Month: September 2008

As promised, it’s the final part of my writeup on the Apology for Raymond Sebond (have fun with parts 1, 2, and 3 and you’ll see why I gave up on this project for a full year)! After this, it’s back to shorter, less preachy (I hope) essays! But this week you get — as per translator Donald Frame’s section titles — Man can have no knowledge (510-539), The senses are inadequate (539-553), Changing man cannot know changing things (553), Changing man cannot know unchanging God (553-556), and Conclusion: Man is nothing without God (556).

In last week’s apology for not having a writeup on the Apology, I mentioned that Montaigne loosened up in the last portion of this 180-page work. By that, I mean that he got back — at times — to the personal aspect of the “personal essay” for which he’s famous. Rather than preach in universal tones, he explored points through his own experiences. This technique, even when describing only abstractions, manages to bring M. down to earth and give some sense of his own journey. Which, of course, I correlate to mine:

I who spy on myself more closely, who have my eyes unceasingly intent on myself, as one who has not much business elsewhere . . . I would hardly dare tell of the vanity and weakness that I find in myself. My footing is so unsteady and so insecure, that on an empty stomach I feel myself another man than after a meal. . . . Now I am ready to do anything, now to do nothing; what is a pleasure to me at this moment will some time be a trouble. A thousand unconsidered and accidental impulses arise in me.

I prefer to quote Bitter Sweet Symphony by the Verve, but we all work with the tools we have at hand.

When I pick up books, I will have perceived in such-and-such a passage surpassing charms which will have struck my soul; let me come upon it another time, in vain I turn it over and over, in vain I twist it and manipulate it, to me it is a shapeless and unrecognizable mass.

I hearya. Somewhere in The Long Goodbye, I once read a passage that captured Chandler’s lyric vision of Los Angeles for me. Re-reading it a year or two later, I was flummoxed. I’ve just now gone back to the book, 16 years later; I’ll let you know if I find it this time.

Even in my own writings I do not always find again the sense of my first thought; I do not know what I meant to say, and often I get burned by correcting and putting in a new meaning, because I have lost the first one, which was better.

No comment.

As I mentioned last week, this segment also sees the return of fart jokes and jerkoff humor. But before getting to the good stuff, I feel like I should boil down the substance of this culmination of the Apology:

1. Man is the measure of nothing, because neither his senses nor his reason can be trusted.
2. Man cannot know anything, in himself.
3. We need to find the world in God and hope that God bestows a “divine and miraculous metamorphosis” upon us.

And now, the Mel Brooks Segment!

Throughout the Apology, M. attacks various schools of philosophy, focusing on the Stoics. His commentary on the relativism of customs from place to place — how one place’s law is another’s crime — leads into an assault on how these philosophers employ reason to justify virtually any action. From there, he explains how the Stoics blurred lines between virtue and vice and tossed propriety out the window:

Metrocles rather indiscreetly let a fart while debating in the presence of his school, and was staying in his house, hiding for shame, until Crates went to visit him and, adding to his consolations and reasons the example of his own freedom, started a farting contest with him, by which he rid him of this scruple, and furthermore drew him over to his own freer Stoical school from the more polite Peripatetic school of which he had hitherto been a follower.

I’m not sure if I’d gravitate to a school like that, but I still laugh over the great campfire scene from Blazing Saddles, so who am I to talk?

A page after Metrocles’ story, M. turns to the Cynics’ lack of shame about sex. He contends that Augustine was too naive when the saint remarked that the Cynics were all talk when it came to sex in public, and that surely they were

merely representing lascivious movements, in order to maintain the shamelessness that hteir school professed; and that in order to eject what shame had restrained and withheld, they still needed later on to seek cover. He had no seen far enough into their debauchery. For Diogenes, practicing masturbation in public, expressed the wish in the presence of the bystanders that he could satisfy his stomach that way by rubbing it. To those who asked him why he did not seek a more comfortable place to eat than right out in the street, he answered: “Because I am hungry right out in the street.”

Never let it be said that the classics are boring. (And ignore the fact that M. does just that four paragraphs from the conclusion of the Apology, when he describes it all as a “long and boring discourse.”)

Thanks for sticking with this one. I hope the essays take a turn back to the fun, even though the next one is called, Of judging the death of others. . .