Category: Monday Morning Montaigne

Of three kinds of association (pp. 753-764) could be subtitled, “These are a few of my favorite things.” Montaigne starts out this one by telling us to flexible. It’s the first thing I told my associate editor after hiring her, and it’s also the lesson I tried to impart to a gathering of undergrads at my alma mater back in 2002. As M. put it, “We must not nail ourselves down so firmly to our humors and dispositions. Our principal talent is the ability to apply ourselves to various practices. It is existing, but not living, to keep ourselves bound and obliged by necessity to a single course.”

Back in my little speech at Hampshire College, I told the kids, “Learn how to learn. Because I guarantee that if you study one narrowly specialized field, you’ll come to hate it within five years of graduation and you’ll wish you could branch out into another field.”

But that’s just the intro to the essay. As I said, this one’s about the things M. loves most in life. I enjoyed the heck out of this one because I’m pretty sure I’d have written the exact same thing, if I were living well in an era that didn’t have basketball or comics.

The first of  M.’s faves is “rare and exquisite” friendship, consisting of conversation in its various forms. These conversations don’t have to be lofty. He tells us:

In our talks all subjects are alike to me. I do not care if there is neither weight nor depth in them; charm and pertinency are always there; everything is imbued with mature and constant good sense, and mingled with kindliness, frankness, gaiety and friendship.

(In fact, he digresses to warn against speaking too learnedly: “[Learned men] quote Plato and Sain Thomas in matters where the first comer would make as good a witness.” Which is to say, know your audience.)

The second of M.’s faves is “beautiful and well-bred women.” Rather than fill this section with personal anecdotes, he writes more about the need to Treat Her Right and not think solely with your Spitzer. Still, he tells us,

[I]f beauty of [the mind or the body] had necessarily to be lacking, I would have chosen sooner to give up the mental. It has its use in better things; but in the matter of love, a matter which is chiefly concerned with sight and touch, you can do something without the graces of the mind, bothing without the graces of the body.

And this leads us to M.’s favorite association. Friendship is “annoying by its rarity,” while love “withers with age,” so neither of them suffice. And that brings us to M.’s  association with books. I thought about paraphrasing his thoughts on his lifelong love of books, but I was so moved by his description of his library that I decided to transcribe that and offer it up.

When at home, I turn aside a little more often to my library, from which at one sweep I command view of my household. I am over the entrance, and see below me my garden, my farmyard, my courtyard, and into most of the parts of my house. There I leaf through now one book, now another, without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments. One moment I muse, another moment I set down or dictate, walking back and forth, these fancies of mine that you see here.

It is on the third floor of a tower; the first is my chapel, the second a bedroom and dressing room, where I often sleep in order to be alone. Above it is a great wardrobe. In the past it was the most useless place in my house. In my library I spend most of the days of my life, and most of the hours of the day. I am never there at night. Adjoining it is a rather elegant little room, in which a fire may be laid in winter, very pleasantly lighted by a window. And if I feared the trouble no more than the expense, I could easily add on to each side a gallery a hundred paces long and twelve wide, on the same level, having found all the walls raised, for another purpose, to the necessary height. Every place of retirement requires a place to walk. My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it. Those who study without a book are all in the same boat.

Te shape of my library is round, the only flat side being the part needed for my table and chair; and curving round me as it presents at a glance all my books, arranged in five rows of shelves on all sides. It offers rich and free views in three directions, and sixteen paces of free space in diameter.

In winter I am not there so continually; for my house is perched on a little hill, as its name indicates, and contains no room more exposed to the winds than this one, which I like for being a little hard to reach and out of the way, for the benefit of the exercise as much as to keep the crowd away. There is my throne. I try to make my authority over it absolute, and to withdraw this one corner from all society, conjugal, filial and civil. Everywhere else I have only a verbal authority, essentially divided. Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide! Ambition pays its servants well by keeping them ever on display, like a statue in a market place. “Great fortune is great slavery (Seneca).” Even their privy is not private. I have found nothing so harsh in the austere life that our monks practice as this that I observe in the orders of these men, a rule to be perpetually in company, and to have numbers of others present for any action whatsoever. I find it measurably more endurable to be always alone than never to be able to be alone.

If anyone tells me that it is degrading the Muses to use them only as a plaything and a pastime, he does not know, as I do, the value of pleasure, play, and pastime. I would almost say that any other aim is ridiculous. I live from day to day, and, without wishing to be disrespectful, I live only for myself; my purposes go no further.

In my youth I studied for ostentation; later, a little to gain wisdom; now, for recreation; never for gain. As for the vain and spendthrift fancy I had for that sort of furniture [books], not just to supply my needs, but to go three steps beyond, for the purpose of lining and decorating my walls, I have given it up long ago.

I know the news will break your heart, but there’s no Montaigne post this week. My headcold rendered me even less comprehensible this weekend. I’ll try to write about the first few essays of Book Three next week.

