Tag: history

Something that the mind has a hard time getting used to in biographies is comparing the greatness of some personalities with the absolute lack of recognition of such greatness while the biographees were alive. Often, posthumous consecration blurs this contrast, and we can hardly imagine the colossus, if not despised, walking the streets as an ordinary man. But we must always keep this in mind, and by doing so we can get much closer to the reality that surrounded him and better visualize his true dimension.

There are inexplicable experiences, the scale of which can only be grasped by he who has lived them first-hand. One of these is undoubtedly the deceitfulness of modernity. The amount of lies that are taught in schools today, or rather the amount of lies that students assimilate not just as certainties, but with veneration, is something that men from other eras could only understand superficially. Complete falsehoods, such as the history of the French Revolution, or the biographies of figures like Newton, Descartes, Machiavelli, or the emergence of so-called modern science, or the history of the Inquisition, the Catholic Church, slavery, and the list goes on and on, one has to have swallowed and digested them very well to be able, years later, to shake with the proper astonishment at seeing them incontestably debunked by a huge pile of books and documents. All lies! All saturated with ulterior motives! Then one feels the contempt that modernity deserves, and only a good modern is capable of feeling it.

The most interesting thing about any biography is to notice the coincidences that do not seem to be coincidences, and although there is often nothing we can do but identify them, their totality always seems to hold something revealing. There are events whose explanation is one hundred percent useless: the fact itself says more than any possible justification. And they mark, transform, determine, so that sometimes identifying them or not means understanding or not understanding.