How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

by Sarah Bakewell

He became so afraid of losing his life that he could no longer enjoy it while he had it.

“With such frequent and ordinary examples passing before our eyes,” wrote Montaigne of Arnaud, “how can we possibly rid ourselves of the thought of death and of the idea that at every moment it is gripping us by the throat?”

During what followed, as witnesses later told him, Montaigne thrashed about. He ripped at his doublet with his nails, as if to rid himself of a weight. “My stomach was oppressed with the clotted blood; my hands flew to it of their own accord, as they often do where we itch, against the intention of our will.” It looked as if he were trying to rip his own body apart, or perhaps to pull it away from him so his spirit could depart. All this time, however, his inward feelings were tranquil: It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go. It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep.

All his actions and words were somehow produced by the body alone. “What the soul contributed was in a dream, touched very lightly, and merely licked and sprinkled, as it were, by the soft impression of the senses.”

In dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there. You die in the same way that you fall asleep: by drifting away. If other people try to pull you back, you hear their voices on “the edges of the soul.” Your existence is attached by a thread; it rests only on the tip of your lips, as he put it. Dying is not an action that can be prepared for. It is an aimless reverie.

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.

If you don’t know how to die, 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.

His memory took longer to come back than his physical sensations, although he spent several days trying to reconstruct the event by interrogating witnesses. None of it struck any spark until the whole incident came back at a blow, with a shock like being struck by lightning—a reprise of the “thunderbolt” of the initial impact. His return to life was as violent as the accident: all jostlings, impacts, flashes, and thunderclaps. Life thrust itself deeply into him, whereas death had been a light and superficial thing.

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)

“Each man is a good education to himself,

provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up.”

Learning how to die was learning to let go; learning to live was learning to hang on.

personal future. The way Pierre wanted Micheau to learn it also exemplified the ideals of the time. Most boys learned their Latin through painful effort at school, but the Romans had not done this: they spoke it as naturally as they breathed air. It was because moderns had to learn the language artificially that they were unable ever to match the ancients in wisdom or greatness of soul—or so went the theory.

Other aspects of Montaigne’s early life were governed by similar principles of ease. It was thought that “it troubles the tender brains of children to wake them in the morning with a start,” so Pierre had his son charmed out of bed like a cobra every day by the plangent sound of a lute or other musical instrument. Corporal punishment was almost unknown to him; in his entire boyhood, he was only twice struck with a rod, and then very gently. It was an education of “wisdom and tact.”

flies so high that the sun burns him. A king and a queen turn into two mountains. 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.

He collected unsystematically, without adding fine bindings or considering rarity value. Montaigne would never repeat his father’s mistake of fetishizing books or their authors. One cannot imagine him kissing volumes like holy relics, as Erasmus or the poet Petrarch reportedly used to, or putting on his best clothes before reading them, like Machiavelli, who wrote: “I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workaday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them.”

“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.

The trigger came on March 1, 1562, at the town of Vassy, or Wassy, in the Champagne area of the northeast. Five hundred Protestants gathered to worship in a barn in the town, which was illegal, for such assemblies were allowed only outside the walls. The duc de Guise, a radical Catholic leader, was passing through the area with a group of his soldiers and heard about the meeting. He marched to the barn. According to survivors’ accounts, he allowed his men to storm in shouting, “Kill them all!” The Huguenot congregation fought back; they had long expected trouble and were ready to defend themselves. They forced the soldiers out and barricaded the barn door, then climbed out on scaffolding over the roof to pelt Guise’s men with stones, piled there in case of need. The soldiers fired their arquebuses, and managed to

reenter the barn. The Protestants now fled for their lives; many fell from the roof or were shot down as they ran. About thirty died, and over a hundred were wounded. The consequences were dramatic. The national Protestant leader, Louis I de Bourbon, prince de Condé, urged Protestants to rise up to save themselves from further attacks. Many took up arms and, in response, Catholics did the same—both sides being driven more by fear than hatred. Catherine de’ Medici, acting on behalf of the twelve-year-old Charles IX, ordered an inquiry into Vassy, but it fizzled out as public inquiries do, and by now it was too late. Leaders of both sides converged on Paris with crowds of their supporters. As the duc de Guise entered the city, he happened to pass a Protestant procession led by Condé; the two men exchanged cold salutes with the pommels of their swords.

