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February 17 - May 24, 2021
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
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!”
Solum certum nihil esse certi
“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.
The mind flows on and on, in a ceaseless “stream of consciousness”—a phrase coined by the psychologist William James in 1890, though it was later made more famous by novelists.
the mynah birds in Aldous Huxley’s novel Island, which are trained to fly around all day calling “Attention! Attention!” and “Here and now!”
He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary.
He particularly avoided announcing a sequence of numbered points (“I will now discuss six possible approaches …”) because it was both boring and risky: one was likely either to forget some of them or to end up with too many.
Despite his father’s constant efforts to motivate him, he wrote, he turned out to be “so sluggish, lax, and drowsy that they could not tear me from my sloth, not even to make me play.”
The Discovery of Slowness, which relates the life of Arctic explorer John Franklin, a man whose natural pace of living and thinking is portrayed as that of an elderly sloth after a long massage and a pipe of opium.
“Forget much of what you learn” and “Be slow-witted” became two of Montaigne’s best answers to the question of how to live.
The mystery of tyrannical dominance is as profound as that of love itself.
Stoics and Epicureans shared a great deal of their theory, too. They thought that the ability to enjoy life is thwarted by two big weaknesses: lack of control over emotions, and a tendency to pay too little attention to the present. If one could only get these two things right—controlling and paying attention—most other problems would take care of themselves. The catch is that both are almost impossible to do. So difficult are they that one cannot approach them head-on. It is necessary to sidle in from lateral angles, and trick oneself into achieving them.
As the Stoic Epictetus wrote: 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.
To borrow an example from Alan Bailey, a historian of Skepticism, if someone declares that the number of grains of sand in the Sahara is an even number and demands to know your opinion, your natural response might be, “I don’t have one,” or “How should I know?” Or, if you want to sound more philosophical, “I suspend judgment”—epokhe. If a second person says, “What rubbish! There is obviously an odd number of grains of sand in the Sahara,” you would still say epokhe, in the same unflappable tone. In effect, you respond with the deadpan statement Sextus himself cited as a definition of epokhe: I
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The Essays are suffused with it: he filled his pages with words such as “perhaps,” “to some extent,” “I think,” “It seems to me,” and so on—words which, as Montaigne said himself, “soften and moderate the rashness of our propositions,” and which embody what the critic Hugo Friedrich has called his philosophy of “unassumingness.” They are not extra flourishes; they are Montaigne’s thought, at its purest.
To quote Hugo Friedrich again, Montaigne had a “deep need to be surprised by what is unique, what cannot be categorized, what is mysterious.
If a parrotfish is hooked by a fisherman, his fellow parrotfish rush to chew through the line and free him. Or, if one is netted, others thrust their tails through the net so he can grab one with his teeth, and be pulled out.
Pyrrhonian Skepticism was almost impossible to fight. Any attempt to quarrel with it only strengthened its claim that everything was open to dispute, while if you remained neutral this confirmed the view that it was good to suspend judgment.
Montaigne: How we cry and laugh for the same thing.
Like Jorge Luis Borges’s twentieth-century character Pierre Menard, who writes a novel which happens to be identical to Don Quixote, Pascal wrote the same words in a different era and with a different temperament, and thus created something new.
The surest way to be taken in is to think oneself craftier than other people.
As Friedrich Nietzsche would remark centuries later, most of the genuinely valuable observations about human behavior and psychology—and thus also about philosophy—“were first detected and stated in those social circles which would make every sort of sacrifice not for scientific knowledge, but for a witty coquetry.”
“Nothing costs me dear except care and trouble,” wrote Montaigne. “I seek only to grow indifferent and relaxed.”
clever-clogs displays such as that of a man who tossed grains of millet through the eye of a needle from a distance.
There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, and some mutual obligation.
Rousseau wards off such accusations by writing, “I place Montaigne foremost among those dissemblers who mean to deceive by telling the truth. He portrays himself with defects, but he gives himself only lovable ones.”
“The archer who overshoots the target misses as much as the one who does not reach it.”
There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.
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.
Those living through the present assume that things are worse than they are, he says, because they cannot escape their local perspective:
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.
respect. Just as you could seek mercy from an enemy forthrightly, without compromising yourself, or defend your property by electing to leave it undefended, so you could get through an inhumane war by remaining human.
Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate; be master of your own life. Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will.
It had that perfect commercial combination: startling originality and easy classification.
Henri told him that he liked the book, to which Montaigne is said to have replied, “Sir, then Your Majesty must like me”—because, as he always maintained, he and his book were the same.
amor fati: the cheerful acceptance of whatever happens.
There can be no really ambitious writing without an acceptance that other people will do what they like with your work, and change it almost beyond recognition.
old Hellenistic trick of amor fati: the cheerful acceptance of whatever happens.
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.”
nature does everything for you, and there is no need to trouble your head about anything. It leads us by the hand, he wrote, as if “down a gentle and virtually imperceptible slope, bit by bit.”
