just really dug it: “Truth has its difficulties, its awkwardnesses and its incompatibilities with us. It is often necessary to deceive us so as to stop us from deceiving ourselves, hooding our eyes and dazzling our minds so as to train them and cure them.”

·      All in all, I’m so glad I’ve now had this exposure to Montaigne.

In other independent-study related discussion, I think we had tentatively mapped out who each of us would “focus on” on in terms of our “presentation” for Kyoko’s class in the fall. I think I landed on Emerson (which I’m happy with), but wanted to confirm. Who is everyone else taking?

Hope summer has started well for all of you. Despite the fact that I’m feeling pretty sick of Montaigne right now (blasphemy, I know), I’m glad we’re doing this.

Jessica