esrosedotblog

ROLE MODEL

I do not know when it was but, when I read Montaigne's Essays, it was a turning point in my intellectual life.

It is amusing to see that some call him the "first blogger" today. Here I am, blogging about him.

I was, as a kid, a reader. I scoured out the local lending library. All the kids stuff first and then the young adults. All the Oz,s, all the Tarzans, and then it was on to the adult novels. The detective novels. The librarian was a neighbor and never blinked when I took the grown up sexy stuff.

But I let most of the non-fiction on the shelf. I dipped in when I had a school assignment. Then I found Montaigne.

He was accessible. He had a life, which is what he wrote about. He had a point of view. It was not auto biography, it was talk. Thought on paper. Wonderful.

Clear, lucid. I suppose his critics meant that when they called him superficial.

Where did I find him? In the Random House series of great books? Perhaps. I read all of those that I could get. They were in the local, county seat, department store.

Maybe freshman year at MIT in the survey, required, Humanites Courses.

But I think before that. When I was in college, everything affected me all at once.

Montaigne came to me quietly and with stealth.

He was widely read. So, his quotes and citations led me to other reading. I became an autodidact.

He was a role model for me for that very reason. He was a magistrate who informed himself. Widely read and independent thinker.

I am grateful for that important breakthrough and happy that the old man still shakes people up enough to write about him, even if they are being snide and snobby.

Labels: life, philosophy