Category: Monday Morning Montaigne

In honor of Father’s Day, I thought Of the affection of fathers for their children would offer up some good material. As it turns out, M. uses most of the essay to argue that elderly men should know when it’s time to withdraw from worldly affairs, then concludes that the great writers correctly treasured their books above their children. Seriously:

If [Epicurus] had had to choose between leaving behind a deformed and ill-born child and leaving behind a stupid and inept book, [would he] not rather have chosen, and not only he but any man of like ability, to incur the former misfortune than the other? It would perhaps be impiety in Saint Augustine, for example — if it were proposed to him on the one hand to bury his writings, from which our religion receives such great fruit, or else to bury his children, in case he had any — if he did not prefer to bury his children.

Wow. So I decided to backtrack and go with Of honorary awards instead. M.’s point in this one is that, the more you give out an award, the less value it has. It comes off as sour grapes, because he received a knighthood of the Order of Saint Michael only after it had become more commonplace.

But this essay gets my Father’s Day seal of approval because it manages to hearken the Montaigne of today, Chris Rock:

We do not note in commendation of a man that he cares for the education of his children, since this is a common action, however just.

and

N*****s will say some dumb shit like, “I take CARE of MY kids!”

You’re SUPPOSED to, you dumb motherf****r!

(For the full experience, go here and advance to the 2:20 mark.)

Next week: either Of books or Of cruelty.

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.

I’m swamped at work, dear reader, and the essay that I read this weekend — Of practice — is requiring an awful lot of thought. Fortunately, a few essays earlier was one entitled, “Work can wait till tomorrow,” so I feel justified in giving you Tuesday Morning Montaigne this week.

Talk amongst yourselves.

UPDATE: I ain’t even gonna try. I’ve got WAY too much to get done on the magazine this week, so Montaigne’s going to have to wait till next (holiday) Monday.

I read The Biographer’s Tale in 2000. Picked it up in Gatwick on the way home from a conference in Italy. Or maybe I picked it up on the way in; I can’t remember. I suppose there’s a credit-card record somewhere. Since there’s no recording angel to keep track of it all, that’s as good as we get nowadays.

I wasn’t very impressed with the book. It had some beautiful passages, but it went to rather complex ends to make what I thought to be a pretty obvious point: that biography is a fool’s game, and that our lives are too complex to be captured by a writer. In one of my From the Editor columns, I wrote that biography is a petty calculus, trying to reduce the sweeping curves of life to understandable fragments. Sure, it’s a necessary act, this attempt at comprehending a person’s life, but I just don’t think it should ever be presented as definitive.

As it turns out, Montaigne was on this more than 400 years ago. With Of the inconsistency of our actions, he sounds like a proto-version of The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony — “I’m a million different people from one day to the next” — but explicitly warns against historians trying to write biographies:

[E]ven good authors are wrong to insist on fashioning a consistent and solid fabric out of us. They choose on general characteristic, and go and arrange and interpret all a man’s actions to fit their picture; and if they cannot twist them enough, they go and set them down to dissimulation.

The essay contains much more than that, offering M.’s typically vivid examples of how we contradict ourselves from day to day, act to act. What he gives us, through this essay, is the futility of learning. Or, perhaps, of understanding. For who we are, M. contends, doesn’t derive from our ordinary actions nor our extraordinary ones. Only the spirit that is utterly focused on ‘a certain and constant course’ is explainable, but that spirit is impossibly rare. The rest of us, he warns, are nothing but patchwork.

It is no wonder, says Seneca, that chance has so much power over us, since we live by chance. . . . What good does it do a man to lay in a supply of paints if he does not know what he is to paint? No one makes a definite plan of his life; we think about it only piecemeal. The archer must first know what he is aiming at, and then set his hand, his bow, his string, his arrow, and his movements for that goal. Our plans go astray because they have no direction and no aim. No wind works for the man who has no port of destination.

