Francesco Petrarca, also known as Petrarch, was the man who invented the idea of modern-day humanities and started the Renaissance. He cherished the study of the past (i.e. Classical Antiquity) to find the sanctuary that his time did not offer. He revived a whole culture buried deep in time by turning back to that long-gone era and, at the same time, transcended it by creating the idea of an autonomous self of free will.

To Francesco Petrarca,

I would like to inform you that your letter has reached us, the future dwellers, and that your words have sunk into our minds and touched our hearts, as you had desired. I came into this world seven centuries after your time and matured in a land six thousand miles away from your country. However, your concerns and wisdom still reached me against all odds, and they are so powerful that I could not help responding to you, wherever you are now.

I would like to show my deepest condolence to the tragic passing of your beloveds, and my utmost respect for your strong will to carry on despite the blows of the insidious Fortune. It is queer that in my time, the word “fortune” only means chance and luck with no touch of harshness and brutality to it. But in your era, the Realm of Fortune, the so-called mortal world below the Circle of the Moon, was a place of chaos and upheavals, was it not? I have never been through such tragedies in my life, but through your letters, I can imagine how devastating it might be to see your friends and relatives pass through your life so unexpectedly.

O Petrarch, no wonder you had such a fear of contingencies and had to seek solace in the past! Indeed, the only thing that cannot change is the past, and for such a person afraid of changes as you, the past is a perfect sanctuary. I really admire that you was able to look beyond your life and your time to travel back to the past to find comfort and inspiration. I am also a person of nostalgia, and often I find myself clinging to the past to reflect on what has happened and what I can get out of it.

I understand that the era in which you lived praised the study of logic, metaphysics and the like, but overlooked the meaning of what it meant to be human. You truly despised that, did you not, O Petrarch? You could not find any solace in these scholastic analyses of life, could you? Was it because personal tragedies were considered mere sub-lunar contingencies and were nothing compared to the perfect, splendid, unchanging wholeness above the Circle of the Moon? Was it because human were considered tiny drops in the infinite ocean of substances in contrast with the heavenly greatness separated by the boundary of the Moon? Indeed, the teachings of your age overlooked the personal, autonomous self because they had the notion that human is but a mere part of the divine whole, and that our selves were nothing but extensive selves, living for a greater community.

This concept could be traced back to the time of the Roman Empire, and though you tried to connect to that era, you did not take this idea of the self. You turned away from this interpretation and instead took a different approach on the recounts of ancient heroes, such as Marius and the Decii, to name but a few. In your analyses of ancient tales, Marius endured the immense physical pain of the surgery without being tied down just because of his great strength of soul rather than of the Roman Virtue he needed to uphold. Likewise, the progenies of Decius followed his valor to sacrifice for the State because they looked up to Decius’ charismatic character rather than yearning for the honor of a noble death.

O Petrarch, when you stripped the ancient heroes of the extensive self whose prestige and responsibility belonged to the State, you created another identity for them, one t hat was theirs and theirs only. It made them more human, as beings of free will and autonomy who had their own internal struggles apart from the superficial glory with which the world saw them.

I have to admit that when I read the common lore from the Greek and Roman era, I often had a feeling that these stories were just mere facts and I could not personally relate to them. I got the notion that in these tales the heroes mechanically did their gallant deeds and sacrificed their lives just because of the praise they would gain. But when I read your recounts, I had the impression that they were indeed just human with the same intricate inner thoughts and feelings as any of their kin, and suddenly they seemed much more intimate and human, as if they were real people that I could see and converse with. I guess it was this perspective on the stories that helped you find solace and inspiration from the Classical readings.

I believe that wherever you are, you are with your beloved who had gone before you outside the Realm of Fortune, where eternal peace can be finally achieved. Please send my regards to your brothers and friends, and to those who departed this world eons ago but still haven’t been forgotten in the flow of time.

From,
The future world.