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

by Sarah Bakewell

Montaigne’s merging of favourite authors with his own father says a lot about how he read: he took up books as if they were people, and welcomed them into his family.

Once he had grasped something, he grasped it firmly. Even as a child, he says: ‘What I saw, I saw well.’23 Moreover, he deliberately used his inert manner as a cover under which he could hide any number of ‘bold ideas’ and independent opinions. His apparent modesty made it possible for him to claim something more important than quick wits: sound judgement.

‘Forget much of what you learn’ and ‘Be slow-witted’ became two of Montaigne’s best answers to the question of how to live. They freed him to think wisely rather than glibly; they allowed him to avoid the fanatical notions and foolish deceptions that ensnared other people; and they let him follow his own thoughts wherever they led – which was all he really wanted to do.

Always prepared to speak his mind, the young Montaigne was also prepared to make other people wait for what he had to say.

These were the kinds of scene that would recur frequently in Montaigne’s essays: one person seeks mercy, and the other decides whether or not to grant it. Montaigne was fascinated by the moral complexity involved. What moral complexity? Monluc would have said. Killing was always the right solution: ‘One man hanged is more effective than a hundred killed in battle.’ Indeed, so many executions took place in the area that the supply of gallows equipment ran low: carpenters were commissioned to make more scaffolds, wheels for breaking limbs, and stakes for burning. When the scaffolds were full, Monluc used trees, and boasted that his travels through Guyenne could be traced in bodies swinging by the roadside. By the time he had finished, he said, nothing stirred in the whole region. All who survived kept their silence.

Whenever a few individuals do break free, adds La Boétie, it is often because their eyes have been opened by the study of history.11 Learning of similar past tyrannies, they recognise the pattern in their own society. Instead of accepting what they are born into, they acquire the art of slipping out of it and seeing everything from a different angle – a trick Montaigne, in the Essays, would make his characteristic mode of thinking and writing. Alas, there are usually too few of these free spirits to do any good. They do not work together, but live ‘alone in their imaginings’.

He never ruled out the possibility of finding someone to reprise La Boétie’s role. Seneca29 had advised this: a wise man should be so good at making new friends that he can replace an old one without skipping a beat.

Montaigne was willing to try any trick of this kind, if it promised consolation. As he wrote in one of his dedications to La Boétie’s posthumous books: ‘he is still lodged in me33 so entire and so alive that I cannot believe that he is so irrevocably buried or so totally removed from our communication.’ Letting La Boétie live on within himself was a way of fulfilling his friend’s dying wish, and easing his own loneliness. Meanwhile, he used techniques of distraction and diversion to get himself through the immediate shock of loss. Best of all, he discovered the therapeutic benefits of writing. By passing on La Boétie’s death narrative and farewell to the world in written form, he helped himself to relive the scene, and thus outlive it. He never fully got over La Boétie, but he learned to exist in the world without him, and, in so doing, to change his own life. Writing about La Boétie eventually led him to write the Essays: the best philosophical trick of all.

The three most famous such systems of thought were Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism: the philosophies collectively known as Hellenistic1 because they had their origins in the era when Greek thought and culture spread to Rome and other Mediterranean regions, from the third century BC onwards. They differed in details, but were so close in essentials as to be hard to distinguish much of the time. Like everyone else, Montaigne mixed and matched them according to his needs.

Stoics and Epicureans shared a great deal of their theory, too. They thought that the ability to enjoy life is thwarted by two big weaknesses: lack of control over emotions, and a tendency to pay too little attention to the present. If one could only get these two things right – controlling and paying attention – most other problems would take care of themselves. The catch is that both are almost impossible to do. So difficult are they that one cannot approach them head-on. It is necessary to sidle in from lateral angles, and trick oneself into achieving them.

The Epicurean writer Lucretius suggested picturing yourself at the point of death, and considering two possibilities. Either you have lived well, in which case you can go your way satisfied, like a well-fed guest leaving a party. Or you have not, but then it makes no difference that you are losing your life, since you obviously did not know what to do with it anyway. This may offer scant comfort on your deathbed, but if you think about it in the midst of life it helps you to change your perspective.

The key is to cultivate mindfulness: prosoche, another key Greek term. Mindful attention is the trick that underlies many of the other tricks. It is a call to attend to the inner world – and thus also to the outer world, for uncontrolled emotion blurs reality as tears blur a view. Anyone who clears their vision and lives in full awareness of the world as it is,5 Seneca says, can never be bored with life.

A violent attack, a quarrel, the loss of a friend: all these are demands barked at you by life, as by a schoolteacher trying to catch you not paying attention in class. Even a moment of boredom is such a question. Whatever happens, however unforeseen it is, you should be able to respond in a precisely suitable way. This is why, for Montaigne, learning to live ‘appropriately’6 (à propos) is the ‘great and glorious masterpiece’ of human life.

