If you ask a man—if you could meet a historical figure, who would you meet?—you’re not asking about history. You’re asking: Who do you wish could teach you something you haven’t learned? Who do you imagine could answer the questions that haunt you?
Because the choice reveals less about the historical figure and more about what the chooser believes he needs.
The Obvious Heroes
Some men answer immediately with the titans:
“Einstein. Leonardo. Shakespeare. Marcus Aurelius.”
These are safe answers—intellectually impressive, universally respected. You can’t be judged for wanting to meet Einstein. Who wouldn’t want to meet the embodiment of genius?
But dig deeper: Why Einstein? What would you actually ask him?
Often the answer is vague: “I’d want to understand how he thought. What it was like to see the universe that way.”
This isn’t really about Einstein. It’s about the fantasy of genius—the belief that some people have access to a different quality of mind, a way of seeing that could be transferred through proximity, like standing near a fire to get warm.
The man who wants to meet Einstein is often someone who feels intellectually limited. He’s smart, maybe very smart, but not that smart. He wonders: what separates good thinking from revolutionary thinking? And he imagines that meeting the person who changed physics could somehow show him the path to his own transformation.
But here’s the truth: meeting Einstein wouldn’t make you Einstein. You’d meet a man. Brilliant, yes, but also particular, idiosyncratic, probably difficult. The genius you imagine meeting exists more in mythology than in the actual historical person who played violin badly and had complicated relationships and struggled with things that had nothing to do with relativity.
The hero you want to meet is often a projection of the person you wish you could become.
The Personal Ancestors
Other men name people connected to their own history:
“My great-great-grandfather. He came from Italy with nothing. Built a life.”
“My grandfather. He died before I was born. I want to know what he was really like.”
“The first person with my last name. I want to know where we come from.”
This isn’t about meeting greatness. This is about meeting origin. About understanding the chain of choices and chances that led to your own existence.
The man who wants to meet his immigrant great-grandfather is asking: What did it take? What did you sacrifice? What would you think of what became of your gamble—of me, the descendant you never imagined?
There’s often guilt in this choice. The sense that the ancestor worked so hard, suffered so much, to create opportunities that the descendant is… what? Wasting? Squandering? Not fully honoring?
Or there’s longing for instruction: You navigated impossible things. You survived what I couldn’t imagine surviving. What did you know that I’ve forgotten? What strength did you have that got diluted through the generations?
Meeting the ancestor is really asking: Who was I supposed to become? And am I doing justice to everyone who died to make my life possible?
The Martyrs and Saints
“Jesus. Buddha. Muhammad. Joan of Arc.”
The man who chooses a religious or spiritual figure is usually asking: How do you live with absolute certainty? How do you believe so completely that you’re willing to die for it?
Because modern life is characterized by uncertainty. We don’t know what’s true. We don’t know what matters. We don’t know if anything we’re doing is meaningful beyond our own small satisfaction.
The spiritual figures lived—or are believed to have lived—with unshakeable conviction. They knew their purpose. They had no doubt. They were willing to endure torture, death, martyrdom because they were absolutely certain.
The man who wants to meet them is drowning in relativism, in the exhausting freedom of choosing your own meaning, in the suspicion that maybe nothing matters and we’re all just making it up as we go.
He wants to ask: How do you know? Not believe, not hope—know. What does that feel like? And can you teach me?
But what he’d likely discover: even the saints had doubt. Even Jesus in Gethsemane: Let this cup pass from me. Even Buddha struggled for years before enlightenment. The certainty we imagine in them might be retrospective construction—history simplifying complexity into heroic narrative.
The saint you want to meet might turn out to be as confused as you are, just more committed to moving forward despite the confusion.
The Artists and Creators
“Van Gogh. Beethoven. Hemingway. Frida Kahlo.”
The man who chooses an artist is usually asking: How do you make something beautiful out of suffering? How do you transform pain into meaning?
Because these figures are famous for their work, yes, but also for their torment. Van Gogh’s madness. Beethoven’s deafness. Hemingway’s depression. Kahlo’s chronic pain.
They suffered extraordinarily and created anyway. More than that: they created because of it, through it, with it as material.
The man who wants to meet them is often someone who’s trying to make sense of his own pain. He’s been hurt, is hurting, and can’t figure out what it’s for. What’s the point of this suffering if it doesn’t produce something? If it just destroys?
He wants to ask: Did creating save you? Or did it just give you something to do while drowning? And which is better—to make beautiful things from your pain, or to heal the pain so you don’t need to make anything from it?
The dangerous fantasy here: that suffering is necessary for greatness. That if you’re not tortured, you can’t be profound. Many men romanticize this, which keeps them from actually addressing their pain.
The truth is messier: some artists created despite their suffering, not because of it. And many wished desperately to be well, to be ordinary, to not have to alchemize agony into art just to survive it.
The Villains
Some men, usually speaking quietly, admit: “Hitler. Stalin. Genghis Khan.”
Not because they admire them, but because they’re horrified and fascinated by them.
The question they want answered: How does someone become capable of that level of destruction? What does evil look like up close? Was it ideology, psychopathy, circumstance—or something else?
