How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

by Sarah Bakewell

This idea – writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognise their own humanity – has not existed for ever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official and wine-grower who lived in the Périgord area of south-western France from 1533 to 1592.

He can say surprising things: a lot has changed since Montaigne was born, almost half a millennium ago, and neither manners nor beliefs are always still recognisable. Yet to read Montaigne is to experience a series of shocks of familiarity, which make the centuries between him and the twenty-first-century reader collapse to nothing. Readers keep seeing themselves in him, just as visitors to the ‘Oxford Muse’ see themselves, or aspects of themselves, in the story of why an educated Russian works as a cleaner or of what it is like to prefer not to dance.

As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror … And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue.

Montaigne was the first writer to create literature that deliberately worked in this way, and to do it using the plentiful material of his own life rather than either pure philosophy or pure invention. He was the most human of writers, and the most sociable. Had he lived in the era of mass networked communication, he would have been astounded at the scale on which such sociability has become possible: not dozens or hundreds in a gallery, but millions of people seeing themselves bounced back from different angles.

Having created a new genre by writing in this way, Montaigne created essais: his new term for it. Today, the word ‘essay’ falls with a dull thud. It reminds many people of the exercises imposed at school or college to test knowledge of the reading list: reworkings of other writers’ arguments with a boring introduction and a facile conclusion stuck into each end like two forks in a corn-cob. Discourses of that sort existed in Montaigne’s day, but essais did not. Essayer, in French, means simply to try. To essay something is to test or taste it, or give it a whirl. One

The Essays is thus much more than a book. It is a centuries-long conversation between Montaigne and all those who have got to know him: a conversation which changes through history, while starting out afresh almost every time with that cry of ‘How did he know all that about me?’ Mostly it remains a two-person encounter between writer and reader.

As one of his favourite adages had it, there is no escaping our perspective: we can walk only on our own legs, and sit only on our own bum.

Don’t read him as children do, for amusement, nor as the ambitious do, to be instructed. No, read him in order to live.

Amid the festivities, he was thinking about some frightening true tale he had recently heard – perhaps one about a young man who,1 having left a similar feast a few days earlier complaining of a touch of mild fever, had died of that fever almost before his fellow party-goers had got over their hangovers. If death could play such tricks, then only the flimsiest membrane separated Montaigne himself from the void at every moment. He became so afraid of losing his life that he could no longer enjoy it while he had it.

If you ran through the images of your death often enough, said his favourite sages, the Stoics, it could never catch you by surprise. Knowing how well prepared you were, you should be freed to live without fear. But Montaigne5 found the opposite. The more intensely he imagined the accidents that might befall him and his friends, the less calm he felt. Even if he managed, fleetingly, to accept the idea in the abstract, he could never accommodate it in detail. His mind filled with visions of injuries and fevers; or of people weeping at his deathbed, and perhaps the ‘touch of a well-known hand’ laid on his brow to bid him farewell. He imagined the world closing around the hole where he had been: his possessions being gathered up, and his clothes distributed among friends and servants. These thoughts did not free him; they imprisoned him.

From being the gloomiest among his acquaintances, he became the most carefree of middle-aged men, and a master of the art of living well. The cure lay in a journey to the heart of the problem: a dramatic encounter with his own death, followed by an extended mid-life crisis which led him to the writing of his Essays.

In his most mature essays, he wrote admiringly of men such as Petronius and Tigillinus, Romans who died surrounded by jokes, music and everyday conversation, so that death simply flowed into them amid the general good cheer. Instead of turning a party into a death scene, as Montaigne had done in his youthful imagination, they turned their death scenes into parties. He particularly liked the story of Marcellinus, who avoided a painful death from disease by a gentle method of euthanasia. After fasting for several days, Marcellinus laid himself down in a very hot bath. No doubt he was already weakened by his illness; the bath simply steamed the last breaths of life out of him. He passed out slowly, and then he passed away. As he went, he murmured languorously to his friends about the pleasure he was experiencing.

