I didn’t get a chance to check in on my Google Reader while I was in New Orleans this week, so when I got home last night, I discovered that there were 4,082 items stacked up and waiting for me. Here are some of them.
Two years ago, I wrote about Montaigne’s library tower, which he describes in one of my favorite essays, Of Three Kinds of Association. I keep a vision of that room in mind anytime I think about knocking down our house and rebuilding, although I’m pretty sure local zoning laws won’t permit a tower like the one in Bordeaux. The place has been a sort of Library of Babel to me, the non-existent room that holds everything I can’t wait to read.
Imagine my surprise when I found out the tower is still standing and open to tours! Looks like I know where my next overseas vacation will be! (It’ll likely be a better trip than the one I wanted to take to the isle of Jura to see Orwell’s last home.)
What I’m reading: I finished Up in the Air
During a conversation we had on Sunday, Samuel R. Delany mentioned to me that the introduction to his essay collection Longer Views
What I’m listening to: Dave Rawlings Machine’s A Friend of a Friend
What I’m watching: Pootie Tang, which was far funnier than I expected. Still terrible, but pretty funny.
What I’m drinking: Desert Juniper & Q-Tonic
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Trying to fit together in the one-dog crate again. I had a Sunday appt. (cleaning a small section of Chip Delany’s apartment) and Amy had to work all weekend, so we had to delay Otis’ debut on the Sunday morning Wawayanda park greyhound hike for another week. Grr.
Where I’m going: Nowhere special.
What I’m happy about: Getting to see some old pals this weekend.
What I’m sad about: Missing the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival this weekend, but my visa’s not up to date, so there’s no way I could’ve made it to Brooklyn.
What I’m worried about: Contracting hantavirus from trying to clean Delany’s apartment.
What I’m pondering: What book I’ll pick up next.
Last year, one of my Montaigne posts included his description of his library, which is one of the few things in life I’m envious of.
But now the New York Observer tells me it can all be ours — on Central Park West, no less — for a mere $7.5 million!
Seriously, go over to the architect’s site and check out the pix of this gorgeous duplex. Then send me money so I can buy the place. I promise I’ll let you come over.
(But I bet the co-op board has a “No dogs” policy. Grr.)
Aesop, that great man, saw his master pissing as he walked. “What next?” he said. “Shall we have to shit as we run?” Let us manage our time; we shall still have a lot left idle and ill spent.
Sorry, dear readers, but I’ll write my last MMM post next week. I’m kinda busy this morning and I had some stuff to do last weekend. But I did finish the final essay, Of experience (pp. 992-1045), whence the passage above derives.
It takes Montaigne 22 pages to bring physiognomy into Of physiognomy (pp. 964-992), but Socrates’ ugly mug looms over the entire essay.
M. uses the essay to stress his desire for natural virtue, for living within one’s nature, for allowing death in its time. Law and religion should “perfect and authorize†this virtue, but we should focus on that which “sustains itself without help.†To that end, he praises both Socrates’ plain-spoken style — “His mouth is full of nothing but carters, joiners, cobblers and masons†— and the lives of the peasants.
Peasants, M. tells us, don’t spend their days worrying about their end. They work, and they get old, and they die. It’s not so easy for us. Learning is a vice, bringing us anticipation and anxiety toward death. M. contrasts
I never saw one of my peasant neighbors cogitating over the countenance and assurance with which he would pass this last hour. Nature teaches him not to think about death except when he is dying. And then he has better grace about it than Aristotle, whom death oppresses doubly, both by itself and by such a long foreknowledge.
with
What if knowledge, trying to arm us with new defenses against natural mishaps, has imprinted in our fancy their magnitude and weight, more than the reasons and subtleties to protect us from them?
It’s a messed-up way of looking at things, to my modern eyes, because it portrays the peasants as animals, not people. But then, some of us do the same thing when we characterize poor people and goof on “Wal-Mart America,†so hey. He proposes a school of stupidity, so that we can learn how to stop worrying about death.
(Last week, when I was walking to my car at lunchtime, I passed a Hispanic guy who was working on the landscaping crew outside our office. We made way for each other on the sidewalk, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge each other as people. In my car, I thought about M.’s sentimental/animal take on peasants and the lead character’s remark in Synecdoche, New York: “There are billions of people in the world, and none of those people is an extra.†I wondered what his life was like, what he does with it, and what he saw and thought when we walked past each other.)
Death, M. writes, so close to the end of his book and his life, “is indeed the end, but not therefore the goal, of life; it is its finish, its extremity, but not therefore its object. Life should be an end unto itself, a purpose unto itself; its rightful study is to regulate, conduct and suffer itself. Among the many other duties comprised in this general and principal chapter on knowing how to live is this article on knowing how to die.â€
In the middle of the essay, M. digresses from the subject of learning and readiness-to-death to discuss the civil war and plague that has racked his region. It seemed out of place to me, but shortly after, M. quotes a page-long passage from Plato’s Apology, in which Socrates addresses his judges in Athens. His unwillingness to argue with the judges, tacitly accepting their death sentence, contrasts with the civil war of M.’s time: the philosopher of the ages will let his city put him to death because his defense argument would overthrow the authority of the city itself. Better to trust the gods to put things straight.
