- Variations on "Of Thumbs"
Editor's note: As Dinty W. Moore will explain in the introduction to follow, this roundtable invited several essayists to create variations on Michel de Montaigne's brief essay "Of Thumbs." Participating were Nancy Canyon, a writer and painter; Patrick Madden, the curator of the Quotidiana.org website; Brenda Miller, the editor-in-chief of the Bellingham Review; Dinty W. Moore, the editor of the online nonfiction journal Brevity; Donald Morrill, poetry editor of the Tampa Review; and Sue William Silverman, a memoirist and associate editor of Fourth Genre. While there are fine modern translations of Montaigne's essays by Donald Frame, M. A. Screech, and others, the most widely available version is the seventeenth-century translation by Charles Cotton, which we reprint here from selections of Montaigne's work on the Quotidiana website.
- "Of Thumbs"
Tacitus reports, that amongst certain barbarian kings their manner was, when they would make a firm obligation, to join their right hands close to one another, and intertwist their thumbs; and when, by force of straining the blood, it appeared in the ends, they lightly pricked them with some sharp instrument, and mutually sucked them.
Physicians say that the thumbs are the master fingers of the hand, and that their Latin etymology is derived from "pollere." The Greeks called them [End Page 125] αντιχειρ, as who should say, another hand. And it seems that the Latins also sometimes take it in this sense for the whole hand:
Sed nec vocibus excitata blandis,Molli pollici nec rogata, surgit.
["Neither to be excited by soft words or by the thumb."
—Martial, xii, 98, 8.]
It was at Rome a signification of favour to depress and turn in the thumbs:
Fautor utrogue tuum laudabit police ludum:
["Thy patron will applaud thy sport with both thumbs"
—Horace.]
and of disfavour to elevate and thrust them outward:
Converso police vulgi,Quemlibet occident populariter.
["The populace, with inverted thumbs, kill all that come before them."
—Juvenal, iii, 36]
The Romans exempted from war all such as were maimed in the thumbs, as having no more sufficient strength to hold their weapons. Augustus confiscated the estate of a Roman knight who had maliciously cut off the thumbs of two young children he had, to excuse them from going into the armies; and, before him, the Senate, in the time of the Italic war, had condemned Caius Vatienus to perpetual imprisonment, and confiscated all his goods, for having purposely cut off the thumb of his left hand, to exempt himself from that expedition. Some one, I have forgotten who, having won a naval battle, cut off the thumbs of all his vanquished enemies, to render them incapable of fighting and of handling the oar. The Athenians also caused the thumbs of the Æginatans to be cut off, to deprive them of the superiority in the art of navigation.
In Lacedaemon, pedagogues chastised their scholars by biting their thumbs. [End Page 126]
- Of Thumbs and Bedeviling Impediments:An Introduction
Halfway through my first viewing of Lars Von Trier's film The Five Obstructions, I began pondering ways this experiment in filmmaking might translate to the art of writing, particularly nonfiction writing, where the main obstruction is always in place—stick to the truth.
In his idiosyncratic documentary, Von Trier challenges filmmaker Jørgen Leth to remake his own 1967 classic short The Perfect Human five times, each time facing a different obstacle. The result, combined with some spirited on-screen discussion between the two cinema storytellers, is a fascinating consideration of the limits of art, the role of chance, and where we find our inspiration.
Since Von Trier's particular obstructions have to do with location, animation, or other constraints that don't directly translate to writing, I constructed my own bedeviling impediments. A few of them focused directly on the building blocks of prose—point of view, structure,narrative mode—while others simply encouraged playfulness and surprise.
To directly emulate the film, I would have needed to find...