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

Occasional signs can be found in the Essays that Montaigne was capable of playing the slyboots when he wanted to. Once, he used an elaborate trick to help a friend who suffered from impotence and was afraid a spell had been cast on him. Instead of reasoning him out of it, Montaigne gave the friend a robe and a magical-looking coin engraved with “celestial figures.” He told him to perform a series of rituals with this medallion whenever he was about to have sex, first laying it over his kidneys, then tying it around his waist, then lying down with his partner and pulling the robe over both of them. The trick worked. Montaigne felt a bit guilty, even though he had done it for his friend’s benefit. Yet this shows that he could practice deception if he felt the situation called for it, or if the psychology of the case fascinated him enough.

The lamentations of the people around him, whom he could not see, horrified him. “My Lord, who is tormenting me so? Why do they take me out of that great pleasant rest that I am in? Leave me alone, I beg you.”

Accordingly, Stoic and Epicurean thinkers spent much time devising techniques and thought experiments. For example: imagine that today is the last day of your life. Are you ready to face death? Imagine, even, that this very moment—now!—is the last moment of your existence. What are you feeling? Do you have regrets? Are there things you wish you had done differently? Are you really alive at this instant, or are you consumed with panic, denial, and remorse? This experiment opens your eyes to what is important to you, and reminds you of how time runs constantly through your fingers. Some Stoics even acted out these “last moment” experiments with props and a supporting cast. Seneca wrote of a wealthy man named Pacuvius, who conducted a full-scale funeral ceremony for himself every day, ending with a feast after which he would have himself carried from the table to his bed on a bier while all the guests and servants intoned, “He has lived his life, he has lived his life.” You could achieve the same effect more simply and cheaply just by holding the idea of your own demise in your mind and paying full attention to it. 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 anywa...

If you feel tired of everything you possess, suggests Plutarch, pretend that you have lost all these things and are missing them desperately. Whether the object is a favorite plate, a friend, a mistress, or the good fortune of living in a time of peace and in good health, this exercise magically makes it seem worth having after all. The principle is the same as when brooding on death: faced with the idea of losing something now, you realize its value. 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, Seneca says, can never be bored with life.

Do not seek 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.

Seneca had an extreme trick for practising amor fati. He was asthmatic, and attacks brought him almost to the point of suffocation. He often felt that he was about to die, but he learned to use each attack as a philosophical opportunity. While his throat closed and his lungs strained for breath, he tried to embrace what was happening to him: to say “yes” to it. I will this, he would think; and, if necessary, I will myself to die from it. When the attack receded, he emerged feeling stronger, for he had done battle with fear and defeated it.

Not everyone can have the benefit of being insane, but anyone can make life easier for themselves by turning down the beam of their reason slightly. With grief, in particular, Montaigne learned that he could not recover simply by talking himself out

of it. He did try some Stoic tricks, and he was not afraid to focus his attention on La Boétie’s death long enough to write his account of it. But most of the time he found it more helpful to divert his attention to something else altogether: A painful notion takes hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it. I substitute a contrary one for it, or, if I cannot, at all events a different one. Variation always solaces, dissolves, and dissipates. If I cannot combat it, I escape it; and in fleeing I dodge, I am tricky.

“All I know is that I know nothing.”

Tuna fish demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of astronomy: when the winter solstice arrives, the whole school stops precisely where it is in the water, and stays there until the following spring equinox. They know geometry and arithmetic too, for they have been observed to form themselves into a perfect cube of which all six sides are equal.

Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1623. As a boy he showed precocious talents for mathematics and invention, and even designed an early calculating machine. At the age of thirty-one, while staying at the abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs, he had a visionary experience which he tried to describe on a piece of paper headed FIRE: Certainty. Certainty. Feeling, Joy, Peace.

God of Jesus Christ. Deum meum et Deum vostrum. Oblivion of the world and of everything excepting God. He is found solely by the ways taught in the Gospel. Grandeur of the human soul. Just Father, the world does not know You, but I know You. Joy, Joy, Joy, tears of joy. This epiphany changed his life. He sewed the piece of paper into his clothes so that he could carry it everywhere, and from then on devoted his time to theological writing and to the notes that became the Pensées. He did not have long for this work. At thirty-nine, he died from a brain hemorrhage.

He was realistic about the extent to which he made the earth move for his lovers, however. Sometimes a woman’s heart is not really in it: “Sometimes they go to it with only one buttock.” Or perhaps she is fantasizing about someone else: “What if she eats your bread with the sauce of a more agreeable imagination?” Montaigne understood that women know more about sex than men usually think, and indeed that their imagination leads them to expect better than they get. “In place of the real parts, through desire and hope, they substitute others three times life-size.” He tutted over irresponsible graffiti: “What mischief is not done by those enormous

pictures that boys spread about the passages and staircases of palaces! From these, women acquire a cruel contempt for our natural capacity.” Does one conclude that Montaigne had a smallish penis? Yes, indeed, because he confessed later in the same essay that nature had treated him “unfairly and unkindly,” and he added a classical quotation: “Even the matrons—all too well they know— Look dimly on a man whose member’s small.”

In 1452, Leon Battista Alberti recommended in his De re aedificatoria (On Building), “The husband and wife must have separate bedrooms, not only to ensure that the husband be not disturbed by his wife, when she is about to give birth or is ill, but also to allow them, even in summer, an uninterrupted night’s sleep.”

In an essay almost entirely about sex, Montaigne cites the wisdom of Aristotle: “A man … should touch his wife prudently and soberly, lest if he caresses her too lasciviously the pleasure should transport her outside the bounds of reason.” The physicians warned, too, that excessive pleasure could make sperm curdle inside the woman’s body, rendering her unable to conceive. It was better for the husband to bestow ecstasy elsewhere, where it did not matter what damage it caused. “The kings of Persia,” relates Montaigne, “used to invite their wives to join them at their feasts; but when the wine began to heat them in good earnest and they had to give completely free rein to sensuality, they sent them back to their private rooms.” They then brought on a more suitable set of women.

Montaigne sought detachment and retreat so that he could not be too badly hurt, but in doing so he also discovered that having such a retreat helped him establish his “real liberty,” the space he needed to think and look inward. He certainly had reason to work at Stoic detachment. Having lost his friend, his father, and his brother in short order, Montaigne was now to lose almost all of his children—all daughters. He noted the sad sequence of births and deaths in his diary, the

People generally did try not to get too attached to children while they were in early infancy, because the likelihood of their dying was great, but Montaigne seemed exceptionally good at staying aloof. It was an affliction he did not feel deeply, he admitted. He even wrote, in the mid-1570s, of having lost “two or three” children, as if uncertain of the figure, though this could just be his usual habit of vagueness about numbers. It is very much like his way of dating his riding accident, which he said happened “during our third civil war, or the second (I do not quite remember which).” In his dedication to his wife in the Plutarch translation, he gets the details even more startlingly wrong, writing that their first daughter had died “in the second year of her life,” although she died at two months. This was probably a slip of the pen rather than of the mind. Or was it? One has the feeling, with Montaigne, that anything is possible.

