Nonfiction, History: Luminary

[silverflight8]

Story prompt: Luminary
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Whenever I sat in history class, I never failed to begin imagining what the teacher was saying into a novel. The Middle Ages, for instance: following a young boy of very poor farmer, raised as an impoverished boy, living as an impoverished man, and dying as an impoverished farmer. Maybe along the way, though, he would bump into a famous man—perhaps impress a high lord of some sort, win favour, maybe, and rise out of his class. Then the teacher would announce that most revolutions come from the top down, because without the knowledge that there’s something better out there, why would you care? and I would realize that the saga of Medieval period boys rising to the rank of king or leading a rebellion was hopeless.

Or maybe, in the middle of learning about King Louis XIV’s extravagant lifestyle, the images of a corresponding court in England, in Scotland, Russia, Italy, Prussia would emerge. The cold stone halls with fluttering tapestries, or the scheming politicians, heads bent together, plotting to depose one king or another. A quick glimpse of military with feathers and cavalry, poised before their monarch.

The myths were even better; I imagined the sea that eventually swallowed up Atlantis, saw Odysseus’s ship plunge and rise on the stormy water, and envisioned Arthur and his knights riding across the greensward. Sometimes these were just snippets, an image. Others would begin to expand into stories.

But it was the Enlightenment that was the most interesting. A bunch of men sitting in smoke-filled salons, arguing heatedly over the big philosophical questions of what’s the meaning of life? What is our basic nature? And those arguments sparking the explosions—literally—of Revolutions: what a mob there must have been, marching down to the Bastille! Imagine the fervent patriotism that some of the early American revolutionists must have felt. Or the fear that gripped the royalty in other nations, praying that their own people would not rebel. Voltaire, Rousseau and other philosophers influenced the revolutions, said my teachers, and I saw a flickering candle and a hand penning the manuscript that would touch off the eventual call for liberty, equality and fraternity!

Even though I know that these were romanticized, those images were so vivid, so real. Don’t ever let them tell you that history is dull.

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Note: I think I veered off the exact definition of what luminary is, but I liked the idea of illumination and light that was associated with the word. Hope you liked it.