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January 22 - February 26, 2020
there is no escaping our perspective: we can walk only on our own legs, and sit only on our own bum.11
Cicero summed up their principle neatly: ‘To philosophise is to learn how to die’.2
If you ran through the images of your death often enough, said his favourite sages, the Stoics, it could never catch you by surprise.
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.
But life is more difficult than death; instead of passive surrender, it takes attention and management. It can also be more painful.
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.
‘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!’
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.
How can you think yourself a great man, when the first accident that comes along can wipe you out completely?
There is no more beautiful life than that of a carefree man; Lack of care is a truly painless evil.
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.
His ‘reverie’ in turn gave Montaigne another mad idea: the thought of writing. He called this a reverie too, but it was one that held out the promise of a solution. Finding his mind so filled with ‘chimeras and fantastic monsters,13 one after another, without order or purpose’, he decided to write them down, not directly to overcome them, but to inspect their strangeness at his leisure. So he picked up his pen; the first of the Essays was born.
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.
Writing had got Montaigne through his ‘mad reveries’ crisis; it now taught him to look at the world more closely, and increasingly gave him the habit of describing inward sensations and social encounters with precision.
‘each man is a good education to himself,
It is a thorny undertaking,18 and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilise the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.
Learning how to die was learning to let go; learning to live was learning to hang on.
All such theories22 are unreliable. In fact, he eventually reveals, he has tried the experiment for himself, and has learned a quite different point: that the question means little, for your imagination can make you believe you are experiencing enhanced pleasure whether you ‘really’ are or not. 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.
Observe, observe perpetually,’
was his rule, she said – and what he observed was, above all, this river of life running through his existence.
Life is what happens while you’re making other plans, they said; so philosophy must guide your attention repeatedly back to the place where it belongs – here.
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:
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.
More recently, the critic Colin Burrow has remarked that astonishment, together with Montaigne’s other key quality, fluidity, are what philosophy should be, but rarely has been, in the Western tradition.
‘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.’
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.
When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep.
If others examined themselves attentively,9 as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off – though I don’t know.
That final coda – ‘though I don’t know’ – is pure Montaigne. One must imagine it appended, in spirit, to almost everything he ever wrote. His whole philosophy is captured in this paragraph. Yes, he says, we are foolish, but we cannot be any other way so we may as well relax and live with it.
Inadequate as he felt himself to be in the practical skills of life, he knew the advantage he had when it came to literature and learning. Pierre’s knowledge of books was as limited as his love of them was boundless.
All right, so Pierre could bounce over the table on one manly thumb, Montaigne seems to say, but in matters of the intellect he was an embarrassment. He worshipped books without understanding them. His son would always try to do the opposite.
Montaigne had some of this anti-intellectual streak in him. He grew up to feel that the only hope for humanity lay in the simplicity and ignorance of the peasantry. They were the true philosophers of the modern world, the heirs to classical sages such as Seneca and Socrates. Only they knew how to live, precisely because they knew nothing much about anything else. To this extent, he returned to the cult of ignorance: a slap in the face for Pierre.
The only well-documented child in the family is Michel de Montaigne – and he was not merely educated. He was made the object of an almost unprecedented pedagogic experiment.
But, in general, the hedonistic approach to education did make a difference to him. Having been guided early in life by his own curiosity alone, he grew up to be an independent-minded adult, following his own path in everything rather than deferring to duty and discipline – an outcome perhaps more far-reaching than his father had bargained for.
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
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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 is so universal6 and so full that on all occasions, and however eccentric the subject you have taken up, he makes his way into your work.’
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
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Montaigne also loved the strong sense of Plutarch’s own personality that comes across in his work: ‘I think I know him even into his soul.’
Effort was just what he himself claimed never to make, either in reading or writing. ‘I leaf through now one book,9 now another,’ he wrote, ‘without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments.’
His rule in reading remained the one he had learned from Ovid: pursue pleasure. ‘If I encounter difficulties in reading,’ he wrote, ‘I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there. I do nothing without gaiety.’
In truth he did work hard sometimes, but only when he thought the labour was worth while.
Whenever Montaigne did exert himself to flick through a book, according to him, he promptly forgot almost everything he had read. ‘Memory is a wonderfully useful tool,12 and without it judgement does its work with difficulty,’ he wrote, before adding, ‘it is entirely lacking in me’.
There is no man who has less business talking about memory. For I recognise almost no trace of it in me, and I do not think there is another one in the world so monstrously deficient.
People with good memories have cluttered minds, but his brain was so blissfully empty that nothing could get in the way of common sense. Finally, he easily forgot any slight inflicted on him by others, and therefore bore few resentments. In short, he presented himself as floating through the world on a blanket of benevolent vacancy.
Where Montaigne’s memory did seem to work well, if he wanted it to, was in reconstructing personal experiences such as the riding accident. Instead of resolving them into neat, superficial anecdotes, he could recover feelings from the inside – not perfectly, because the Heraclitan stream kept carrying him away, but very closely.
‘What I do easily and naturally,’21 he wrote, ‘I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict command.’ Allowing his memory to follow its own path formed part of his general policy of letting nature govern his actions. In his childhood, the result was that he often appeared to be lazy and good for nothing, and in many ways he probably was.
By his own estimation, he was not only idle but slow-witted. His intelligence could not penetrate the slightest cloud: ‘There is no subtlety so empty22 that it will not stump me. Of games in which the mind has a part – chess, cards, draughts, and others – I understand nothing but the barest rudiments.’
But, again, there were benefits. Once he had grasped something, he grasped it firmly. Even as a child, he says: ‘What I saw, I saw well.’
Montaigne would have understood all this very well. For him, slowness opened the way to wisdom, and to a spirit of moderation which offset the excess and zealotry dominating the France of his time.
