Worth Reading at Any Age

We are studying the period of the Renaissance in history, so I recently preread I, Juan de Pareja by Elizabeth Trevino for the children. I couldn't help but think of CS Lewis as he said:

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."

He also said:

"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally--and often far more--worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond."

This is one of those books. It will be good for the children, but it also had several messages that made *me* think. It is first person historical fiction, based on the life of de Pareja, a slave to the famous Spanish artist Diego Velazquez, who was also an artist in his own right. I want to preserve some of the quotes and ideas that stood out to me.

This is a painting by Velazquez of his slave, Juan de Pareja.

On slavery:
"They mean no harm, they are not actively cruel, but they simply do not see. They look at a black boy and they see only a slave who is capable of doing work. They do not see what I see."
"What do you see?"
"Well, I see a person. A boy. A human being with a soul, made in God's image." (pg. 19)

"I am only a slave. . .a servant, " I complained, feeling sorry for myself.
"Who is not?" asked Brother Isidro, briskly. "Do not we all serve? In any case, we should. That is nothing to be ashamed of; it is our duty." (pg. 22)

"Now I had lived long enough and had heard enough from urchins my age and from other slaves, to distrust the person who calls himself merciful, or just, or kindly. Usually these are the most cruel, niggardly and selfish people, and slaves learn to fear the master who prefaces his remarks with tributes to his own virtues." (pg. 25)

This is a self-portrait of Velazquez.

An artist's perspective:
"Art must be true," he said. "It is the one thing in life that must rest on solid truth. Otherwise, it is worthless." (p53)

"(I must) teach you not to beautify. It is a great temptation. Art should not be Beauty. Art should be Truth; and Truth unadorned, unsentimentalized, is Beauty. You must learn this. I would rather paint exactly what I see, even if it is ugly, perfectly, than indifferently paint something superficially lovely. Art is Truth, and to serve Art, I will never deceive." (p 67)

"He lived by what entered his being through his eyes and by what he gave back from his eyes by means of his painting--not, as other people, by what they took into their mouths and gave back as conversation."
"My canvases are my conversation," he said once. (p 94)

"Ah, but I do feel emotion, strong emotion," he told me, looking with fierce intentness at the wound in a deer's throat. "But my emotion is the detached emotion of a spirit or an angel, something not of this earth. Painters are like this, I think; they train themselves to be so. We must represent the essence of what we see, with no extra strokes. Personal human emotion dare not enter in, for then the hand would tremble and one would be tempted to drop soft veils over anything painful or repulsive." (p 108)

On imprisoned souls:
"We are brothers," he (The Dwarf Francisco Lezcano, used to entertain the king) used to say to me in his strange, deep voice like a man's, "you and I, because we are enslaved by reason of the way we were born. You were born strong, a fine normal being, but black. I was born as I am, a man in the body of a little creeping child. Why did God put this burden on us, Juanico?"

"To make us humble, maybe. Our Lord was despised and rejected, you remember. He himself told us so. And He said, 'He who exalts himself shall be brought low, and he who humbles himself shall be lifted up.'" (112)

Painting by Velazquez of The Dwarf Francisco Lezcano

"For some time I resented the meticulous way Master painted these deformed and pathetic beings. He was making obeisance to the truth as he saw it. He had explained that to me often enough. And yet it seemed to me cold-blooded, even cruel. But later, when I looked at those portraits years after, I saw what he had done, and what glossing over their deformities could not have achieved. He had painted, in every case, a soul imprisoned." ( 114)

Painting by Velazquez of 'The Buffoon Calabazas' (the court idiot)

On love:
"As for me, love had come and bloomed in my heart. Lolis was not gentle and sweet like my mother, nor pitifully delicate and lovely like Miri. She was a person with her own character and with great variety in her make up. She was constantly interesting to me, and I looked forward to hearing her soft step, to listening to her wonderful deep laughter, to those occasions when she touched me or even slapped at me as she went about her work." (151)

On true friendship:
"In those days (when Velazquez had lost his beloved wife) His Majesty proved what a true friend he was to Master. Not one day went by that he did not come, and simply sit, quiet and comforting in his big silent presence, in the same room where Master was." (165)

Painting by Velazquez of King Philip IV

"I realized then that I had not yet told him (a former apprentice to Velazquez and friend of de Pareja) that I was free. Yet he had taken me in and offered me his home and his studio.
I bowed my head and thanked him.
"I will go and bring Lolis," I told him, and as I went away toward the inn I thought about Bartolome's generosity and candid comradeship. Some day, I thought, when we have finished work, and sit to take a glass of wine together--some day when our wives whispered and rocked children to sleep in the upper rooms--I would say, "Bartolome, Master Velazquez freed me. I am no longer a slave."
And he would say, "So? Good, my friend."
He would be glad for me. And I would be glad that to him it had never mattered, for his friendship was of the heart." (176)