And it now seemed to him that the only people who regularly died as bravely as philosophers should were those who knew no philosophy at all: the uneducated peasants in his local estates and villages. ‘I never saw one of my peasant neighbours12 cogitating over the countenance and assurance with which he would pass this last hour,’ he wrote – not that he would necessarily have known if they did. Nature took care of them. It taught them not to think about death except when they were dying, and very little even then. Philosophers find it hard to leave the world because they try to maintain control. So much for ‘To philosophise is to learn how to die.’ Philosophy looked more like a way of teaching people to unlearn the natural skill that every peasant had by birthright.

If you don’t know how to die,13 don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.

‘Don’t worry about death’ became his most fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live. It made it possible to do just that: live.

he tried to import some of death’s delicacy and buoyancy into life. ‘Bad spots’15 were everywhere, he wrote in a late essay. We do better to ‘slide over this world a bit lightly and on the surface’. Through this discovery of gliding and drifting, he lost much of his fear, and at the same time acquired a new sense that life, as it passed through his body – his particular life, Michel de Montaigne’s – was a very interesting subject for investigation. He would go on to attend to sensations and experiences, not for what they were supposed to be, or for what philosophical lessons they might impart, but for the way they actually felt. He would go with the flow.

From now on, Montaigne would live for himself rather than for duty.

Montaigne’s change of gear during his mid- to late thirties has been compared to the most famous life-changing crises in literature: those of Don Quixote,3 who abandoned his routine to set off in search of chivalric adventure, and of Dante, who lost himself in the woods ‘midway on life’s path’. Montaigne’s steps into his own mid-life forest tangle, and his discovery of the path out of it, leave a series of footprints – the marks of a man faltering, stumbling, then walking on:

Having committed himself to what he hoped would be a contemplative new life, Montaigne went to great trouble to set it up just as he wanted it. After his retirement, he chose one of two towers at the corners of his château4 complex to be his all-purpose retreat and centre of operations; the other tower was reserved for his wife. Together with the main château building and the linking walls, these two corner-pieces enclosed a simple, square courtyard, set amid fields and forests.

‘Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!’

Over the years, Montaigne’s roof beams faded too, but they were later restored to clear legibility, so that, as you walk around the room now, voices whisper from above your head: Solum certum nihil esse certi Et homine nihil miserius aut superbius Only one thing is certain: that nothing is certain And nothing is more wretched or arrogant than man. (Pliny the Elder)

How can you think yourself a great man, when the first accident that comes along can wipe you out completely? (Euripides)

There is no more beautiful life than that of a carefree man; Lack of care is a truly painless evil. (Sophocles)

The beams form a vivid reminder of Montaigne’s decision to move from public life into a meditative existence – a life to be lived, literally, under the sign of philosophy rather than that of politics. Such a shift of realms was also part of the ancients’ advice. The great Stoic Seneca repeatedly urged his fellow Romans to retire in order to ‘find themselves’, as we might put it. In the Renaissance, as in ancient Rome, it was part of the well-managed life. You had your period of civic business, then you withdrew to discover what life was really about and to begin the long process of preparing for death. Montaigne developed reservations about the second part of this, but there is no doubt about his interest in contemplating life. He wrote: ‘let us cut loose9 from all the ties that bind us to others; let us win from ourselves the power to live really alone and to live that way at our ease’.

Seneca, in advising retirement, had also warned of dangers. In a dialogue called ‘On Tranquillity of Mind’,10 he wrote that idleness and isolation could bring to the fore all the consequences of having lived life in the wrong way, consequences that people usually avoided by keeping busy – that is, by continuing to live life in the wrong way. The symptoms could include dissatisfaction, self-loathing, fear, indecisiveness, lethargy and melancholy. Giving up work brings out spiritual ills, espec...

Seneca would have approved. If you become depressed or bored in your retirement, he advised, just look around you and interest yourself in the variety and sublimity of things. Salvation lies in paying full attention14 to nature.

