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

by Sarah Bakewell

Zweig knew that Montaigne disliked preaching, yet he managed to extract a series of general rules23 from the Essays. He did not list them as such, but paraphrased them in such a way as to resolve them into eight separate commandments – which could also be called the eight freedoms: Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate: be master of your own life. Be free from death: life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will.

Among its admirers was Henri III himself. When Montaigne travelled through Paris later in 1580, he presented the king with a copy, as was conventional. Henri told him that he liked the book, to which Montaigne is said to have replied, ‘Sir, then Your Majesty must like me’3 – because, as he always maintained, he and his book were the same.

I turn my gaze inward,6 I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself.

Montaigne’s Essays initially presented itself as a fairly conventional work: a bunch of blossoms plucked from the garden of the great classical authors, together with fresh considerations on diplomacy and battlefield ethics. Yet, once its pages were opened, they metamorphosed like one of Ovid’s creatures into a freak held together by just one thing: the figure of Montaigne.

His secretary, accompanying him and (for a while) keeping his journal for him, remarked that people in the party complained about Montaigne’s habit of straying from the path whenever he heard of extra things he wanted to see. But Montaigne would say it was impossible to stray from the path: there was no path.

His adaptability extended to language. In Italy, he spoke in Italian11 and even kept his journal in that language, taking over from the secretary. He imitated the chameleon, or octopus, and tried to pass incognito wherever possible – or what he thought was incognito.

As he crossed into French territory, he switched back from Italian to French in the journal, and when at last he reached his estate he recorded his arrival3 together with a note that his travels had lasted ‘seventeen months and eight days’ – a rare case of his getting a precise figure correct.

He was known as a man who would listen thoughtfully to all sides: whose Pyrrhonian principle was to lend his ears to everyone and his mind to no one, while maintaining his own integrity through it all.

Montaigne was anxious to forestall any expectation that he might be a copy of his own father, ruining his health with work. He remembered seeing Pierre6 worn out by business trips, ‘his soul cruelly agitated by this public turmoil, forgetting the sweet air of his home’.

As to the political difficulties of being caught between sides, Montaigne typically belittled these. It is not really difficult to get on when caught between two hostile parties, he wrote; all you have to do is to behave with a temperate affection towards both, so that neither thinks he owns you. Don’t expect too much of them, and don’t offer too much either.

The English were not born philosophers; they did not like to speculate about being, truth and the cosmos. When they picked up a book they wanted anecdotes, odd characters, witty sallies, and a touch of fantasy. As Virginia Woolf said à propos Sir Thomas Browne, one of many English authors who wrote in a Montaignean vein, ‘The English mind2 is naturally prone to take its ease and pleasure in the loosest whimsies and humours.’

Shakespeare and Florio did know one another, and Shakespeare was among the first readers of the Essays translation. He may even have read parts in manuscript before it went to press: signs of Montaigne seem faintly discernible in Hamlet, which predates Florio’s edition.

writing and life should be allowed just to flow on, even if that means branching further and further into digressions without ever coming to any resolution. Sterne

This makes them both accidental philosophers: naturalists on a field trip into the human soul, without maps or plans, and having no idea where they will end up, or what they will do when they get there.

SOME WRITERS JUST write their books. Others knead them like clay, or construct them by accumulation.

Although he returned to his work constantly, he hardly ever seemed to get the urge to cross things out – only to keep adding more. The spirit of repentance was alien to him in writing, just as it was in life, where he remained firmly wedded to amor fati: the cheerful acceptance of whatever happens.

Montaigne knew that some of the things he had done in the past no longer made sense to him, but he was content to presume that he must have been a different person2 at the time, and leave it at that. His past selves were as diverse as a group of people at a party. Just as he would not think of passing judgement on a roomful of acquaintances, all of whom had their own reasons and points of view to explain what they had done, so he would not think of judging previous versions of Montaigne.

Out of an author who had made himself very popular while barely seeming to exert himself, she made Montaigne into a misunderstood genius.

There would also be consequences for Montaigne readers in languages other than French. A new English translation would be urgently needed, since the two otherwise excellent ones that dominate the market now, by Donald Frame and M. A. Screech, are firmly of the Bordeaux Copy era.

he also knew that reading always involved some process of selection. He did it himself whenever he picked up a book, and he did it even more decidedly if he then flung it aside in boredom. Montaigne read only what interested him; his readers and editors do the same to him.

The more a critic works on a text, he said, the less anyone understands it.

Over the centuries, this interpretation and reinterpretation creates a long chain connecting a writer to all future readers – who frequently read each other as well as the original. Virginia Woolf had a beautiful vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how ‘minds are threaded together42 – how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides … It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind.’ This capacity for living on through readers’ inner worlds over long periods of history is what makes a book like the Essays a true classic. As it is reborn differently in each mind, it also brings those minds together.

There can be no really ambitious writing without an acceptance that other people will do what they like with your work, and change it almost beyond recognition. Montaigne accepted this principle in art, as he did in life. He even enjoyed it. People form strange ideas of you; they adapt you to their own purposes. By going with the flow and relinquishing control of the process, you gain all the benefits of the old Hellenistic trick of amor fati: the cheerful acceptance of whatever happens.

What he left behind was all the better for being imperfect, ambiguous, inadequate, and vulnerable to distortion. ‘Oh Lord,’ one might imagine Montaigne exclaiming, ‘by all means let me be misunderstood.’

Modern readers who approach Montaigne asking what he can do for them are asking the same question he himself asked of Seneca, Sextus and Lucretius – and the same question they asked of their predecessors. This is what Virginia Woolf’s chain of minds really means: not a scholarly tradition, but a series of self-interested individuals puzzling over their own lives, yet doing it co-operatively. All share a quality that can simply be thought of as ‘humanity’: the experience of being a thinking, feeling being who must get on with an ordinary human life – though Montaigne willingly extended the union of minds to embrace other species too.

I set forth a humble and inglorious life1; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Indeed, that is just what a common and private life is: a life of the richest stuff imaginable.

What he had first realised after his fall into unconsciousness was now amply confirmed: nature does everything for you, and there is no need to trouble your head about anything. It leads us by the hand, he wrote, as if ‘down a gentle and virtually imperceptible slope,3 bit by bit’. We hardly need to look where we are going. By making him ill, nature gave him what he had sought for so long: ataraxia, and thus eudaimonia. The greatest moments of well-being he had known in life came immediately after an attack4, when the stone passed through. There was physical relief, but also a liberating spiritual lightness.

He drew a similar lesson from the fact of ageing in general. It was not that age automatically conferred wisdom. On the contrary, he thought the old were more given to vanities and imperfections than the young. They were inclined to ‘a silly and decrepit pride,6 a tedious prattle, prickly and unsociable humours, superstition, and a ridiculous concern for riches’. But

Even philosophy needs to be ‘thickened and obscured’8 before it can be applied to real life. ‘There is no need to light up affairs so deeply and so subtly.’ Nothing is to be gained from living like Tasso, blinding oneself with one’s own brilliance. It is better to be moderate, modest, and a little vague. Nature will take care of the rest.

Life should be an aim unto itself,7 a purpose unto itself.

There is no one in particular I can thank for this turn of events; only Fortune, and the Montaignean truth that the best things in life happen when you don’t get what you think you want.