On Perspective – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
A part of being a historian is learning how to reach into the sources and find the perspectives of the people you’re researching. In my case that’s a French explorer and writer named André Thevet (1516–1590), who longtime readers and listeners to this publication will now be familiar with. The best way to learn about Thevet’s perspective is to read his books, and in my case to translate them as well. It’s a humbling experience to get to know this man, or at least to get to know the public persona he crafted in his published works over a 45 year career.
These are lessons I’ve found important to carry over into my daily life. I’m more hesitant to get angry at someone who cuts me off driving, or to get annoyed at the crying baby in a café or restaurant because I don’t know what’s bothering the baby or how their parents’ day might be going. I do remember my own phase in life when my initial reaction to most things was to cry, as an adult I figure that’s because I was scared of the unknown, scared of being away from familiar places, people, and things. I hope I remember that when the day comes that I’m lucky enough to be a parent, should that day come indeed.
I’ve learned to adapt my speech to fit the people I’m talking to, using the official wording of a company or that someone in a professional capacity used to make sure we’re talking on the same wavelength. One instance of this that annoyed me to no end was at my local Panera, since closed, where the staff had a different way of referring to sizes of soups and mac & cheese than what was on the menu. Whereas it was written above their heads that portions were served as half or whole they instead would only refer to them as small or large, and often wouldn’t seem to understand what I wanted when I used the printed terminology from Panera. I learned after a few awkward encounters, though admittedly Panera’s mac & cheese has always been hit or miss, somedays it’s delicious with a creamy hot melted cheese, other times the cheese is clumpy and more a lukewarm solid than a liquid.
For a while I’ve been thinking about the contemporary efforts underway to find a gender neutral 3rd person pronoun to use in English. The choice of they makes a great deal of sense considering the history of this language. For each person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd) we have two pronouns, singular and plural, except of course for the 2nd person which is you all around. For the 3rd person options we have it and they, and while they is a clunky solution to the conundrum of gender neutrality in language, they is still a better fit than it. It bears an air of inhumanity; it’s what we use to refer to things that are less-than human: animals, plants, and inanimate objects. The division between something referred to as it rather than he, she, or they is murky. I often became quite annoyed with people who referred to my dog Noel as it rather than she, after all she had a gregarious personality. She expressed emotions, love, joy, happiness, fear, sadness, boredom. It was clear to me having lived with her for over a decade that she knew how to think for herself, how to make her desires known to those of us who could understand her. It reflects English’s Germanic roots more than anything else. I tend to think of the English it in the context of its closest German cognate, the pronoun es, as well as in the German distinction between the action of humans eating essen and the action of animals eating fressen.
We’ve preserved this distinction in our language because we find it useful to define boundaries between different types of subjects and objects. This distinction demonstrates our priorities toward one set from another, toward the human over what older schools of natural history referred to as lesser forms of life. I for one find that to be an outdated way of thinking for it ignores what we have to learn from the great kaleidoscope of life in all its radiance and color. I became a better person because of the years I spent living with Noel, playing with her, taking her for walks, comforting her when she needed it, and letting her comfort me when I was feeling down.
If we have one great flaw as humans, it’s our hubris. We let ourselves believe that we know all there is out there to know, that we have gotten to a point in our evolution as a species where we’ve developed tools that can make sense of anything and everything the Universe can throw at us. Life has proven to me that that kind of thinking is flawed on so many levels. We know a lot more about what’s out there around us now than we did in the past, but the most wonderous part of being alive is knowing that we don’t know everything yet! I love that fact for how simple it is, and because it means there’s more for us to explore, that there’s still a horizon to look over.
I think that’s why I’m drawn to people like Thevet, like Noel. I like explorers because in my own way I’m an explorer too. I may not always take off for far distant countries or alien worlds, but I do get out of bed every morning not knowing what the day ahead is going to bring. And no matter if it’s a good day or a bad one, I know eventually it’ll make a good story, and that I’ll learn from it so I can wake up the next day better prepared for life.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 