Montaigne Essays

After reading Montaigne, I was actually eagerly anticipating the chance to hear some other perspectives and opinions on Montaigne's Essays, which of course was left unfilled, so I will enter my conjecture in this forum. Of the three essays included in Norton, the one that I found intriguing was Of Cannibals, which is also the one that lends itself into our semester's topic the best, The Culture of Competition. The part that I took the most from was in the excerpt from page 1638;

        "We win enough advantages over our enemies that are borrowed advantages, not really our own. It       is the quality of a porter, not of valor, to have sturdier arms and legs; agility is a dead and                 corporeal quality; it is a stroke of luck to make our enemy stumble, or dazzle his eyes by by the sunlight; it is a trick of art and technique, which may be found in a worthless coward, to be an able fencer. The worth and value of a man is in his heart and his will."

He later goes on to talk about how there is more valor in the manner of some defeats than there were in many other victories.

This was very interesting to me because I had never even given a tremendous amount of thought to that aspect of competition. Yes, we are taught from an early age that winning isn't everything, and that what matters most is that you try your hardest, and all the other crap that you tell a kid when he has just lost (I can say that because I'm a dad, and I will tell them the same things when, not if, they experience failure). We all are told those things, but it doesn't take very long to learn that that is all crap, and isn't really true at all. In a society that's so geared towards the goal of winning as the sole measure of success, there is a lot lost on the way. If a team wins the superbowl on a last minute freak touchdown pass that was tipped by a defender and miraculously caught in the end zone really the best team? A tennis player who wins because his opponent tripped on match point? We emphasize too much in our society on the destination that much is lost in the journey along the way.