Author: TATYANA KUPTSEVICH

While reading Montaigne’s essays, I was really impressed by his sense of humor and the way he picks up the absurdness of human behavior. The most obvious example is his take on relativism in the essay “Of Cannibals”. As he describes the savage customs of a native South American tribe, which include killing and eating their war prisoners, Montaigne is quick to point out that while many of their behaviors strike as barbaric, they are not any more barbaric that the customs of his own nation. Appalled by the religious wars in France, where mass murder and particularly cruel torture methods and executions were employed, he rightly points out that the Europeans consider themselves more civilized only because humans tend to perceive their familiar local norms as the correct ones and not because they are truly superior. In his essay “Of the inconsistency of our actions”, the writer describes the frequent hypocrisy and inconsistency of humans who change their mind or interpret other people’s behavior as the situation suits  them at the particular moment without perceiving the contradictions. The anecdote of a promiscuous young woman who attempted suicide because of being pursued by an unwanted admirer in an apparent show of virtue is one of the many examples of this. In other essays Montaigne observes how people sometimes arbitrarily consider things good or bad, simply from custom or convenience, as, for example, saying “bless you” at a sneeze but frowning on the other two “sorts of wind”. He simply mocks his own culture and people at every angle, exposing the innate ridiculousness of humans.

My first impression of Louise Labe’s poetry was that it was purely aesthetic: that is, she writes about longing and unrequited love in a very particular style as a way to play with words and display her cleverness. The singularity and repetitiveness of the theme suggests someone who is in love with the idea of love rather than looking for an actual relationship: clearly in line with the style of romantic poetry of Labe’s time, but not particularly deep. As I went through the sonnets, however, I found some that were quite erotic and passionate, which suggested that her experience and interest in romance was perhaps more genuine that it appears at the first glance.

My favorite was  of all #21 because it shows real insight into love and passion. While most romantic poetry of that era (written by men) extols physical beauty and its power on the beholder, Labe has a very different idea. She points out that love is irrational and unpredictable: you love someone simply because, and it’s not the person’s looks, personality, popularity, talents, or any other trait that makes you lose your mind, but simply being that particular person has that effect on you. Nowadays, we call it “chemistry”, “connection”, “soul-linking”, etc, and Labe has no definition for this phenomenon, but she explains it beautifully.

I find Augustine’s allusions to his early education very interesting in the light that he was an educator himself and eventually a man of the church. After all, Christianity emphasizes the virtues of obedience, particularly of elders, tedious work, patience, and suffering. Knowing St. Augustine’s background, you would think that a man as learned as he was would praise strict discipline and rigorous education for children, but he seems to take the opposite view. He claims that he learned despite of himself and his tutors (due to divine guidance of sorts) and that his accomplishments can hardly be attributed to the formal education he received as a child. If anything, he still resents the harshness of his childhood punishments as recounts them decades later as a middle-aged man. His ideas are actually quite modern and more in line with current trends in psychology and pedagogy in that children should be allowed to play and enjoy childhood and that learning should be made interesting and relevant rather than be memorization of tedious material under a threat of corporal punishment.