I’m puzzling over this one, fiddling with it like a loose tooth. I don’t understand why M. builds his argument the way he does, and his conclusion is perplexing.
See, what begins as a meditation on how we must and can’t prepare for death turns into a defense of the personal essay, leading to an exhortation to follow the example of a wise man who never bothered to write a word. And in the middle, M. writes about the time he was nearly killed when he was thrown from a horse.
To the beginning.
Of practice begins with a description of the general importance of preparation in life —
Reasoning and education, though we are willing to put our trust in them, can hardly be powerful enough to lead us to action, unless besides we exercise and form our soul by experience to the way we want it to go; otherwise, when it comes to the time for action, it will undoubtedly find itself at a loss.
— reminding me of my brother’s tenet: “You make the habits, and the habits make you.†Then he writes about the most important thing:
But for dying, which is the greatest task we have to perform, practice cannot help us. A man can, by habit and experience, fortify himself against pain, shame and indigence, and such other accidents; but as for death, we can try it only once: we are all apprentices when we come to it.
So practice is thrown out the window within the second paragraph of an essay that is ostensibly in service of the subject. M. offers some methods of familiarizing ourselves with death, or the steps leading to it, but leaves it off as — not exactly the great unknowable, but the great unlearnable. Exploring the process of falling asleep is about all that he can dig up, and his rationale feels half-hearted to me:
It is not without reason that we are taught to study even our sleep for the resemblance it has with death. How easily we pass from waking to sleeping! With how little sense of loss we lose consciousness of the light and of ourselves! Perhaps the faculty of sleep, which deprives us of all action and all feeling, might seem useless and contrary to nature, were it not that thereby Nature teaches us that she has made us for dying and living alike, and from the start of life presents to us the eternal state that she reserves for us after we die, to accustom us to it and take away our fear of it.
Like I said, half-hearted. M. surely sees this, because he launches into a discussion of violent near-death experiences, for
those who by some violent accident have fallen into a faint and lost all sensation, those, in my opinion, have been very close to seeing death’s true and natural face.
This prompts him to focuse on his own near-death experience, when he was flung from his horse, “bruised and skinned” and believed dead by his servants. The next several pages discuss his actions when he was unconscious — coughing up blood, struggling to get out of his doublet, babbling about getting a horse for his wife — and these lead M. to the conclusion that the body is not the self. Predating Descartes, he writes:
There are many animals, and even men, whose muscles we can see contract and move after they are dead. Every man knows by experience that there are parts that often move, stand up, and lie down, without his leave [wink, wink]. Now these passions which touch only the rind of us cannot be called ours. To make them ours, the whole man must be involved; and the pains which the foot or the hand feel while we are asleep are not ours.
Similarly, his ramblings in this delirious state
were idle thoughts, in the clouds, set in motion by the sensations of the eyes and ears; they did not come from within me. I did not know, for all that, where I was coming from or where I was going, nor could I weigh and consider what I was asked. These are slight effects which the senses produce of themselves, as if by habit; what the soul contributed was in a dream, touched very lightly, and merely licked and sprinkled, as it were, by the soft impression of the senses.
He refers to this state as “very pleasant and peaceful,” but M. — writing years later — doesn’t consider it a “practice” for death, because he got better. In fact, getting better felt a lot worse:
[T]wo or three hours later, I felt myself all of a sudden caught up again in my pains, my limbs being all battered and bruised by my fall; and I felt so bad two or three nights after that I thought I was going to die all over again, but by a more painful death; and I still feel the effect of the shock of that collision.
What he draws from this experience is murky: he seems to tell us that the swoon immediately after the accident was the practice for death, and the remainder of the experience serves to separate body & soul. But of course it’s all a jumble. He doesn’t remember the accident for days, then recoils in shock when the memory opens up to him. Still, it all fits within the scope of an essay about getting practice for death (and, through this practice, overcoming fear):
This account of so trivial an event would be rather pointless, were it not for the instruction that I have derived from it for myself; for in truth, in order to get used to the idea of death, I find there is nothing like coming close to it. Now, as Pliny says, each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up. What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.
And this is where M. goes off the rails. (Trust me; I know how easy it is to go off the rails mid-essay.) The rest of the piece turns into a spirited defense of his essay-writing, his desire to publish, and his very subject:
It is many years now that I have had only myself as object of my thoughts, that I have been examining and studying only myself; and if I study anything else, it is in order promptly to apply it to myself, or rather within myself. And it does not seem to me that I am making a mistake if — as is done in the other sciences, which are incomparably less useful — I impart what I have learned in this one, though I am hardly satisfied with the progress I have made in it. There is no description equal in difficulty, or certainly in usefulness, to the description of oneself. Even so one must spruce up, even so one must present oneself in an orderly arrangement, if one would go out in public. Now, I am constantly adorning myself, for I am constantly describing myself.
I found this passage heartening, because it seemed to justify my last four-plus years of writing this blog. For several paragraphs, M. defends the need to write about himself, attacking custom and critics. These essays, he tells us, are his means of knowing himself: “spying on himself from close up.” He vigorously defends the project, admitting that it can go awry, but confident that he’s pursuing his own nature deeply enough to reveal the “weaknesses and imperfections” so as not to become self-satisfied.
Still, it’s difficult to grasp why he’s writing about this in the midst of an essay about preparation for death. If he drew a clear line from the overall project of these essays to that preparation for death, I’d understand. But he appears to go in the opposite direction; that is, he uses the example of his near-death experience and its pertinence to this topic as a defense for writing about himself, rather than using all the other essays as the culmination of this goal.
And then we reach the conclusion, which throws all of M.’s essay-rumination into disarray. Of all classical figures for M. to evoke in the final paragraph, he chooses the example of Socrates:
Because Socrates alone had seriously digested the precept of his god — to know himself — and because by that study he had come to despise himself, he alone was deemed worthy of the name wise. Whoever knows himself thus, let him boldly make himself known by his own mouth.
Here endeth the essay. I was perplexed the first time I read this. It’s been 3 or 4 times now, and I still don’t know what to make of this final paragraph. First, I was bothered by the idea that it was Socrates’ self-loathing that made him wise. Then I read that last sentence, and thought, “But, Socrates never actually committed anything to words! What we know about him came from his students!”
So what the heck is M. trying to tell us? He cites Socrates a few paragraphs earlier, in defense of writing about himself:
What does Socrates treat of more fully than himself? To what does he lead his disciples’ conversation more often than to talk about themselves, not about the lesson of their book, but about the essence and movement of their soul?
Surely M. sees the difference between Plato’s dialogues and his own essays. The former, for everything else they contain, are also plays. The Phaedo isn’t meant as a verbatim transcript of the execution of Socrates; it’s a drama, and a treatise. Sure, it gives the example of Socrates living through his philosophy to embrace his own death, but we’re not getting Socrates’ word on that; we’re getting it from his student.
So, I’m sorry I dragged you along this far, because I remain confused by the aim of this piece. There are passages in the defense of the essay — particularly a piece on why he wants to be judged by words and not deeds — that are fantastic, but they don’t add up.
I’m out of practice.
