Category: Monday Morning Montaigne

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.”

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.

As near as I can tell, this is Montaigne’s progression in Of coaches (pp. 831-849):

1. I don’t like riding in coaches; I’m much more comfortable on horseback.
2. Some ancient kings and emperors sure used some strange and extravagant means of conveying their coaches.
3. Kings and emperors tend to spend their subjects’ money liberally and ostentatiously.
4. People sure were inventive in the days of old, and the past is like a million foreign countries.
5. Boy, have we committed some awful atrocities on the natives in the Americas.
6. The king of Peru never used a coach, but was borne in a throne of gold by his subjects.

It’s that second-to-last section that M. focuses on, detailing a number of grotesque abuses that the Spanish inflicted on the natives in the new world. Reflecting on the ill treatment of the natives, he laments that America wasn’t discovered in the time of Alexander, who could have brought out the better aspects of their souls, rather than push them into darkness and war as the explorers did. I was caught up on that point, as it seemed to indicate that M. thinks the world would have been better off without a Catholic church.

Moreover, I was fascinated by the notion that, in his time, the Americas  really were a new world. I’m not sure I ever considered how Columbus’ discovery was understood in that era (the first century or so after 1492). M. writes:

Our world has just discovered another world (and who will guarantee us that it is the last of its brothers, since the daemons, the sibyls, and we ourselves have up to now been ignorant of this one?) no less great, full, and well-limbed than itself, yet so new and so infantile that it is still being taught its A B C; not fifty years ago it knew neither letters, nor weights and measures, nor clothes, nor wheat, nor vines. . . . If we are right to infer the end of our world, and that poet is right about the youth of his own age, this other world will only be coming into the light when ours is leaving it. The universe will fall into paralysis; one member will be crippled, the other in full vigor.

I’m sure there’s some cutting remark to be made here, contrasting America with Europe, but I’m not the guy to make it.

This week’s Montaigne essay, On some verses of Virgil (pp. 774-831), turned out to be really good. However, I didn’t have time to write about it, so I’m going to reread it this week and try to put something together for you by next Monday.

Suffice to say, my worries about a 50-plus-page essay titled after a poet I’ve never read turned out to be unfounded. I should know better than to take M.’s titles on face value.

I was flummoxed by Of diversion (pp. 764-774) and tempted to skip writing about it. Problem is, the next essay, On some verses of Virgil, is

1. 50 pages long, and
2. about a poet I’ve never read.

So you’re stuck with Of diversion this week. The first two-thirds of this one discuss the various ways that individuals and the polis can be, well, diverted from unpleasant thoughts or feelings. Montaigne begins by telling us how he once consoled a sad woman, not by telling her that her sorrow was useless, but “very gently deflecting our talk and diverting it bit by bit to subjects nearby, then a little more remote, as she gave me more of her attention, I imperceptibly and entirely soothed for as long as I was there.” Once he left, she showed no improvement.

He brings up similar cases of diverting attention from a singular topic. M. being M., that subject tends to be death. He thinks there’s a rare person who can look death square in the eye; most men on the gallows will begin “praying aloud, with a violent and continual excitement,” and “busying their senses . . . as much as they can.” Facing death, we put ourselves elsewhere, in diversions of escape, or our children’s futures, or the lasting glory of our works.

The last third of the essay, as I said, goes off the rails for me. M. explains, “It takes little to divert and distract us, for it takes little to hold us.” From there, he launches into a digression about how we’re moved by lamentation in fiction, how actors and orators convince themselves of the sorrow of their speeches, and how people will mourn when they see a funeral procession, even if they don’t know who’s in the casket. He makes good points about the ease with which we get preoccupied, but it seems out of place in an essay that focuses on the implacability of grief and the difficulties we have diverting it.

Still, he offers up a wonderful little portrait of Keeping It Real after a loved one’s death:

In a region near our mountains the women play the part of Prester Martin [who spoke both parts at Mass]; for even as they magnify their grief for their lost husband by remembering the good and agreeable qualities he had, at the same time they also assemble and proclaim his imperfetions, as if to bring themselves to some sort of balance and to turn themselves aside from pity to disdain; with much better grace, at that, than we who, at the loss of a casual acquaintance, pride ourselves on lending him new and undeserved praises and making him quite another man, when we have lost sight of him, than he seemed ot use when we were seeing him. As if regret were an instructive thing, or tears enlightened our understanding by washing it. From this moment I renounce any favorable testimonials that anyone may want to give me not beause I shall deserve them but because I shall be dead.

On to Virgil!