"They chose one general characteristic, and go and arrange and interpret all a man's actions to fit their picture: and if they cannot twist them enough, they go and set them down to dissimulation." (1943) A quote from the essay: "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions", where Michel DE Montaigne argument that man attempts to label one another on a single action or attribute and that we are not that simple and yet more complex.
Throughout time you could ask one hundred people about a man in which they were all acquainted and receive one hundred different interpretations of his life or whom he was. Montaigne expresses this idea quite clearly with his opening statement:.
"Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop." (1942).
As humans we are consistently trying to be or become something different to everyone and every situation. Throughout or lives we are expected to be a parent, an employee, a psychologist, a teacher, a child, a lover, etc . . . , and yet with one fell swoop we can become a failure, a disappointment, or a coward. .
In current society we are prime examples of this essay. We are by fault an expression of our society. What pleases us one moment can disgust us the next. What we want one day becomes a thing of the past the next. One man can be our guide, protector, and pursuer, and then just as quickly our enemy, opponent, and adversary. As our needs, wants, and desires change, so do our masks. We honor man in such a fashion that we give him the authority to make the most crucial decisions and if he were to make one wrong choice in his life, he is forever tainted. At that point we have detached him from his past accomplishments, and even gone so far as to defile his ascendants.