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

by Sarah Bakewell

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

there is no escaping our perspective: we can walk only on our own legs, and sit only on our own bum.

Cicero summed up their principle neatly: “To philosophize is to learn how to die.” Montaigne himself would one day borrow this dire thought for a chapter title.

Death is only a few bad moments at the end of life, he wrote in one of his last added notes; it is not worth wasting any anxiety over.

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.

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.

“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!”

“How does one achieve peace of mind?” On the latter point, Plutarch’s advice was the same as Seneca’s: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it.

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.

Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are.

If others examined themselves attentively, 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.

Yes, he says, we are foolish, but we cannot be any other way so we may as well relax and live with it.

It does not matter, he wrote, whether a person one loves has been dead for fifteen hundred years or, like his own father at the time, eighteen years. Both are equally remote; both are equally close.

If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.

The subject of Voluntary Servitude is the ease with which, throughout history, tyrants have dominated the masses, even though their power would evaporate instantly if those masses withdrew their support. There is no need for a revolution: the people need only stop cooperating, and supplying armies of slaves and sycophants to prop the tyrant up. Yet this almost never happens, even to those who maltreat their subjects monstrously. The more they starve and neglect their people, the more the people seem to love them. The Romans mourned Nero when he died, despite his abuses. The same happened on the death of Julius Caesar—whom, unusually, La Boétie does not admire. (Montaigne had similar reservations.) Here was an emperor “who abolished the laws and liberty, a personage in whom there was, it seems to me, nothing of value,” yet he was adored out of all measure. The mystery of tyrannical dominance is as profound as that of love itself.

It is a terrible spectacle to see “a million men serving miserably with their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater force, but somehow (it seems) enchanted and charmed by the mere mention of the name of one, whose power they should not fear, since he is alone, and whose qualities they should not love, since he is savage and inhuman towards them.”

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.

the hope that death might be a tranquil affair for the person undergoing it, however little it looked that way from outside.