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

by Sarah Bakewell

‘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!’

As Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out.

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.

Learning should be a pleasure, and children should grow up to imagine wisdom with a smiling face, not a fierce and terrifying one.

The child should learn to question everything: to ‘pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust’.

‘There is no one who,42 if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a pattern all his own, a ruling pattern, which struggles against education.’

The nymph Samacis plunges herself into the pool where the beautiful Hermaphroditus is bathing, and wraps herself around him like a squid holding fast to its prey, until her flesh melts into his and the two become one person, half male, half female.

People with good memories have cluttered minds, but his brain was so blissfully empty that nothing could get in the way of common sense.

nothing made an incident stick in the memory more than a conscious effort to forget it.

Hercules, capable of heroic things but hesitating too long at the moral crossroads.

The Jesuit order, founded by Ignacio López de Loyola in 1534, set itself to fighting a battle of ideas against the enemy. A fiercer, less intellectual movement, arising in France from the 1550s, was loosely grouped under the name of the ‘Leagues’. Their aim was not to outwit the heretics by fancy argument but to wipe them from the face of the earth by force. They and their Calvinist counterparts faced each other without a shred of compromise in their hearts, as fanatical mirror-images.

Monluc understood ‘pacification’ to mean ‘mass slaughter’. He set to work hanging Protestants in large numbers without trial, or having them broken on the wheel. After one battle at the village of Terraube, he ordered so many of its residents killed and thrown in the well that you could put your hand in from above and touch the top of the pile.

The Renaissance was a period in which, while any hint of real homosexuality was regarded with horror, men routinely wrote to each other like lovestruck teenagers. They were usually in love less with each other than with an elevated ideal of friendship, absorbed from Greek and Latin literature.

The mystery of tyrannical dominance is as profound as that of love itself.

If it occurred on a smaller scale, someone would probably be burned at the stake, but when bewitchment seizes a whole society, it goes unquestioned.

Something in human beings drives them to a ‘deep forgetfulness of freedom’.10 Everyone, from top to bottom of the system, is mesmerised by their voluntary servitude and by the power of habit, since often they have known nothing else. Yet all they need to do is to wake up and withdraw their co-operation.

‘If he had begun to say something, he never failed to finish it, even though the man he was speaking to had gone away’ – because he did not want to be diverted from his inner reality by external changes.

‘Even if all that has come down to us by report from the past should be true and known by someone, it would be less than nothing compared with what is unknown.’

How puny is the knowledge of even the most curious person, he reflected, and how astounding the world by comparison.

A human being’s perspective may not merely be prone to occasional error, but limited by definition, in exactly the way we normally (and arrogantly) presume a dog’s intelligence to be.

Fideism produced odd bedfellows indeed: extremists and secular moderates were brought together by a shared desire to marvel at their own ignorance.

I can neither put my feet firmly down on the bottom nor swim to keep myself on the surface.

I accept with all my heart48 and with gratitude what nature has done for me, and I am pleased with myself and proud of myself that I do. We wrong that great and all-powerful Giver by refusing his gift, nullifying it, and disfiguring it.

‘Women are not wrong22 at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them.’

‘We are in almost all things unjust judges of their actions, as they are of ours.’

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’.

‘I seek only to grow indifferent and relaxed.’

I avoid subjecting myself to any sort of obligation.

Everyone behaved as they pleased, and any guest who craved solitude could also go and do their own thing for as long as they liked, without causing offence.

Cruelty nauseated Montaigne: he could not help himself. He hated it cruelly23, as he wrote, making a point of the paradox. His revulsion was instinctive, as much a part of him as the openness written all over his face. This was why he could not stand hunting. Even seeing a chicken having its neck wrung, or a hare caught by dogs, horrified him. The same perspective-leaping tendency that enabled him to borrow his cat’s point of view made it impossible for him to see a hare being ripped apart without feeling it in his own guts.

On a global scale, no single creature can be of much importance, he wrote, yet in another way these ‘I’s are the only things of importance. And only a politics that recognises them can offer hope for the future.