Another practice of the Stoics was to visualise time circling around on itself, over aeons. Thus Socrates would be born again and would teach in Athens just as he did the first time; every butterfly would flap its wings in the same way; every cloud would pass overhead at the same speed. You yourself would live again, and have all the same thoughts and emotions as before, again and again without end. This apparently terrifying idea9 brought comfort, because – like the other ideas – it showed one’s own fleeting troubles at a reduced size. At the same time, because everything you had ever done would come back to haunt you, everything mattered. Nothing was flushed away; nothing could be forgotten. Meditating on this forced you to pay more attention to how you lived your everyday life. It posed a challenge, but also led to a kind of acceptance: to what the Stoics called amor fati, or love of fate.

As the Stoic Epictetus wrote: Do not seek10 to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen, and your life will be serene.

Later in his life, Montaigne used the trick of diversion against his own fear of getting old and dying. The years were dragging him towards death; he could not help that, but he need not look at it head-on. Instead, he faced the other way, and calmed himself by looking back with pleasure over his youth and childhood. Thus, he said, he managed to ‘gently sidestep18 and avert my gaze from this stormy and cloudy sky that I have in front of me’.

From his own experience of nearly dying, Montaigne would learn that the best antidote to fear was to rely on nature: ‘Don’t bother your head20 about it.’ From losing La Boétie, he had already discovered that this was the best way of dealing with grief. Nature has its own rhythms. Distraction works well precisely because it accords with how humans are made: ‘Our thoughts are always elsewhere.’ It is only natural for us to lose focus, to slip away from both pains and pleasures, ‘barely brushing the crust’ of them. All we need do is let ourselves be as we are.

All Pyrrho renounced, according to Montaigne, was the pretension most people fall prey to: that of ‘regimenting, arranging, and fixing truth’. This was what really interested Montaigne in the Sceptical tradition: not so much the Sceptics’ extreme approach to warding off pains and sorrows (for that, he preferred the Stoics and Epicureans, who seemed more closely attuned to real life), but their desire to take everything provisionally and questioningly. This was just what he always tried to do himself. To keep this goal in the forefront of his mind, he had a series of medals9 struck in 1576, featuring Sextus’s magic word epokhe (here appearing as epekho), together with his own arms and an emblem of weighing scales. The scales are another Pyrrhonian symbol, designed to remind himself both to maintain balance, and to weigh things up rather than merely accepting them.

All Montaigne’s skills at jumping between perspectives come to the fore when he writes about animals. We find it hard to understand them, he says, but they must find it just as hard to understand us. ‘This defect that hinders communication between them and us, why is it not just as much ours as theirs?’

Montaigne cannot look at his cat without seeing her looking back at him, and imagining himself as he looks to her. This is the kind of interaction between flawed, mutually aware individuals of different species that can never happen for Descartes who was disturbed by it, as were others in his century.

Montaigne is ‘so advantageously positioned in this universal doubt that he is equally strengthened both in success and defeat’. You can feel the frustration: how can anyone fight such an opponent? Yet one must. It is a moral duty, for otherwise doubt will carry everything away like a great flood: the world as we know it, human dignity, our sanity, and our sense of God. As T. S. Eliot also remarked: Of all authors40 Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences, or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument.

Pascal wrote: ‘Human sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things: sign of a strange disorder.’ Montaigne would have put it exactly the other way round.

We often irritate others when we think we could not possibly do so.

Montaigne apparently managed the trick of living as Nietzsche longed to do: without petty resentments or regrets, embracing everything that happened without the desire to change it. The essayist’s casual remark, ‘If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived’, embodied everything Nietzsche spent his life trying to attain. Not only did Montaigne achieve it, but he even wrote about it in a throwaway tone, as if it were nothing special.

‘My thoughts fall asleep12 if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it.’

We should have wife, children, goods,23 and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh as if without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.

Pierre had undertaken such projects for the pleasure and challenge of the job – but that was Pierre. He was the sort of man who would today keep himself busy with DIY work, and probably leave half of it unfinished. If his type seems familiar, so too does the Montaigne type, whose two mottoes would surely be ‘Anything for a quiet life’ and ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

‘Having had neither governor nor master35 forced on me to this day, I have gone just so far as I pleased, and at my own pace. This has made me soft and useless for serving others, and no good to anyone but myself.’ This passage reveals some of his true motivation: it was his life he wanted to live. Being impractical made him free. ‘Extremely idle, extremely independent, both by nature and by art,’ was the way he summed up his character. He was ruled by ‘freedom and laziness’.

