"Of the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers"

Dali has given us three illustrations for this essay. The first is what must have struck him as a novel way to see the resemblance between father and son. We are used to people commenting on children's physical resemblances to their parents, and even occasionally resemblances in ability as they grow up. But at age 45 Montaigne discovers that he has takens after his father by way of a chronic disease he has developed, painful attacks of kidney stones. He writes: '

'Tis to be believed that I derive this infirmity from my father, for he died wonderfully tormented with a great stone in his bladder, he was never sensible of his disease till the sixty-seventh year of his age; and before that had never felt any menace or symptoms of it... I was born above five and twenty years before his disease seized him, and in the time of his most flourishing and healthful state of body, his third child in order of birth, where could his propension to this malady lie lurking all that while? And he being then so far from the infirmity, how could that small part of his substance where with he made me, carry away so great an impression for its share? and how so concealed, that till five and forty years after, I did not begin to be sensible of it? being the only one to this hour, among so many brothers and sisters, and all by one mother, that was ever troubled with it? He that can satisfy me in this point, I will believe him in as many other miracles as he pleases... (p. 169)

Even when he was well, Montaigne says, he suffered from the anxiety that he would get his father’s disease. Hence Dali’s small little man looking up at his lame father.And so we have, in Dali's drawing, the son looking up at the diseased father in fear and wonder.

A larger sense of wonder applies to Dali's color illustration for this essay. The dodecahedron is a frequent image in Dali's work. As I have said already, in Plato’s Timaeus the creator-god or “demiurgos” uses this so-called “Platonic solid” as a model for “the universe as a whole.” Thus it represents creation in general, in all its inscrutable imperfection.



When Dali painted this, the mysteries of genetics were just beginning to unfold. There did in fact turn out to be a basic geometric structure containing the answer to Montaigne's question, the double helix.

Of course there is much we still do not know; future generations will undoubtedly look at our times in the way that we look on Montaigne's. We have also lost some of what was known in his time: much knowledge of natural healing, for example, was lost in the burning of witches that was at a fever pitch in his time, and which Montaigne condemned, in an essay entitled "Of Cripples."

There is also the question of why a creator-god would design our physical vehicle so imperfectly as to allow such unjust suffering to be endured generation after generation. That is a question which is more accessible to Montaigne. He does not offer an answer in this essay, but he does discuss it in later essay, "On Experience." We will consider his remarks in the section on his essay, "That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die."

In the present essay, Montaigne reflects that despite the untold miseries that afflict people, they continue to cling to life, even he, who had often declared himself ready to die whenever death chose (again, see the section on "That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die," which Dali puts later but was written earlier):

I have so inured myself to it as to be content to live on in it; and have found wherein to comfort myself, and to hope; so much are men enslaved to their miserable being, that there is no condition so wretched they will not accept provided they may live!

Make me lame in hand
Lame in foot and thigh,
Shake out my loosened teeth;
While life stays, so stay I. [Seneca] (pp. 164-165).

It may such sentiments that prompted the drawing that appears near the end of this essay, in which a mother offers up her child to heaven, and the angel, I think, is refusing to take him. The angel perhaps corresponds to that force in Montaigne that wills to live despite all.