When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me? by Saul Frampton

Author:Saul Frampton [Frampton, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-37959-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

It is therefore ourselves who are really barbaric, in corrupting and smothering Nature’s beauty with clothing and decoration. By contrast, he remarks upon the uncultivated fruits of this new Eden: ‘which possess a delicacy of flavour that is excellent to the taste and to the envy of our own’. Montaigne thus turns the tables, and inaugurates a tradition that culminates in Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage – a prelapsarian state of nature more to be esteemed than artificial poise. And in his later essay ‘Of Coaches’, Montaigne places himself in the minds of the Amerindians, and looks back on himself and his own kind:

For, take away from those who subjugated them the tricks and artifices which they used to deceive them, and the natural astonishment of the people on seeing the unexpected arrival of bearded men, differing from them in language, religion, shape and countenance, from a faraway region of the world, where they had never imagined that there could be any habitation, mounted on big unknown monsters … men with a hard and shining skin and sharp and glittering weapons against men who, for the miracle of the gleam of a mirror or a knife would exchange great wealth in gold and pearls … add to this the thunder and the lightning of our cannon and arquebuses … against people who were naked … people taken by surprise, under colour of friendship and good faith, curious to see strange and unknown things. Take into account, I say, all the superiority of the conquerors, and you deprive them of all the credit of so many victories.

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