Oh, Petrarch. You were certainly an icon. One of the foremost humanists of your time, you certainly set the standard. However, things change with time. Our view of the past is always colored by the world of the present. We can only know so much by the people who no longer live. It leaves us with the conundrum of trying to understand them without having access to them. We can only see their writings, their letters, what people have said about them, the legends surrounding them, the stories that we tell. It is an incomplete picture, and we are left drawing some blanks.

I will give you a short review of how you are seen as today. Your goal, to revive the antiquities, is now called humanism, as if trying to reach for the ultimate way to be human, to live. You are said to be the first humanist, the one to lay down the tracks for those that come after you, to be the forebear that it all is built upon. Of course, you had previous works to pull up on, the efforts of others to collect texts, the efforts of others to translate them, the efforts of ones who did not follow your path, and yet, set the stage. Your contemporary, Boccaccio, is counted among the humanists, as are many others that you spoke with and wrote to. Your work, The Secret, and Boccaccio’s work, The Decameron, were the first in a long, long line of works trying to understand what it meant to be the better man. A noble goal, to be sure. While it may have been an effort in futility, I think it is rather impressive.

We live in a very, very different world nowadays. It is much larger. We discovered an entire new land of undiscovered peoples with cultural traditions that we never could have guessed with depths of knowledge that we did not plumb. However, it feels so much smaller. We no longer depend on horses to take messages but can send them in instant 5000 miles across the world. And despite the vastness of this earth, and the fact that there is so much we have left to see, it feels like the world has shrunk. Your goal, now, seems small in comparison to some of the ventures that we take today. That does not mean it is no less important. Western culture, since humanism, has indeed affected the entire world. Europe decided to get its sticky fingers and every single land on earth, to try and get as much profit as they possibly could out of the land.

I don't know what you would have thought of this, Petrarch, but I do know that people do not try to revive the antiquities with the idea of being a better man anymore. There is an urge, now, to reshape the world into an image as one sees fit. This feels like such a small view to me. Changing the world seems easy in comparison to changing one's self. And, really, I congratulate you for trying to be the best man you possibly could in your lifetime. You did what every self-help book will tell you to do- think happy thoughts and argue with yourself over the meaning of existence.

Your works, in particular, are truly revolutionary, even for our time. The Secret, a dialogue between a fictional you and a fictional hero of yours, is seen as a manifesto for humanism, the constant struggle between the baser natures of men in the world they live, and the necessity of rising above that. Your Rime sparse, despite being in Italian and not Latin, remains one of the most influential collection of poems to date. Your love for Laura, however your interaction in life was little, stands as a testament to the determination of a man to get as close to a beautiful woman as possible. Truly, you are the voice of a generation. Your poems stand out, again, for their irreconciliation of her beauty, her kindness, your struggles of your distant love. It truly sets the stage for personal poetry, and every emo poem I wrote in high school. And for that, I commend you and condemn you in the same breath.

However, there are always two sides to every argument, if not more. Your epic, Africa, was certainly not a best-seller. Perhaps, after you delayed it again and again and again, it was never intended to be. I find your zeal for a return to Rome, not strange, but contradictory. Especially for the time period. The world is always changing, and one should never forget this. You cannot place an ancient thing unchanged into the world of the present. People adapt to the things we create. A Rome would not have survived in the world that you lived in. It may sound nice, but a unified empire? That would not have lasted in the fractured Europe in which it would have lived. People have moved on from Rome. It stands as one of the greatest empires in our history and we now know more than ever about how many empires have existed and fallen since time immemorial. However, things change. People develop identities separate from the past and based in either the more recent past or the newly forming present and future. A Rome cannot exist without Romans, and there were none of those left. I wish to impress upon you the dangers of forcing an uncertain past when people of the present are not prepared for it, nor want it. As one torn between trying to understand and be the past while knowing that there were irreconcilable differences, you should know better.

As well, I feel it is necessary to mention your opinions of woman as I am one. Things have advanced far past the 14th century in which you lived. Men and women are not so different. This seems a tired point to say to a man long dead, but I feel it is necessary on principle. There are so many things that you missed out on because women were not allowed to participate. You missed the depth of our thoughts, you missed the insight in our criticisms, and you missed the heart in our arguments. They have gone unnoticed and unrecognized, and we will never be able to know them, because they were never written down, and never allowed to. Women might have even been some of the most amazing humanists, lovers of antiquity, that you have ever seen, desperate for change in the world in which they lived. I wish you, perhaps even in heaven, a greater depth of knowledge of all of humankind , not just mankind.

However, I do admire you. Your works were, quite literally, revolutionary. They set up a time in which we were allowed to explore a greater depth of humanity. Beyond sin and pleasure, beyond mortal souls, beyond earthly concerns and heavenly ones. You tried to reach into the past and may have even succeeded. We will never know, but I think it is admirable simply to try. I think the past is a lesson for the present and the guidebook for the future. I think trying to understand what people thought in the past, what these great figures were thinking while they did the things that make it to history books, the things that live on as legends, is important. I think it is worth to look back, and to try to emulate what they did, try to try to live how they live. I appreciate you for opening up the door, and for waving me inside to see what it had to offer. And for that, I say thank you.

Panfilo