The St. Bartholomew’s massacres, terrible as they were, gave way to years of inconclusive individual suffering rather than heralding the end of the world. The Antichrist did not come. Generation followed generation until a time came when, as Montaigne predicted, many people had only the vaguest idea that his century’s wars ever took place. This happened partly because of the work he and his fellow politiques did to restore sanity. Montaigne, affecting ease and comfort, contributed more to saving his country than his zealous contemporaries. Some of his work was directly political, but his greatest contribution was simply to stay out of it and write the Essays. This, in the eyes of many, makes him a hero.

Everywhere they went, they visited fashionable fountains and water gardens, good for hours of sadistic entertainment. In the gardens of the Fugger family in Germany, a wooden walkway leading between two fishponds concealed brass jets primed to spray unsuspecting ladies and gentlemen as they passed. Elsewhere in the same garden, you could press a button to shoot a spout of water into the face of anyone who looked at a particular fountain. A Latin sign in the garden read, “You were looking for trifling amusements; here they are; enjoy them.” Apparently Montaigne’s party did.

They were no happier when Montaigne himself took over the diary-writing and told them that he had voided a stone “as big and long as a pine nut, but as thick as a bean at one end, and having, to tell the truth, exactly the shape of a prick.”

People complain that his terms as mayor passed without much trace, he wrote. “That’s a good one! They accuse me of inactivity in a time when almost everyone was convicted of doing too much.” With “innovation” (that is, Protestantism) having caused such mayhem, surely it was commendable to have kept a city in a mostly uneventful state for so long. And Montaigne had long since learned that much of what passed for passionate public commitment was just showing off. People involve themselves because they want to have an air of consequence, or to advance their private interests, or simply to keep busy so that they don’t have to think about life.

Montaigne’s circumscribed sense of where his duty lay became most apparent in June 1585, when Bordeaux suffered a heat wave rapidly followed by an outbreak of plague: a particularly destructive combination. The epidemic lasted until December, and during those few months more than 14,000 people died in the city, almost a third of its population. More people were killed than in the St. Bartholomew’s massacres across the whole country, yet, as often happens with epidemics occurring in time of war, it left little trace on historical memory. In any case, plague was common. So frequent were outbreaks in the sixteenth century that it is easy to forget how catastrophic they were, each time, for those unfortunate enough to be caught up in them.

This was not completely new, but it now became central to the question of his authority as a writer. Even among earlier generations, his talk of buttocks, cracks, and tools had occasionally bothered people. Lord Halifax, the dedicatee of an English translation in the seventeenth century, remarked: “I cannot abide that, after having discoursed of the exemplary life of a holy man, he should immediately talk as he does of cuckoldom and privy-parts, and other things of this nature … I wish he had left out these things, that ladies might not be put to the blush, when his Essays are found in their libraries.” This last part seems ironic, since Montaigne had joked that the risqué parts of his final volume would get his book out of the libraries and into ladies’ boudoirs, where he would rather be.

Their predicament must already have been dire before he left, for he wrote in the Essays of having seen people dig their own graves and lie down in them to wait for death. Once they had reached this stage, they were beyond rescue.

He even came to find a similar pleasure in the midst of the attacks themselves. They were still painful, but he learned to delight in their few compensations, including the glow of satisfaction he felt on seeing admiration in other people’s eyes: There is pleasure in hearing people say about you: There indeed is strength, there indeed is fortitude! They see you sweat in agony, turn pale, turn red, tremble, vomit your very blood, suffer strange contractions and convulsions, sometimes shed great tears from your eyes, discharge thick, black, and frightful urine, or have it stopped up by some sharp rough stone that cruelly pricks and flays the neck of your penis; meanwhile keeping up conversation with your company with a normal countenance, jesting in the intervals with your servants. Only he knew the truth: that it was easier to joke and keep up conversations in the grip of pain than an observer could ever guess.

Learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection in this way, and even to embrace it. Our being is cemented with sickly qualities … Whoever should remove the seeds of these qualities from man would destroy the fundamental conditions of our life.