The title le passage comes from one of Michel de Montaigne's Essais, "On repentance." Montaigne's project in writing the essays was to paint of picture of himself, and in turn all of mankind, honestly and openly. The essays are wandering and often contradictory and refuse to make final, clear-cut judgments about humans and the world they inhabit.
In "On repentance," Montaigne explains, "Je ne peins pas l'être, je peins le passage" - "I don't paint the being, I paint the path." Rather than talking explicitly about himself ("I'm 6'3, have blue eyes, am witty and charming...") he paints a picture of his thinking - the passage, the movement, the evolution, the route...
And isn't that what we do when we humans write about ourselves? In this blog, I haven't told you very much about myself, my education, my family; the hard facts are pretty absent. But how much is that really worth? The concrete details are far easier to enumerate, but far lest interesting and informative than my thoughts. If you want to know a person, get to know her ideas, passions, feelings... When we give only the facts (age, personality traits, nationality, profession) we miss the path, fallaciously thinking we humans are stable, fixed creatures. Hardly so! Life is a passage, a journey, and to truly know a person, you've got to get into her head, see her thoughts in all their clutter and inconstancy.
If you're disinterested in my thoughts, as you well might (and probably should) be, know that the project is for me more than for you, as I said in my last post.
Adieu, donc.
I wrote you a good comment but then it erased and I am too tired to recreate it. I will tell you when we institute the GRE walkathon.
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