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

by Sarah Bakewell

Religion was one of the reasons why many English readers, from the late seventeenth century on, felt so free to enjoy Montaigne. It was of no concern to English Protestants when the Church put his book on the Index. It even allowed them to enjoy the pleasant feeling of getting one up on Catholics and, more gratifyingly still, on the French. The latter could be portrayed as a people unable to recognize their own best writers, especially after the French Académie began imposing rigorous standards of classical elegance on all its literature. A “free and unruly” writer (as Montaigne described himself) had no place in the new French aesthetics, but the English language welcomed him like a prodigal son. As the exuberant and anarchic home of Chaucer and Shakespeare, English seemed the right language for such an author.

If they liked the Essays’ style, English readers were even more charmed by its content. Montaigne’s preference for details over abstractions appealed to them; so did his distrust of scholars, his preference for moderation and comfort, and his desire for privacy—the “room behind the shop.” On the other hand, the English also had a taste for travel and exoticism, as did Montaigne. He could show unexpected bursts of radicalism in the very midst of quiet conservatism: so could they. Much of the time he was happier watching his cat play by the fireside—and so were the English. Then there was his philosophy, if you could call it that. 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 mind is naturally prone to take its ease and pleasure in the loosest whimsies and humors.”

The Essays happened to find an excellent English translator from the beginning, in a man named John Florio. This made all the difference.

phrase which the modern translator Donald Frame renders calmly as “werewolves, goblins, and chimeras” emerges from Floriation as “Larves, Hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellowes, and other such Bug-beares and Chimeraes”—a piece of pure Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Of all Montaigne’s cross-Channel heirs, the one who deserves the last word is an Anglo-Irishman: Laurence Sterne, eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy. His great novel, if it can be so classified, is an exaggerated Montaignesque ramble, containing several explicit nods to its French predecessor, and filled with games, paradoxes, and digressions.

Tristram Shandy started an Irish tradition that would reach its most extreme point with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a novel which divides into offshoots and streams of association over hundreds of pages until, at the end, it loops around on itself: the last half-sentence hooks on to the half-sentence with which the book began. This is much too tidy for Sterne, or for Montaigne, who avoided neat wrap-ups. For both of them, 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 and Montaigne both engage constantly with a world which always generates more things to write about—so why stop? 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.

Montaigne did not smear his words around like Joyce, but he did work by revisiting, elaborating, and accreting. 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.

It is true that the Essays was beginning to strain at the limits of comprehension. One can sometimes make out the skeleton of the first edition through the tangle, especially in those modern editions which supply small letters to mark out the three stages: A for the 1580 edition, B for 1588, and C for everything after that. The effect can be that of glimpsing the outlines of a Khmer stone temple through a mass of tropical foliage.

At a time when many persisted in seeing the book mainly as a collection of Stoic sayings—a valid interpretation so far as it went—she admired it for less usual things: its style, its rambling structure, its willingness to reveal all. It was partly Gournay’s feeling that everyone around her was missing the point that created the long-lasting myth of a Montaigne somehow born out of his time, a writer who had to wait to find readers able to recognize his value. Out of an author who had made himself very popular while barely seeming to exert himself, she made Montaigne into a misunderstood genius. Gournay was happy to acknowledge that she remained in Montaigne’s shadow: “I cannot take a step, whether in writing or speaking, without finding myself in his footsteps.” In reality her own personality comes through loud and clear, often in ways that are at odds with his. When she extols Montaignean virtues such as moderation, she does it in her crashingly immoderate way. Advocating the arts of Stoic detachment and of slipping quietly through life, she does it emotionally and abrasively.

spokesman for one such recent British series was quoted as saying, “Moby-Dick must have been difficult in 1850—in 2007 it’s nigh-on impossible to make your way through it.” Yet the danger in cutting too much blubber out of Moby-Dick is that of being left with no whale. Similarly, Montaigne’s “spirit” resides in the very bits editors are most eager to lose: his swerves, his asides, his changes of mind, and his restless movement from one idea to another. No wonder he himself was driven to say that “every abridgment of a good book is a stupid abridgment.” Yet 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. All readings of the book eventually become an Esprit des Essais de Montaigne, even the most scholarly ones.

Postmodernists consider the world as an endlessly shifting system of meanings, so they concentrate upon a Montaigne who speaks of the world as a dancing branloire, or who says that human beings are “diverse and undulating,” and “double within ourselves.” They think objective knowledge is impossible, and are therefore drawn to Montaigne’s writings on perspective and doubt. (This book is as prone to such temptations as any other, being a product of its time.) It is beguiling; it is flattering. One looks into one’s copy of the Essays like the Queen in Snow White looking into her mirror. Before there is even time to ask the fairy-tale question, the mirror croons back, “You’re the fairest of them all.”

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. In Montaigne’s case, amor fati was one of the answers to the general question of how to live, and as it happened it also opened the way to his literary immortality. 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.”

Old age provides an opportunity to recognize one’s fallibility in a way youth usually finds difficult. Seeing one’s decline written on body and mind, one accepts that one is limited and human. By understanding that age does not make one wise, one attains a kind of wisdom after all. 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. Even philosophy needs to be “thickened and obscured” 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.

as close as Montaigne ever came to a final or best answer to the question of how to live. Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself. Either this is not an answer at all, or it is the only possible answer. It has the same quality as the answer given by the Zen master who, when asked, “What is enlightenment?” whacked the questioner on the head with a stick Enlightenment is something learned on your own body: it takes the form of things happening to you. This is why the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics taught tricks rather than precepts. All philosophers can offer is that blow on the head: a useful technique, a thought experiment, or an experience—in Montaigne’s case, the experience of reading the Essays. The subject he teaches is simply himself, an ordinary example of a living being.

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 judgment, 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. Perhaps some of the credit for Montaigne’s last answer should therefore go to his cat—a specific sixteenth-century individual, who had a rather pleasant life on a country estate with a doting master and not too much competition for his attention. She was the one who, by wanting to play with Montaigne at an inconvenient moment, reminded him what it was to be alive. They looked at each other...