The People You Honer

[This Baron of Mora]

I was recently reading this article artofmanliness.com/2012/03/11/the-cabinet-of-invisible-counselors/ and came upon this quote:

“Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of a man you are, for it shows me what your ideal of manhood is, and what kind of a man you long to be.” – Thomas Carlyle

Naturally you can interchange woman with man in context.

I found the article rather interesting which follows the line of the quote. Looking in the comments section on who people would include as "men they honer" Jesus was mentioned a lot and others like Napoleon, Teddy Roosevelt, Benjamin Franklin, Greeks (Socrates mostly), other Presidents (Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson), Biblical people, and various relatives. By looking through the website though I find there is some reasoning to some of these. The authors talk about some of them, especially Teddy Roosevelt and that's probably where they got the idea from.

After reading it I tried putting a list together, and my it's hard to pick and choose! Try putting one together yourself (fictional people work too, one person put down Gandalf), and think about it good and hard, and then if you like, tell us about it.
Happy thinking.

[This Baron of Mora]

Here's my list,

1. Theodore Roosevelt (my favorite President)
2. Jack Lewis (C.S. Lewis)
3. "Tollers" (J.R.R. Tolkien)
4. Alfred the Great (the person in my picture to the left)
5. Sven Hedin (the greatest explorer ever)
6. Benjamin Franklin (well we've all heard of him)
7. Churchill
8. One of my Pastors
9. My Grandfather
10. And sure, we can throw Gandalf in their to

Naturally, Jesus is present as well but I thought his "role" in a cabinet of invisible counselors would be different than the others.

Honorable Mentions: David, Moses, Andrew Carnegie, Demosthenes, Athelstan, Lincoln, and several more.

[newburydave]

Interesting premise. It has a ring of truth to it.

From a writing perspective I would suppose that this is also predictive of the kind of people we make into our POVCs.

Perhaps it would be a fruitful study for our story character development to identify our heroes and do an in in depth character analysis on each of them and develop a behavior/response matrix based on our heroes. This could add a lot of depth to our POVCs and really make them come alive.

SGD
dave

[Bainespal]

This sounds like a good idea to me; I'm sure our conception of our ideal selves, based on who we honor and seek to emulate, says a lot about how God made us.

After thinking about it for a while, though, I don't have a list to post. The people I would post would either be men that I have known in real life and that no one else here would know, or else come from the same handful of historical, biblical, and literary figures that everyone else is probably thinking of.

Aug 4, 2012 12:11:42 GMT -5 This Baron of Mora said:

10. And sure, we can throw Gandalf in their to

Since Gandalf wasn't a real person, he is sort of already an idealized concept. I think we can extend Gandalf to the Merlin-Gandalf-Dumbledore archetype.

(P.S. -- It's pretty sad that my browser's spell checker recognizes the spellings of "Merlin" and "Dumbledore" but doesn't know "Gandalf"! )

[newburydave]

Seems to me that real people you've known would be the best kind to profile your characters upon. Everybody may use the famous ones, the real people are likely to be unique and make your stories stand out (a key to getting published / purchased from what I hear).

Besides, truth is stranger than fiction; a real person you know will be a more well rounded character than some archetypal "Character".

Some of the more successful writers that I've read after admit to profiling their POVCs on friends or family. I'm working up a novel project with the main POVC based on a friend from church who is a unique person.

Give it a shot and see what comes out, you might be pleasantly surprised.

SGD
dave