Jag fick idag en mycket intressant kommentar i bloggen om Montaigne. Jag vill gärna dela den med er:
One of Montaigne's favourite hobbies was imagining the world from different perspectives. To remind himself how strange human behaviour looked if one's vision was not dulled by familiarity, he collected stories from his reading: tales of countries where men urinated squatting and women standing, where people blackened their teeth or elongated their ears with rings, where hair was worn long in front and short behind, or where boys were expected to kill their fathers at a certain age.
At home, he extended his perspective-leaping to other species. "When I play with my cat", he wrote, "who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?" He borrowed her point of view in relation to him just as readily as he occupied his own in relation to her. And, as he watched his dog twitching in sleep, he imagined the dog creating a disembodied hare to chase in its dreams – "a hare without fur or bones", just as real in the dog's mind as Montaigne's own images of Paris or Rome were when he dreamed about those cities. The dog had its inner world, as Montaigne did, furnished with things that interested him.
These were all extraordinary thoughts in Montaigne's own time, and they remain so today. They imply an acceptance that other animals are very much like us, combined with an ability to wonder how differently they might grasp what they perceive. Some animals see colours differently from humans, for example, so who is to say which are the "real" colours of things? Montaigne quoted a story he had picked up from Pliny, about a species of "sea-hare", a kind of sea-slug, which is deadly to humans but which (thought Pliny) itself dies on contact with human skin. "Which is really poisonous?" he asked. "Which are we to believe, the fish about man, or man about the fish?" Surely we must believe neither – or both.
Sarah BakewellJag var ju tvungen att ta reda på vem som skrivit denna intressanta kommentar. Och det visade sig - förstås - att Sarah Bakewell skrivit en bok om Montaigne. Hennes hemsida kan du läsa här. Och om hennes bok kan du läsa här.
Och här en video där hon talar om Montaigne: