Travelogue 1241 – 5 March
The Rhetorician

A century after its inception, the sonnet found its master. This is someone unavoidable, a figure dead centre in the road of cultural history, the indispensable man. Though one wouldn’t want to lose Dante, one could, and history would flow past him with barely a ripple. But one couldn’t tell our story without Francesco Petrarca, the father of the Renaissance, the first humanist, and the consummate poet.

I wrote a forgettable thesis about Petrarca at university, in my baccalaureate days, and he has haunted me since. Even after reading about him for months, I sense that I didn’t really understand him. His legacy is complex. His persona is complex. He is the fox to Dante’s lion. Where Dante stood tall, stood alone, stood proudly; Petrarca sought out company, linked arms with others, chatted, lectured, and sang.

It is meaningful for history that Petrarca was simply a more congenial man, someone who cared about and cultivated the opinion of others. He became the first modern poet laureate by courting important people across Italy and charming them, by exciting them with ideas. He was persuasive. He was a rhetorician. He revived the study of Cicero, one of the great rhetoricians in European history. To study Renaissance intellectual history is to study ancient Greek and Roman history. To the ancients, rhetoric was the linchpin of education. It was fundamental to politics; it was a tool in social advancement.

We in our time say we don’t like rhetoric. We are suspicious of it. Even as we make up the most manipulated societies of all time, swimming in floods of persuasion, drowning in advertising and targeted messaging, though we are subject to psy-ops nearly every day of our lives, we turn our noses up at the word “rhetoric”. It seems “inauthentic” to engage in formal rhetoric. I guess we would know from inauthentic, living in the Trump era.

The truth is, rhetoric can be a tedious study, boring. So is math, but we would never eliminate math from our curriculum. Instead, we dropped rhetoric and civics. We think we have grown beyond these topics. Never mind that in two generations, we have lost all feel for how we are governed, how our own government works; never mind that we are inarticulate in the face of oppression. Never mind that Donald Trump, a man forcing a national dialogue about dementia; a man who cannot finish a sentence; a man whose vocabulary is that of a middle-schooler; a man who cannot make an intellectual case for any one of his devastating policies, and has recourse only to primitive emotional ones; that this man is called, with great seriousness, a “great communicator”.