When one is a child or a teenager, it takes quite a lot of imagination to see the people they tell you about, in the classroom, as humans like us. After all, look at them, those ancestors, with their silly costumes, their silly manners and their weird way to talk.
How can you relate to such persons?
It takes quite an effort not to consider them as hopeless aliens, who believed in God (!), thought that the Earth was at the center of the Universe (gasp!) and could not even grasp a simple concept like, say, inflation (I mean, wtf?).
And I was the same. These people, though humans like me, were more aliens than animals, they existed only in two dimensions in the rather naïve paintings of them I saw in the school books.
However, all of that was shattered by a single story in Montaigne’s ESSAIS.
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was a French nobleman who lived during the XVIth century, right in the middle of the darkest era of France’s history, the war of religions which turned everything upside down. After a modest political career, he retired on his estates and composed the “Essays”, a compilation of observations and commentaries on all subjects imaginable.
As a teenager, I decided to read this book, because it had a lot of stories about heroes of the Antiquity, quotes, and anecdotes about history, philosophers, etc… But then, there was this story, which is worth a thousand memes:
The late Mareschal de Montluc having lost his son, who died in the island of Madeira, in truth a very worthy gentleman and of great expectation, did to me, amongst his other regrets, very much insist upon what a sorrow and heart-breaking it was that he had never made himself familiar with him; and by that humour of paternal gravity and grimace to have lost the opportunity of having an insight into and of well knowing, his son, as also of letting him know the extreme affection he had for him, and the worthy opinion he had of his virtue. “That poor boy,” said he, “never saw in me other than a stern and disdainful countenance, and is gone in a belief that I neither knew how to love him nor esteem him according to his desert. For whom did I reserve the discovery of that singular affection I had for him in my soul? Was it not he himself, who ought to have had all the pleasure of it, and all the obligation? I constrained and racked myself to put on, and maintain this vain disguise, and have by that means deprived myself of the pleasure of his conversation, and, I doubt, in some measure, his affection, which could not but be very cold to me, having never other from me than austerity, nor felt other than a tyrannical manner of proceeding.” I find this complaint to be rational and rightly apprehended. [Source]
This is not literature. This is the true pain of a father who suddenly realizes that his son is gone and regrets his vanity and his conceit and would give all he has in his possession to have the pleasure to hold his son again.
Worse, he worries that he has always shown his son only his rigid and severe side, instead of the love he rightly deserved. But due to his own stupid rigidity of mind, of what he thought the rules of paternity required of him, he deprived his son of any display of love and respect and admiration, forcing probably this young lad to go fetch glory by himself in a remote corner of the world where his body would rot.
[Credit]