Saturday, February 28, 2004

more interesting birthday news

ok, so this is no longer about my birthday, as it is past, and i am over it for yet another year.......i enjoyed this entry on/in writer's almanac, about the writer who had what it took to be the bestest ever blogger, if only he was on-line.....

garrison k. has written.....It's the birthday of the great essayist Michel de Montaigne, born in Perigueux, France (1533). His father was a wealthy landowner and a devout Catholic, with innovative ideas about child rearing. He sent the infant Michel to live with peasant parents, so that he would learn to love the lower classes. Then, when Michel was a toddler, his father required everyone in the household to speak Latin rather than French, so that Latin would be his first language. Michel went off to college and became a lawyer. His father died when Michel was thirty-eight years old, and so he retired to the family estate and took over managing the property. His best friend had died a few years before, so he had no one to write to while living on his estate. He grew increasingly bored, so to occupy himself he began to write down his thoughts for an imaginary reader. He wrote about a wide variety of subjects: sadness, idleness, liars, fear, smell, prayer, cannibals, and thumbs, among other things. He called his short pieces "essays" when he published his first collection in 1580, because the French word "essai" comes from the word for "attempt", and he considered the short pieces he wrote to be mere attempts at addressing ideas.

Montaigne didn't think he had an extraordinary mind, but he believed that every mind was unique, and he wanted to leave a record of his own. He wanted to capture on paper the movement of his own thoughts. He said, "I take the first subject Fortune offers: all are equally good for me. I never plan to expound them in full. . . . Everything has a hundred parts and a hundred faces: I take one of them and sometimes just touch it. . . . I jab into it, not as wide but as deep as I can; and I often prefer to catch it from some unusual angle. . . . I can surrender to doubt and uncertainty and to my master-form, which is ignorance. Anything we do reveals us."

He lived at a time when religious civil wars were breaking out all over the country. The Black Plague was ravaging the peasants in his neighborhood; he once saw men digging their own graves and then lying down to die in them. Still, while he occasionally wrote about big subjects like hatred and death, he also wrote about the most ordinary things, like his gardening or the way radishes affected his digestion.

Montaigne wrote, "Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most."

And he wrote, "Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition."

Today is also the birthday of our good friend jeff thornton, who looks so much younger than 58..........interestingly enough, i discovered last night at supper, during the 'reasons to vote for kerry' discussion, that we should vote for him because he shares a birthday with our middle child, born december 11......... not in the same chinese new year cycle, but the same day................cayle shares a birthday with abraham lincoln, by the way............though his actual name/lineage has been called into question....seems nancy hanks may have been with child by the head of the household to which she was indentured in north carolina, and she may have been sent 'west' to ky with a husband(mr. lincoln) attained for just that purpose...........

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