There’s an uncomfortable truth here: humans are deeply curious about evil. Not because we want to commit it, but because we need to understand how ordinary people (and they were ordinary, before they weren’t) become capable of the monstrous.
The man who wants to meet Hitler is asking: Am I capable of that? Given the right conditions, the right pressures, the right story—could I become that? And how do I make sure I don’t?
He’s also asking: What’s the difference between conviction and fanaticism? Between leadership and tyranny? Between believing you’re right and being willing to murder millions who disagree?
Meeting the villain isn’t admiration. It’s moral inoculation—studying the disease to prevent infection.
Though sometimes, rarely, there’s a darker reason: the man who’s felt powerless his whole life is drawn to figures of absolute power. He doesn’t want to be them, but he wants to understand what power without limit feels like. This is troubling, but also human.
The Revolutionaries
“Mandela. Gandhi. Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X.”
The man who chooses a revolutionary is asking: How do you stay committed to justice when the cost is enormous? How do you endure imprisonment, violence, hatred, and not become what you’re fighting against?
These men (and they’re almost always men, which says something) transformed the world through moral force. They didn’t just protest—they embodied the change they demanded. They suffered for it. They were jailed, beaten, killed. And they didn’t break.
The man who wants to meet them is usually someone who sees injustice but feels paralyzed by it. He knows things are wrong—in his workplace, his community, his country, the world. But he doesn’t act. He’s afraid, or tired, or doesn’t know where to start, or has convinced himself that individual action doesn’t matter.
He wants to ask: Where did you find the courage? How did you keep going when it seemed hopeless? And were you afraid? Because I’m afraid, and I don’t know if that makes me a coward or just realistic.
The answer he’d probably get: Yes, I was afraid. I acted anyway. Not because I was special, but because staying silent was impossible. You don’t need to be fearless. You need to care more about the cause than about your own safety.
But that’s a hard answer to live with. Because it means you can’t use fear as an excuse anymore.
The Ordinary People
A few men give unexpected answers:
“My father, when he was my age. Before I was born.”
“The person I was at seventeen.”
“The man I’ll be at seventy, if I make it.”
These are the most interesting answers because they’re not about meeting greatness. They’re about meeting possibility.
The man who wants to meet his young father is asking: Were you like me? Did you have the same fears, the same doubts? Before life wore you down, what were you like? And can I forgive you if I understand you then?
The man who wants to meet his teenage self is either:
Seeking reconciliation. I’m sorry I didn’t become who you wanted to be. Or: Thank you for surviving long enough to become me. Or: I wish I could tell you it gets better/harder/different.
Or:
Seeking recovery. You knew something I’ve forgotten. You had dreams I abandoned. You had fire I’ve lost. I want to remember what mattered before I learned what was “realistic.”
The man who wants to meet his future self is asking the ultimate question: Does it work out? The choices I’m making now—do they lead somewhere I want to go? And if not, can you tell me what to change?
But of course, meeting your future self would change your future self. The paradox is the point: you can’t know if you’re on the right path until you’ve already walked it, and by then it’s too late to choose differently.
What Men Actually Want
Strip away the specific names, and what men are really asking when they choose a historical figure is:
Teach me something I can’t learn from books.
Books give you information. Meeting the person—they imagine—would give you transmission. Something ineffable that can only be passed person to person. The way a master teaches an apprentice not through words but through presence.
Validate that my struggles are real.
The figures they choose often struggled with the same things they struggle with: doubt, fear, failure, isolation, the sense of not being enough. Meeting them would prove: even the greatest were human. Even they were uncertain. My struggles aren’t signs of my inadequacy—they’re just the human condition.
Show me that transformation is possible.
Many choose figures who changed dramatically—from ordinary to extraordinary, from flawed to heroic, from lost to purposeful. The question underneath: Can I change too? Or am I stuck as this version of myself forever?
Answer the question I can’t answer myself.
What’s worth living for? How do you find meaning? What happens after death? How do you face evil? How do you create beauty? How do you survive suffering? How do you become brave?
Every historical figure choice is really a question the asker hasn’t solved.
The Honest Answer
The wisest response might be:
“I used to think I’d want to meet [insert impressive figure]. But honestly? I think I’d rather meet someone who lived a good, quiet life. Someone who wasn’t famous, wasn’t in the history books, but who loved well, worked honestly, stayed kind despite everything. Because that’s actually harder than changing history. And that’s what I’m trying to do.”
This is the man who’s stopped looking for external validation of his worth. He’s not trying to download genius or absorb greatness by proximity.
He’s realized: the person you need to meet is yourself. The self you’re capable of becoming if you stop performing for history and start living for the people in front of you.
The historical figures can’t save you. They can’t tell you who to be. They were just people who made choices, who struggled, who sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed.
You’re a person making choices too. And someday, you’ll be historical—meaning: dead, part of the past, potentially misunderstood by whoever comes after.
The question isn’t who you’d meet. It’s: What are you doing now that would make you worth meeting?
If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be? And what question are you really trying to answer through them?
Bhyllabus l'énigme 
Tinggalkan komentar