{"id":1386,"date":"2007-03-12T05:00:39","date_gmt":"2007-03-12T10:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-7\/"},"modified":"2007-03-12T05:01:48","modified_gmt":"2007-03-12T10:01:48","slug":"monday-morning-montaigne-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-7","title":{"rendered":"Monday Morning Montaigne"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> I was pretty excited when I saw that the next essay in my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/1400040213?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=virtualmemories-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1400040213\">Montaigne collection<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=1400040213\" style=\"border: medium none  ! important; margin: 0px ! important\" border=\"0\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" \/> was <em>Of Friendship<\/em>. I saved it till Saturday morning, figuring I&#8217;d be able to spend the day ruminating on his ideas of the subject and how they jibed &#8212; or failed to jibe &#8212; with my own. Unfortunately, I found this essay pretty unenlightening and, well, boring.<\/p>\n<p><em>Of Friendship<\/em> is intended to introduce poems by Montaigne&#8217;s dead friend, political philosopher <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/%C3%89tienne_de_La_Bo%C3%A9tie\" target=\"_blank\">Etienne de La Boetie<\/a>, but what it focuses on is the character of their &#8220;once in three centuries&#8221; friendship. In the process of describing the intense, four-year relationship the men shared, Montaigne proceeds to dismiss the possibility of true friendship between a man and<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>his dad (too much respect)<\/li>\n<li>his brother (too much sibling rivalry)<\/li>\n<li>a girl (too much lust; a 16th century version of <a href=\"http:\/\/imdb.com\/title\/tt0098635\/\" target=\"_blank\">When Harry Met Sally<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>a fag (see above, and note &#8220;[T]hat other, licentious Greek love is justly abhorred by our morality.&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>more than one guy (too much sharing)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So I was let down, especially because my brother and my wife are two of my closest friends, there are a number of other friends I&#8217;d (essentially) go to the end of the earth for, and I once contemplated having two guys killed to avenge a brutal assault on a queer friend of mine (not that we shared that other, licentious Greek love or anything).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, rather than pass on any excerpts from that stuff, I thought I&#8217;d share with you the opening to the essay. It mirrors my own tendency to start off strong and end up all over the darned place:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As I was considering the way a painter I employ went about his work, I had a mind to imitate him. He chooses the best spot, the middle of each wall, to put a picture labored over with all his skill, and the empty space around it he fills with grotesques, which are fantastic paintings whose only charm lies in their variety and strangeness. And what are these essays of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence or proportion other than accidental?<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">&#8220;A lovely woman tapers off into a fish.&#8221; [Horace]\n<p>I do indeed go along with my painter in this second point, but I fall short in the first and better part; for my ability does not go far enough for me to dare to undertake a rich, polished picture, formed according to art.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Fortunately, the next few essays are <em>Of Moderation, Of Cannibals,<\/em> and <em>Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes<\/em>, so I figure there should be some more entertaining posts in the weeks ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was pretty excited when I saw that the next essay in my Montaigne collection was Of Friendship. I saved it till Saturday morning, figuring I&#8217;d be able to spend the day ruminating on his ideas of the subject and how they jibed &#8212; or failed to jibe &#8212; with my own. Unfortunately, I found &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-7\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Monday Morning Montaigne&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,45,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-monday-morning-montaigne","category-politics-explicit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-mm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3226,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-on-okay-i-didnt-finish-this-one","url_meta":{"origin":1386,"position":0},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: On okay I didn&#8217;t finish this one","author":"Gil","date":"January 12, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This week's Montaigne essay, On some verses of Virgil (pp. 774-831), turned out to be really good. However, I didn't have time to write about it, so I'm going to reread it this week and try to put something together for you by next Monday. Suffice to say, my worries\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Monday Morning Montaigne&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2239,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-the-reloadening","url_meta":{"origin":1386,"position":1},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: The Reloadening!","author":"Gil","date":"August 12, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I gave up on my Monday Morning Montaigne project a year ago for two reasons. The first one was that I reached Apology for Raymond Sebond, the central essay of the second book. This essay -- the introduction to (and kindasorta defense of) Sebond\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Natural Theology, which Montaigne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dad asked\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;literature&quot;","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1516,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-work-can-wait-till-tomorrow","url_meta":{"origin":1386,"position":2},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: &#8220;Work can wait till tomorrow&#8221;","author":"Gil","date":"May 21, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm swamped at work, dear reader, and the essay that I read this weekend -- Of practice -- is requiring an awful lot of thought. Fortunately, a few essays earlier was one entitled, \"Work can wait till tomorrow,\" so I feel justified in giving you Tuesday Morning Montaigne this week.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Monday Morning Montaigne&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3640,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-the-grand-finale","url_meta":{"origin":1386,"position":3},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: The Grand Finale!","author":"Gil","date":"March 16, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Aesop, that great man, saw his master pissing as he walked. \"What next?\" he said. \"Shall we have to shit as we run?\" Let us manage our time; we shall still have a lot left idle and ill spent. Sorry, dear readers, but I'll write my last MMM post next\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Monday Morning Montaigne&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2704,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/montaigne-update","url_meta":{"origin":1386,"position":4},"title":"Montaigne update","author":"Gil","date":"October 16, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Hmm. Maybe I should have pushed my Montaigne-as-blogger idea, floated a few weeks ago when I wrote up Of presumption in my Monday Morning Montaigne series. Here's a piece from Andrew Sullivan's article \"Why I Blog\" in the new ish of The Atlantic: But perhaps the quintessential blogger avant la\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Monday Morning Montaigne&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3402,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-of-the-art-of-discussion","url_meta":{"origin":1386,"position":5},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: Of the art of discussion","author":"Gil","date":"February 9, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"With only six of the Essays remaining, I feel as though there should be some sort of growing imperative, a sense of completion in the final 200 pages. So I was a bit disappointed when I read (and re-read) Montaigne's Of the art of discussion (pp. 854-876), but I didn't\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Monday Morning Montaigne&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}