Post date: Dec 1, 2016 3:39:37 PM
From grade school to before I read The Travels, my knowledge of Marco Polo hasn't expanded very much. After reading The Travels, I do not think my knowledge of him has been expanded for the better. He seems more like a tourist looking at Asia than an actual participant in the culture. Everything is a novelty for him. I especially disliked the distance he seemed to keep from the people he was observing and interacting with. He did not seem to engage with them but rather was like a scientist observing animals that he had very little in common with. While I didn't always get the sense he was demeaning them because I like to think he was genuinely curious of the people's and in this time period it was not common to interact with "primitive" people's, I did get an air of superiority.
There were many experiences of his which I enjoyed. My favorite was of the two young children who died when they were four and their parents "married" them and provided a life for them in the afterlife. I thought that was a beautiful sentiment and was a cool aspect of a different culture. Another aspect of this book I found interesting was the opening. While not very exact, the opening of the prologue reminded me again of an epic. The writer is calling people to listen to this story but instead of relying on the gods to inspire him he is relying on the "facts" as told by Marco Polo. I found this shift interesting since we are no longer invoking gods to inspire us but man is relying on his own personal experience to relate stories. I believe this relates to the scholastic method that had become popular with Saint Thomas Aquinas where you are supposed to question everything until you can come to undisputed truth. I have also been commenting on this shift into a more reason focused way of thinking in some of my other posts.