Perhaps he even began with the intention of composing a commonplace book: a collection of thematically arranged quotations and stories, of a kind popular among gentlemen of the day. If so, it did not take him long to move beyond this, possibly under the influence of the one writer he liked more than Seneca: Plutarch. Plutarch had made his name in the first century A.D. with lively potted biographies of historical figures, and also wrote short pieces called Moralia, which were translated into French in the year Montaigne began writing16 his Essays. These gathered together thoughts and anecdotes on questions ranging from ‘Can animals be called intelligent?’ to ‘How does one achieve peace of mind?’ On the latter point, Plutarch’s advice was the same as Seneca’s: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it.

As Montaigne the man went about his daily life on the estate, Montaigne the writer walked behind him, spying and taking notes.

Montaigne wanted to drift away, yet he also wanted to attach himself to reality and extract every grain of experience from it. Writing made it possible to do both. Even as he lost himself in his reveries, he secretly planted his hooks in everything that happened, so that he could draw it back at will. Learning how to die was learning to let go; learning to live was learning to hang on.

As a famous line by the ancient philosopher Heraclitus has it, you cannot step into the same river twice. Even if you return to the same spot on the bank, different water flows in upon you at every moment. Similarly, to see the world exactly as you did half an hour ago is impossible, just as it is impossible to see it from the point of view of a different person standing next to you. The mind flows on and on, in a ceaseless ‘stream of consciousness’20 – a phrase coined by the psychologist William James in 1890, though it was later made more famous by novelists.

Other sixteenth-century writers shared Montaigne’s fascination with the unstable. What was unusual in him was his instinct that the observer is as unreliable as the observed. The two kinds of movement interact like variables in a complex mathematical equation, with the result that one can find no secure point from which to measure anything. To try to understand the world is like grasping a cloud of gas, or a liquid, using hands that are themselves made of gas or water, so that they dissolve as you close them.

This is why Montaigne’s book flows as it does: it follows its author’s stream of consciousness without attempting to pause or dam it. A typical page of the Essays is a sequence of meanders, bends and divergences. You have to let yourself be carried along, hoping not to capsize each time a change of direction throws you off balance.

In the end, the oddity of the human mind is all we can be sure of – an extraordinary conclusion which seems to bear no relation to the topic he was originally aiming at.

If my mind could gain a firm footing,24 I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.

As Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out. The only one who can keep you mindful of this is you: It will cause no commotion28 to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly … What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that. If you fail to grasp life, it will elude you. If you do grasp it, it will elude you anyway. So you must follow it – and ‘you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow’.

The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience – but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvellous such ordinary things are.

As Montaigne got older, his desire to pay astounded attention to life did not decline; it intensified. By the end of the long process of writing the Essays, he had almost perfected the trick. Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, ‘I try to increase it in weight,30 I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it … The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.’ He discovered a sort of strolling meditation technique: When I walk alone31 in the beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me.

Both ‘Don’t worry about death’ and ‘Pay attention’ were answers to a mid-life loss of direction: they emerged from the experience of a man who had lived long enough to make errors and false starts. Yet they also marked a beginning, bringing about the birth of his new essay-writing self.

As the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would warn, ‘One should not try to surpass one’s father in diligence; that makes one sick.’ On the whole Montaigne did not try, and thus he kept himself sane.

His way of adding ‘though I don’t know’, implicitly or explicitly, to almost every thought he ever had sets him very far apart from the old ways. The ideals of his father survived in him after all, but in mutant form: softened, darkened, and with the certainty knocked out of them.

The unusual treatment began soon after his birth, when Micheau was sent to live with a humble family in a nearby village. Having a peasant wet-nurse was normal enough, but Montaigne’s father wanted his son to absorb an understanding of commoners’ ways along with their breast-milk, so that he would grow up comfortable with the people who most needed a seigneur’s help. Instead of bringing a nurse to the baby, therefore, he sent the baby to the nurse, and left him there long enough to be weaned. Even at the christening, Pierre had ‘people of the lowliest class’ hold the infant over the font. From the start, Montaigne had the impression at once of being a peasant among peasants, and of being very special and different. This is the mixture of feelings that would stay with him for life. He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realising his ordinariness made him extraordinary.