It was difficult to keep the pieces of this essay in front of me. It fragments wildly. As I mentioned, M. doesn’t get to the subject of physiognomy until page 22 of this 28-page essay. When he does, I’m not sure what point he’s trying to make. On the one hand, he tells us, “There is nothing more likely than the conformity and relation of the body to the spirit.†On the other, the two most beautiful spirits he cites — Socrates and La Boetie — were ugly men. “The face,†he writes, “is a weak guarantee.â€
However, he concludes Of physiognomy with a pair of anecdotes in which his life was threatened, but his kindly demeanor and honest words saved him. “If my face did not answer for me, if people did not read in my eyes and my voice the innocence of my intentions, I would not have lasted so long without quarrel and without harm.â€
(Good news! You only have on more of these insane, rambling posts to go!)
Don’t invent reasons to explain every fact. For example, just because you had really good sex with a crippled woman, it does not validate a proverb that says cripples are better in bed.
Seriously. That’s the example he chose.
On to Of physiognomy!
There’s a lot going on in Of husbanding your will (pp. 932-954): Montaigne relates the experience of his two-term stint as mayor of Bordeaux (by good luck, he didn’t have to do anything dramatic); he explains how the idea of giving up one’s own desires for the “greater good†is horseshit (or, at best, a noble lie to make normal people do good); he ties habit and nature into one (so as to remove excuses for either); he looks inward to show how, contra Oscar Wilde, the best way to defeat temptation is to run the other way at the slightest sign of it, since that’s a lot easier than dealing with it once it’s in your heart); . And most importantly (to me), he reminds us that You Are Not Your Job.
Most of our occupations are low comedy. “The whole word plays a part.†(Petronius) We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own. We cannot distinguish the skin from the shirt. It is enough to make up our face, without making up our heart. I see some who transform and transubstantiate themselves into as many new shapes and new beings as they undertake jobs, who are prelates to their very liver and intestines, and drag their position with them even into their privy. I cannot teach them to distinguish the tips of the hat that are for them from those that are for their office, or their retinue, or their mule. . . .
The mayor and Montaigne have always been two, with a very clear separation. For all of being a lawyer or a financier, we must not ignore the knavery there is in such callings. An honest man is not accountable for the vice and stupidity of his trade, and should not therefore refuse to practice it: it is the custom of his country, and there is profit in it. We must live in the world and make the most of it such as we find it. But the judgment of an emperor should be above his imperial power, and see and consider it as an extraneous accident; and he should know how to find pleasure in himself apart, and to reveal himself like any Jack or Peter, at least to himself.
So don’t be your job. Figure out where it ends and you begin. And don’t bore the crap out of me by complaining about the estoeric aspects of your workplace and coworkers. I promise to do the same; I’ll only bore you with rants about Montaigne. And there are only 3 more of those. (On deck for next week: Of cripples!)
Oh, and one other takeaway from this essay: accumulating wealth or wisdom in old age is useless: “Mustard after dinner.â€
I think Montaigne’s fighting with the Essays as much as I am. At least, after 56 pages of Of vanity (pp. 876-932), I feel as if I have less of a grip on them than I did before. Since I haven’t read any background material or criticism, I have no idea if he knew he was approaching the end of the last book of Essays, or if he considered this an open-ended project, but it feels as though he’s trying to justify what he’s been writing for the previous 15 years, trying to explain how his style has changed, why his titles don’t seem to match their subjects, why his chapters have grown longer, how he can and can’t live up to his father’s legacy, how difficult it is to capture the fluidity of his own life (a life he considers rather stable and stolid).
I grew frustrated plenty of times in this one, as M. flitted from subject to subject, as organized by , and then felt kicked in the nuts when M. wrote near the end (p. 927):
It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room. I seek out change indiscriminately and tumultuously. My style and my mine alike go roaming. A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid, say the precepts of our masters, and even more so their examples.
M. justifies his expansively longer essays by declaring that the reader needs to make a longer commitment to understanding them. That is, the shorter essays were over too soon to get the reader’s full attention. But this one covers so many topics, so many internal and external subjects, that it truly does live up to its title, but renders itself nearly useless in the process.
I need to go back to this one and diagram the whole shebang, in hopes of finding some structure that makes sense of it. I won’t make you put up with that, unless I come up with something interesting. On the plus side, there should only be 4 more of these posts!
But, to be fair, I offer up a neat passage near the end of this one:
A thousand poets drag and languish prosaically; but the best ancient prose — and I scatter it here indiscriminately as verse — shines throughout with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and gives the effect of its frenzy. To poetry we must certainly concede mastery and preeminence in speech. The poet, says Plato, seated on the tripod of the Muses, pours out in a frenzy whatever comes into his mouth, like the spout of a fountain, without ruminating and weighing it; and from him escape things of different colors and contradictory substance in an intermittent flow. He himself is utterly poetic, and the old theology is poetry, the scholars say, and the first philosophy. It is the original language of the Gods.
With only six of the Essays remaining, I feel as though there should be some sort of growing imperative, a sense of completion in the final 200 pages. So I was a bit disappointed when I read (and re-read) Montaigne’s Of the art of discussion (pp. 854-876), but I didn’t think the last season of The Wire held up to the rest of the series either.
This essay is meant to cover M.’s guide to worthwhile conversation / argument. I was hoping for something that would serve as an explanation of What I Got Out of St. John’s College, but instead it treads over old territory of how the learned reveal themselves to be imbeciles, how princes have dignity through their offices and not their thoughts, how the way in which we approach problems is more important than the substance of what we say about them, and how silly his own speech can be.
It all feels like a rehash, and I suppose there’s some meta-way in which the structure of the essay actually mirrors what he’s seeing about the forms of argument, but I didn’t see it in my readings.
So I’m going to bail on this one, leave you with a single quote —
It is unfortunate that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and trust yourself, and always sends you away discontented and diffident, whereas opinionativeness and heedlessness fill their hosts with rejoicing and assurance.
— and get started on the 55-page Of vanity.
