No
individual has had a greater influence on my intellectual life then Morris
Gabriel Cohen, my high school teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School in
Brooklyn. He was legally blind from
Leber’s optic atrophy, a mitochondrial genetic disorder he inherited from the
cytoplasm of his mother’s egg. I had the
good fortune of reading out loud to him for five years (one year in high school
and four years in the morning before heading to NYU). During those years I assimilated an immense
range of books, plays, memoirs, and other writings of the classics of Western
Civilization. Mr. Cohen was a Pulitzer Prize scholarship winner at
Columbia. He served in WWI before he
became a high school teacher and before his vision began to deteriorate. He never married and the only woman with whom
he corresponded was a young woman he met in Britain in 1919. She was killed during an air raid in London
in 1940.
I
particularly enjoyed the essays of Montaigne. Don’t read the Florio translation
which is Renaissance English. Read the Donald
Frame translation (1958) in modern English.
I read the Cotton translation which was in the Modern Library series of
classic books. Montaigne wrote 107 essays during his lifetime. He was born in southern France where his
parents had an estate and sold wine and fruits that they grew in their orchard. His mother was from a Converso family of
Spanish Jews who fled across the Pyrenees. This probably gave Montaigne the
tolerance he had for all religions and he was successful in settling disputes
as a magistrate after getting a law degree.
Montaigne enjoyed life. He
converted a silo on his farm into a library and study where he would have the
solitude to write and read. He suffered
from kidney stones all his adult life. He loved conversation and entertained
with a circle of acquaintances who enjoyed discussing history, philosophy, and
the issues of the day in a broader context than their politics. He read most of his classics in the original
Greek or Latin.
Montaigne
invented the personal essay. He reflects
on what he reads and the implications of human behavior from his work at court,
his observations of his peers, and from the numerous examples he culls from his
vast reading. Each essay brings the past and present together with his own
personal experiences. I learned from
Montaigne that the personal essay is more powerful than the abstract essay which
tends to be more like an encyclopedia entry.
The personal essay shows that the topic is alive and at least filtered
through the person writing it. It was
this essay style I mimicked in my high school and college English classes. It was the personal essay that was my model
for my Life Lines columns for the Times Beacon Record newspapers on Long
Island, New York, that Leah Dunaieff publishes.
I loved Montaigne’s essay “How by many paths we arrive at the same
end.” His very moving essay on
friendship celebrates the life of his closest friend, Etienne de Boétie who
died young. By reading his essays I got
his biography, not in a linear way but the way we learn about our own families
growing up. I have used that for my own
memoirs (with a working title of Bits and
Pieces) when I read aloud chapters at the Emeriti House on the IU campus
with my fellow retirees.
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