Recognition, in turn, should lead to kindness. Forgetting this similarity is the worst political error, as well as the worst personal and moral one.

The first French5 settlement in Brazil, founded by Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon near the present site of Rio de Janeiro in the 1550s, was so weakened by its Catholic–Protestant divisions that it succumbed to invasion by the Portuguese.

people who try to rise above the human manage only to sink to the subhuman.

the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.

Contemporary demonologist Jean Bodin argued that, in crisis conditions such as these, standards of evidence must be lowered. Witchcraft was so serious, and so hard to detect using normal methods of proof, that society could not afford to adhere too much to ‘legal tidiness and normal procedures’. Public rumour could be considered ‘almost infallible’: if everyone in a village said that a particular woman was a witch, that was sufficient to justify putting her to the torture. Medieval techniques were revived specifically for such cases, including ‘swimming’ suspects to see if they floated, and searing them with red-hot irons. The numbers of convicted witches kept rising as standards of evidence went down, and the increase amounted to further proof that the crisis was real and that further adjustment of the law was necessary.

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.

To join in mass violence, in such circumstances, was to let God know that you stood with Him. Both Protestant and Catholic extremists made a cult of holy zeal,9 which amounted to a total gift of yourself to God and a rejection of the things of this world.

But a minority went to the opposite extreme. Radicalised10 beyond measure, they called for total war against Catholicism and the death of the king – the ‘tyrant’ responsible for the deaths of Coligny and all the other victims.

Montaigne reminded his contemporaries of the old Stoic lesson: to avoid feeling swamped by a difficult situation, try imagining your world from different angles or at different scales of significance. This is what the ancients did when they looked down on their troubles from above, as upon a commotion in an ant colony.

Others managed to travel so ‘covered and wrapped in a taciturn and incommunicative prudence, defending themselves from the contagion of an unknown atmosphere’ that they noticed nothing at all.

Nearby, in Vitry-le-François, he was regaled with stories about seven or eight girls in the area who had ‘plotted together’ to dress and live as men. One married a woman and lived with her for several months – ‘to her satisfaction, so they say’ – until someone reported the case to the authorities and she was hanged. Another story in the same region concerned a man named Germain who had been a girl until the age of twenty-two, when a set of ‘virile instruments’ popped out one day as he leaped over an obstacle. A folk song arose in the town, warning girls not to open their legs too wide when they jumped in case the same thing happened to them.

Such a feeling of hallucinatory strangeness frequently strikes visitors to Rome, partly because everything there is already so familiar to the imagination long before you see it. Two hundred years later, Goethe32 would find it at once exhilarating and disorienting. ‘All the dreams of my youth have come to life,’ he wrote on his arrival:

One of Montaigne’s problems was that he was so honest about his choices. Other people, far less conscientious than he, were praised because they pretended to be committed and energetic.

Montaigne remains honest and thus comes across as gruff and indifferent.

One could sum up Montaigne’s policy by saying that one should do a good job, but not too good a job. By following this rule, he kept himself out of trouble and remained fully human. He did only what was his duty; and so, unlike almost everyone else, he did do his duty.

You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff.

It is better to be moderate, modest, and a little vague. Nature will take care of the rest.

The twenty-first century has everything to gain from a Montaignean sense of life, and, in its most troubled moments so far, it has been sorely in need of a Montaignean politics. It could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgement, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict. It needs his conviction that no vision of heaven, no imagined Apocalypse, and no perfectionist fantasy can ever outweigh the tiniest of selves in the real world. It is unthinkable to Montaigne that one could ever ‘gratify heaven and nature by committing massacre and homicide, a belief universally embraced in all religions’. To believe that life could demand any such thing is to forget what day-to-day existence actually is. It entails forgetting that, when you look at a puppy held over a bucket of water, or even at a cat in the mood for play, you are looking at a creature who looks back at you. No abstract principles are involved; there are only two individuals, face to face, hoping for the best from one another.