Some of his answers to the question of how to live are indeed chilly: mind your own business, preserve your sense of self, stay out of trouble and keep your room behind the shop. But there is another which is almost the exact opposite. It is …

Montaigne loved open debate. ‘No propositions astonish me,3 no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers with my own.’ He liked being contradicted, as it opened up more interesting conversations and helped him to think – something he preferred to do through interaction rather than staring into the fire like Descartes. His friend Florimond de Raemond described his conversation as ‘the sweetest and most enriched with graces’. Yet when Montaigne was not feeling sweet, or when he was carried away by the topic of a discussion, he could be vociferous. His passion led him to say things that were indiscreet, and he encouraged others to do the same. Freedom of expression was the law of his house.

Even when Montaigne went off to his tower to write, he rarely worked alone or in silence. People talked and worked around him; outside his window horses would have been led back and forth from the stables, while hens clucked and dogs barked. In the wine-making season, the air would be filled with the sound of clanking presses. Even at the height of the wars, Montaigne kept his property more open to the world than others did – a rare decision in such dangerous times.

Christianity seems to offer a simple answer: the victor should always show mercy, and the victim should always turn the other cheek. But the real world cannot be relied upon to work that way – and neither could most Christians in this era of violent religious war. Montaigne paid little attention to theology: he was immersed in his classical reading and, as usual, seemed to forget the Christian angle. For him, in any case, the true difficulties were psychological rather than moral. Or if they were moral, it was in the broader sense of that term used in classical philosophy, where it did not mean following precepts but knowing how to make just and intelligent decisions in real life.

Montaigne’s view, on balance, was that both victim and victor should take the path that entailed placing maximum trust in the other – that is, like good Christians, the defeated party should seek mercy and the victor should grant it. But both must do this boldly, with an ‘open countenance’, free of cringing and submissiveness.

Writing about consciousness, the psychologist William James29 had a similar instinct. We understand nothing of a dog’s experience: of ‘the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts’. They understand nothing of ours, when for example they watch us stare interminably at the pages of a book. Yet both states of consciousness share a certain quality: the ‘zest’ or ‘tingle’ which comes when one is completely absorbed in what one is doing. This tingle should enable us to recognise each other’s similarity even when the objects of our interest are different. Recognition, in turn, should lead to kindness. Forgetting this similarity is the worst political error, as well as the worst personal and moral one.

Montaigne, by contrast, saw himself as a thoroughly ordinary man in every respect, except for his unusual habit of writing things down. He ‘bears the entire form of the human condition’,24 as everyone does, and is therefore happy to cast himself as a mirror for others – the same role he bestows on the Tupinambá. That is the whole point of the Essays. If no one could recognise themselves in him, why would anyone read him?

If your heart beats like mine with an indescribable emotion; if the memory of a great man inspires in you this deep veneration which one cannot refuse to the benefactors of humanity – enter.

The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.

‘The archer who overshoots the target misses as much as the one who does not reach it.’

Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober, and consequently ugly-looking.

The qualities he valued were curiosity, sociability, kindness, fellow-feeling, adaptability, intelligent reflection, the ability to see things from another’s point of view, and ‘goodwill’ – none of which is compatible with the fiery furnace of inspiration.

Montaigne even went so far as to claim that true greatness of the soul is to be found ‘in mediocrity’ – a shocking remark and even, paradoxically, an extreme one.

Montaigne distrusts godlike ambitions: for him, people who try to rise above the human manage only to sink to the subhuman.

Mediocrity, for Montaigne, does not mean the dullness that comes from not bothering to think things through, or from lacking the imagination to see beyond one’s own viewpoint. It means accepting that one is like everyone else, and that one carries the entire form of the human condition.

There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.

As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance.

Astrologers now warn of ‘great and imminent alterations and mutations’, writes Montaigne, but they forget the simple fact that, however bad things are, most of life goes on undisturbed. ‘I do not despair about it,’ he added lightly.

Those who have adopted Montaigne in this role usually cast him as a hero of an unusual sort: the kind that resists all claim to heroism.

More often, he is admired for his stubborn insistence on maintaining normality in extraordinary circumstances, and his refusal to compromise his independence.

Just as you could seek mercy from an enemy forthrightly, without compromising yourself, or defend your property by electing to leave it undefended, so you could get through an inhumane war by remaining human.

In a time such as that of the Second World War, or in civil-war France, Zweig writes, ordinary people’s lives are sacrificed to the obsessions of fanatics, so the question for any person of integrity22 becomes not so much ‘How do I survive?’ as ‘How do I remain fully human?’ The question comes in many variants: How do I preserve my true self? How do I ensure that I go no further in my speech or actions than I think is right? How do I avoid losing my soul? Above all: How do I remain free? Montaigne was no freedom fighter in the usual sense, Zweig admits.