{"id":1557,"date":"2007-06-18T05:40:21","date_gmt":"2007-06-18T10:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-of-honorary-awards\/"},"modified":"2007-06-18T05:41:27","modified_gmt":"2007-06-18T10:41:27","slug":"monday-morning-montaigne-of-honorary-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-of-honorary-awards","title":{"rendered":"Monday Morning Montaigne: Of honorary awards"},"content":{"rendered":"

In honor of Father’s Day, I thought Of the affection of fathers for their children<\/em> would offer up some good material. As it turns out, M. uses most of the essay to argue that elderly men should know when it’s time to withdraw from worldly affairs, then concludes that the great writers correctly treasured their books above their children. Seriously:<\/p>\n

If [Epicurus] had had to choose between leaving behind a deformed and ill-born child and leaving behind a stupid and inept book, [would he] not rather have chosen, and not only he but any man of like ability, to incur the former misfortune than the other? It would perhaps be impiety in Saint Augustine, for example — if it were proposed to him on the one hand to bury his writings, from which our religion receives such great fruit, or else to bury his children, in case he had any — if he did not prefer to bury his children.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wow. So I decided to backtrack and go with Of honorary awards<\/em> instead. M.’s point in this one is that, the more you give out an award, the less value it has. It comes off as sour grapes, because he received a knighthood of the Order of Saint Michael only after it had become more commonplace.<\/p>\n

But this essay gets my Father’s Day seal of approval because it manages to hearken the Montaigne of today, Chris Rock:<\/p>\n

We do not note in commendation of a man that he cares for the education of his children, since this is a common action, however just.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and<\/p>\n

N*****s will say some dumb shit like, “I take CARE of MY kids!”<\/p>\n

You’re SUPPOSED to, you dumb motherf****r!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(For the full experience, go here<\/a> and advance to the 2:20 mark.)<\/p>\n

Next week: either Of books<\/em> or Of cruelty<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In honor of Father’s Day, I thought Of the affection of fathers for their children would offer up some good material. As it turns out, M. uses most of the essay to argue that elderly men should know when it’s time to withdraw from worldly affairs, then concludes that the great writers correctly treasured their … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Monday Morning Montaigne: Of honorary awards”<\/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":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-montaigne"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-p7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1409,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-of-cannibalism","url_meta":{"origin":1557,"position":0},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: Of Cannibalism","author":"Gil","date":"March 26, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"This week's essay was Of Cannibals, which raised all sorts of expectations. Unfortunately, Montaigne's depictions of man-eating tribes in Brazil (or 'Antarctic France') were pretty much in the \"noble savage\" mode. On the plus side, he never went into a rant about how Europe needs to bring them religion. If\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","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":1557,"position":1},"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 "Monday Morning Montaigne"","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":3118,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-break","url_meta":{"origin":1557,"position":2},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: BREAK!","author":"Gil","date":"December 22, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Due to travel schedules, and my unwillingness to lug a 1,300-page hardcover around with me, Monday Morning Montaigne is off until January! Enjoy!","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","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":3034,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-of-brain-cloud","url_meta":{"origin":1557,"position":3},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: Of brain-cloud","author":"Gil","date":"December 8, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I know the news will break your heart, but there's no Montaigne post this week. My headcold rendered me even less comprehensible this weekend. I'll try to write about the first few essays of Book Three next week.","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","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":3549,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-of-cripples","url_meta":{"origin":1557,"position":4},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: Of cripples","author":"Gil","date":"March 2, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Don't invent reasons to explain every fact. For example, just because you had really good sex with a crippled woman, it does not validate a proverb that says cripples are better in bed. Seriously. That's the example he chose. On to Of physiognomy!","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","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":1307,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne","url_meta":{"origin":1557,"position":5},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne","author":"Gil","date":"January 22, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Montaigne, on prognostications: True, there remain among us some means of divination by the stars, by spirits, bodily dreams, and the like -- a notable example of the frenzied curiosity of our nature, which wastes its time anticipating future things, as if it did not have enough to do digesting\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557","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=1557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}