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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.
Only one thing is certain: that nothing is certain And nothing is more wretched or arrogant than man. (Pliny the Elder)
There is no more beautiful life than that of a carefree man; Lack of care is a truly painless evil. (Sophocles)
“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.
“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.
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.
The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything.
They were usually in love less with each other than with an elevated ideal of friendship, absorbed from Greek and Latin literature. Such a bond between two well-born young men was the pinnacle of philosophy: they studied together, lived under each other’s gaze, and helped each other to perfect the art of living.
Having found some admirable man, he said, one should visualize him as an ever-present audience, in order to hold oneself to his exalted standards. If you would live for yourself, he wrote, you should live for others—above all for your chosen friend.
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.
One should be able to accept everything just as it is, willingly, without giving in to the futile longing to change it. Montaigne seemed to find this trick easy: it came to him by nature. “If I had to live over again,” he wrote cheerfully, “I would live as I have lived.” But most people had to practice it, and this was where the mental exercises came in.
“very gently deflecting our talk and diverting it bit by bit to subjects nearby, then a little more remote.” The widow seemed to pay little attention at first, but in the end the other subjects caught her interest. Thus, without her realizing what was happening, he wrote, “I imperceptibly stole away from her this painful thought and kept her in good spirits and entirely soothed for as long as I was there.”
Pyrrhonians accordingly deal with all the problems life can throw at them by means of a single word which acts as shorthand for this maneuver: in Greek, epokhe. It means “I suspend judgment.” Or, in a different rendition given in French by Montaigne himself, je soutiens: “I hold back.” This phrase conquers all enemies; it undoes them, so that they disintegrate into atoms before your eyes.
I cannot say which of the things proposed I should find convincing and which I should not find convincing. Or: I now feel in such a way as neither to posit dogmatically nor to reject any of the things falling under this investigation. Or: To every account I have scrutinized which purports to establish something in dogmatic fashion, there appears to me to be opposed another account, purporting to establish something in dogmatic fashion, equal to it in convincingness or lack of convincingness.
We, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion.
He even took pleasure in his memory lapses, for they reminded him of his failings and saved him from the error of insisting that he was always right.
provides a neat contrast to the image of Montaigne pacing up and down, pulling books off the shelves, getting distracted, mentioning odd thoughts to his servants to help himself remember them, and arriving at his best ideas in heated dinner-party discussions with neighbors or while riding in the woods. Even in “retirement,” Montaigne did his thinking in a richly populated environment, full of objects, books, animals, and people. Descartes needed motionless withdrawal.
He indulges his dog because he can imaginatively share the animal’s point of view: he can feel how desperate the dog is to banish boredom and get his human friend’s attention.
Montaigne, he wrote, was “the first person in the world to express this intense, personal horror of cruelty. He was, too, the first completely modern man.”
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 recognizes them can offer hope for the future.
In the view of William James, as of Leonard Woolf and Montaigne, we do not live immured in our separate perspectives, like Descartes in his room. We live porously and sociably. We can glide out of our own minds, if only for a few moments, in order to occupy another being’s point of view. This ability is the real meaning of “Be convivial,” this chapter’s answer to the question of how to live, and the best hope for civilization.
Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober, and consequently ugly-looking.
twentieth-century author Rebecca West described it thus: Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