More lasting were the effects of Montaigne’s education on his personality. As happens with much early life experience, it benefited him in exactly the areas where it also damaged him. It set him apart from his household and from his whole contemporary world. This gave him independence of mind, but may have inclined him to a certain detachment in relationships. It gave him great expectations, since he grew up in the company of the greatest writers of antiquity rather than the provincial French of his neighbourhood. Yet it also cut off other, more conventional, ambitions, because it led him to question everything that other people strove for. The young Montaigne was unique. He did not need to compete; he barely needed to exert himself. He grew up constrained by some of the most bizarre limits ever imposed on a child, and at the same time had almost unlimited freedom. He was a world unto himself.

He fulminates against the brutal methods of most schools. ‘Away with violence and compulsion!’ If you enter a school in lesson time, he says, ‘you hear nothing but cries, both from tortured boys and from masters drunk with rage’. All this achieves is to put children off learning for life.

Often, books need not be used at all. One learns dancing by dancing; one learns to play the lute by playing the lute. The same is true of thinking, and indeed of living. Every experience can be a learning opportunity: ‘a page’s prank, a servant’s blunder, a remark at table’. The child should learn to question everything: to ‘pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust’. Travelling is useful; so is socialising, which teaches the child to be open to others and to adapt to anyone he finds around him. Eccentricities should be ironed out early, because they make it difficult to get on with others.

One unsuitable text which Montaigne discovered for himself at the age of seven or eight, and which changed his life, was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This

In Ovid,2 people change. They turn into trees, animals, stars, bodies of water, or disembodied voices. They alter sex; they become werewolves.

Once a taste of this sort of thing had started him off, Montaigne galloped through other books similarly full of good stories: Virgil’s Aeneid, then Terence, Plautus and various modern Italian comedies. He

Because he liked to know what people really did, rather than what someone imagined they might do, Montaigne’s preference soon shifted from poets to historians and biographers. It was in real-life stories, he said, that you encountered human nature in all its complexity. You learned the ‘diversity and truth’5 of man, as well as ‘the variety of the ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him’. Among historians, he liked Tacitus best, once remarking that he had just read through his History from beginning to end without interruption. He loved how Tacitus treated public events from the point of view of ‘private behaviour and inclinations’, and was struck by the historian’s fortune in living through a ‘strange and extreme’ period, just as Montaigne himself did. Indeed, he wrote of Tacitus, ‘you would often say that it is us he is describing’.

Turning to biographers, Montaigne liked those who went beyond the external events of a life and tried to reconstruct a person’s inner world from the evidence. No one excelled in this more than his favourite writer of all: the Greek biographer Plutarch, who lived from around AD 46 to around 120 and whose vast Lives presented narratives of notable Greeks and Romans in themed pairs. Plutarch was to Montaigne what Montaigne was to many later readers: a model to follow, and a treasure-chest of ideas, quotations and anecdotes to plunder.

He loved the way Plutarch assembled his work by stuffing in fistfuls of images, conversations, people, animals and objects of all kinds, rather than by coldly arranging abstractions and arguments. His writing is full of things, Montaigne pointed out. If Plutarch wants to tell us that the trick in living well is to make the best of any situation, he does it by telling the story of a man who threw a stone at his dog, missed, hit his stepmother instead, and exclaimed, ‘Not so bad after all!’ Or, if he wants to show us how we tend to forget the good things in life and obsess only about the bad, he writes about flies landing on mirrors and sliding about on the smooth surface, unable to find a footing until they hit a rough area. Plutarch leaves no neat endings, but he sows seeds from which whole worlds of inquiry can be developed. He points where we can go if we like; he does not lead us, and it is up to us whether we obey or not.