No rambling exegeses this week. Instead, you get a couple of passages from Montaigne. The first comes from his Defense of Seneca and Plutarch:

We must not judge what is possible and what is not, according to what is credible and incredible to our sense. . . . It seems to each man that the ruling pattern of nature is in him; to this he refers all other forms as to a touchstone. The ways that do not square with his are counterfeit and artificial. What brutish stupidity!

For my part, I consider some men very far above me, especially among the ancients; and although I clearly recognize my inability to follow them with my steps, I do not fail to follow them with my eyes and judge the powers that raise them so high . . . I well see the method which the great souls use to raise themselves, and I wonder at their greatness. And the flights that I find very beautiful, I embrace; and if my powers do not reach them, at least my judgment applies itself to them very gladly.

The next is from The Story of Spurina, which explores our physical and mental lusts and then relates the tale of a beautiful young man who decided to disfigure himself to avoid inflicting desire upon others. M. condemns this action as unwise, because desire is only one sin: “What is his ugliness later served to cast others into the sin of scorn and hatred or of envy for the glory of so rare a merit, or of calumny, interpreting this impulse as a frantic ambition?”

He goes on to tell us how, to quote Annie Lennox, “Dying is easy / It’s living that scares me to death”:

Those who evade the common duties and that infinite number of thorny and many-faceted rules that bind a man of precise probity in civil life, achieve, in my opinion, a fine saving, whatever point of especial rigor they may impose on themselves. It is in a sense dying to escape the trouble of living well. They may have some other prize; but the prize of difficulty it has never seem to me they had, nor do I think there is anything more arduous than keeping oneself straight amid the waves and rush of the world, loyally repsonding to and satisfying every part of one’s charge.

I’m perplexed, dear reader. Of virtue (pp. 646-653) starts with a promising thought — that it is not in a crisis that we learn who a man is, but through his day-to-day actions — and somehow evolves into a celebration of assassins. In between, we learn that the ritual suicides of Indian wives and Gymnosophists is a “miracle” because of their “constant premeditation through a whole life.”

Montaigne appears to contrast this will-to-death with Christian peoples’ professed belief in fate. That is, while M.’s contemporaries paid lip service to the idea that your number was called long in advance, they still panicked like chickens with their heads cut off during battles.

I suppose M.’s point is that it’s one thing to say you believe something, but another to integrate it into your life:

Except for order, moderation and constancy, I believe that all things are achieveable by a man who in general is very imperfect and defective.

Ha-ha. And I didn’t even go into his celebration of men cutting off their own junk out of spite or abnegation.

* * *

Bonus! To paraphrase Of a monstrous child (pp. 653-4): “A couple of days ago, I saw a particularly messed-up Siamese twin. I also know a farmer who was born without ‘nads. Must be God’s plan. And quit being so provincial; if it happened, it must be part of nature!”

I’m going to skip some of the short ones in this segment, such as Of riding post (pp. 626-7) and Of thumbs (pp. 634-5), on the grounds that I couldn’t come up with anything funny to write about them. If anything, they bolster the Montaigne-as-blogger argument, because we all have observations that don’t really go anywhere: “But they made sense at the time!”

This week’s main reading was Of evil means employed to a good end (pp. 627-630). Like Socrates does in the Republic, Montaigne draws out the correspondence between man and state:

The diseases and conditions of our bodies are seen also in states and government: kingdoms and republics are born, flourish, and wither with age, as we do. We are subject to a useless and harmful surfeir of humors. . . . States are often seen to be sick of a similar repletion, and it has been customary to use various sorts of purgation.

And so, just as the medicine of his day called for leeching or bloodletting for personal health, the health of the state also relied on such practices. In this case, though, establishing colonies and fighting wars serves to drain humors:

Sometimes also [the Romans] deliberately fostered wars with certain of their enemies, not only to keep their men in condition, for fear that idleness, mother of corruption, might bring them some worse mischief . . . but also to serve as a bloodletting for their republic and to cool off a bit the too vehement heat of their young men, to prune and clear the branches of that too lustily proliferating stock.

The choice, as M. puts it after citing several examples through history, is between foreign war and civil war, and the former is the “milder evil.”

He goes on to declare that gladiator fights were more humane than, um, the ancients’ practice of human vivisection of condemned criminals (?), because at least the latter was meant for the health of the soul while the latter only aided treatment of the body (?). M. does get around to condemning gladiatorial combat for getting out of hand —

The early Romans used criminals for such examples; but later they used innocent slaves, and even freeman who sold themselves for this purpose; finally Roman senators and knights, and even women.

— but he points out that this practice isn’t so bizarre, given the fact that, as he was writing, foreign mercenaries were fighting France’s internal quarrels merely for money.

* * *

Of the greatness of Rome (pp. 630-2): The Romans could make slaves out of kings, and kings out of ordinary citizens.

* * *

Not to counterfeit being sick (pp. 632-634): Don’t make a face or it’ll freeze like that.

I’m going to cover four shorter essays this week, because it’s my party.

* * *

Our first essay, Of giving the lie (pp. 611-615), actually continues the conversation from Of presumption, to my gratification (see last week’s post to get an idea of how overwhelming that essay is). Montaigne begins it by discussing the nature of his Essays and the purpose in writing a book of himself, despite his lack of “achievement”. After all, it’s natural for people to want to read the words of great men, but why would the public be interested in the essays of a minor noble who retired from public life at the age of 38? He offers a few defenses for his book, essays for his essays, as it were. First, it’s not for everybody:

This is for a nook in a library, and to amuse a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who may take pleasure in associating and conversing with me again in this image. Others have taken courage to speak of themselves because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, because I have found mine so barren and so meager that no suspicion of ostentation can fall upon my plan.

Maybe it’s for posterity (but probably not):

What a satisfaction it would be to me to hear someone tell me . . . of the habits, the face, the expression, the favorite remarks, and the fortunes of my ancestors. . . .

However, if my descendants have other tastes, I shall have ample means for revenge: for they could not possibly have less concern about me than I shall have about them by that time.

Okay, maybe I’m writing these essays for myself:

And if no one reads me, have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts? In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me.

Hmm: “It’s meant as a quiet(ish) conversation; it’d be nice if people could refer to it in future to get some idea of who I am/was; the act of writing it has helped me define myself.” Those sure sound like the top three reasons I write Virtual Memories. If only he added, “I’m looking for a three-book deal and a movie option.”

Anyway, M. lets these defenses of his self-writing lead into the topic of lying. “But whom shall we believe when he talks about himself, in so corrupt an age [. . .]? Since mutual understanding is brought about solely by way of words, he who breaks his word betrays human society.”

Lying (and lying about lying) inverts our values, M. contends, by demonstrating contempt for God and fear of men. We — the French of his time, who treated lying like a virtue — take more offense about being accused of lying than of any other sin. He touches on the subject only briefly, but promises to return to the topic sometime to cover “the varied etiquette of giving the lie, and our laws of honor in that matter, and the changes they have undergone.”

So the alleged topic of this essay is undertreated, in favor of M.’s discussion of his own aims and purposes. I didn’t mind that particularly, but the discussion on lying did contain a brief aside that left me hoping for more. In a comment about “certain nations of the new Indies,” M. mentions the “monstrous and unheard-of case” of their conquest, the desolation of which “has extended even to the entire abolition of the names and former knowledge of the places.” Even though he’s discussing their use of blood sacrifice, he’s clearly coming down heavily on the the practice of genocide in the New World. I sure hope he gets back to this topic, even if it’s only in brief allusions like this one.

* * *

The next essay, Of freedom of conscience (pp. 615-619), discusses the damaging effects of hyperorthodoxy. M. contends that, among those who were on the “right” side in France’s civil war, there were many “whom passion drives outside the bounds of reason.” Further, he argues, early Christians who destroyed pagan library “did more harm to letters than all the bonfires of the barbarians.”

The center of the essay is the life of Emperor Julian, the Apostate. M. characterizes Julian as a great man who “[i]n the matter of religion . . . was bad throughout,” and doubts the story that Julian returned to the faith in his dying breath. M. describes him as a harsh enemy of Christianity, “but not a cruel one.”

M.’s question is this: Why do some regimes allow freedom of conscience? Julian permitted this to create general dissension “in the hope that this complete freedom would augment the schisms and factions that divided them and would kepe the people from uniting.” However, the kings of M.’s time used it to reduce dissension; by permitting freedom of religion, they give the people one less thing to fight over.

I prefer to think, for the reputation of our kings’ piety, that having been unable to do what they would, they have pretended to will what they could.

* * *

In We taste nothing pure (pp 619-623), M. explores the way all our sensations alloy to their opposite. He brings up le petit mort in a way that makes me doubt that he enjoyed sex:

Our utmost sensual pleasure has an air of groaning and lament about it. Wouldn’t you say that it is dying of anguish? Indeed, when we forge a picture of it at its highest point, we deck it with sickly and painful epithets and qualities: languor, softness, weakness, faintness, morbidezza: a great testimony to their consanguinity and consubstantiality.

Despite that, M. takes his essay in an interesting direction when he gets away from the alloys of abstractions and explores one of my favorite topics: how we can be too smart for our own good:

[One’s] penetrating clarity has too much subtlety and curiosity in it. These must be weighted and blunted to make them more obedient to example and practice, and thickened and obscured to relate them to this shadowy and earthy life. Therefore common and less high-strung minds are found to be more fit and more successful for conducting affairs. And the lofty and exquisite ideas of philosophy are found to be inept in practice. . . You get lost considering so many contrasting aspects and diverse shapes. . . .

He who seeks and embraces all the circumstances and consequences impedes his choice. An average intelligence conducts equally well, and suffices to carry out, things of great or little weight.

Which puts me in mind of That Damned Hegel Quote, and the smart guy’s tendency to overthink and miss out on life.

* * *

Against do-nothingness (pp. 622-626) turned out to be a lot less interesting than its title led me to hope. It basically says that, if you’re a king, you should accompany your soldiers in war. Kind of a letdown, even if its key example was the death of “Moulay Moloch, king of Fez.”