In a conventional essay, this would be the part where the writer implores us to become focused, become the arrow, the bow, the sinews, etc. But what’s interesting to me about this essay — and M.’s writing thus far — is that the wisdom that M. is trying to impart is not that we should strive to lead an impossibly focused life, but rather that we shouldn’t try to judge people based on what they do:

[A] sound intellect will refuse to judge men simply by their outward actions; we must probe the inside and discover what springs set men in motion. But since this is an arduous and hazardous undertaking, I wish fewer people would meddle with it.

This essay is followed by Of drunkenness, and then a lengthy one justifying suicide. Fortunately, he’s already warned us against too-deep reading into biography, so I won’t make any thesis about M.’s circumstances around that time.

No Monday Morning Montaigne this week, dear readers. While I did start reading Book Two of the essays this weekend, and found the first three — Of the inconsistency of our actions, Of drunkenness, and A custom of the island of Cea — quite engaging and worth rambling about, I didn’t have time to do so. I didn’t get into a writing mood during the train ride up to Boston yesterday, and the loud 3-second buzz that occurs every 3-4 minutes in my hotel room has left me a frazzled wreck.

Really, the fact that I’ve put these sentences together is something of an accomplishment.

Fortunately, you don’t need to know anything about Democritus or Heraclitus to enjoy this brief essay. (Yeah, “enjoy”. I know most of you dear readers don’t care for this project, but I’m sticking with it, because I’m finding all sorts of grist for my mill in it. Nyeh!) It begins with Montaigne explaining what he’s actually doing with these essays. See, he admits that he doesn’t know a ton about a lot of subjects, but insists on testing (essaying) them, as much to learn about himself as to learn about them:

I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all equally good to me. And I never plan to develop them completely. For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us.

M. looks to be setting us up for that Socratic paralysis (aporia) that leads to some sorta wisdom, but he veers off course when he writes about the individuality of minds:

Death is frightful to Cicero, desirable to Cato, a matter of indifference to Socrates. Health, conscience, authority, knowledge, riches, beauty, and their opposites — all are stripped on entry and receive from the soul new clothing, and the coloring that she chooses [. . .] and which each individual soul chooses [. . .] Let us no longer make the external qualities of things our excuse; it is up to us to reckon them as we will.

What I’m getting out of this is that the pursuit of Truth is fine, but it’s a different project than understanding the vagaries of the human soul. And when it comes to that soul, we need to be aware of the lows as well as the highs:

Every movement reveals us. That same mind of Caesar’s which shows itself in ordering and directing the battle of Pharsalia, shows itself also in arranging idle and amorous affairs. We judge a horse not only by seeing him handled on a racecourse, but also by seeing him walk, and even by seeing him resting in the stable. [. . .] Each particle, each occupation, of a man betrays him and reveals him just as well as any other.

“Every movement reveals us.” Most religions feature an afterlife in which judgment gets passed on the dead, all of their deeds and thoughts recorded on a ledger, held to account. For M., we go in the other direction, extrapolating the soul from a single fragment. For those of us who consider our lives to be tangles of contradictions, this is a strange notion, but maybe M.’s telling us that we don’t have the perspective to understand what seems inexplicable to us about ourselves.

In his essays, M. quotes liberally from Cicero, Plutarch, Virgil and others. From me, you get the Coen brothers:

It’s like pulling away from the maze. While you’re in the maze, you go through willy-nilly, turning where you think you have to turn, banging into the dead ends, one thing after another.

But you get some distance on it, and all those twists and turns, why, they’re the shape of your life. It’s hard to explain. But seeing it whole gives you some peace.

–“The Man Who Wasn’t There”

When M. finally gets to the Democritus/Heraclitus comparison, it’s merely to ask what’s better: to laugh at the “vain and ridiculous condition of man” or to lament and pity it. He sides with the former, figuring that laughter shows more disdain for mankind, while pity gives it some esteem: “We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.”

I’ll let you know when I figure out what his concept of redemption is. If you’ve read this far, why don’t you leave a comment about what yours is?

I thought of writing on Of sumptuary laws this week, because it had a great premise: if you want to get the masses to cease “vain and insane expenditures for the table and for clothes,” don’t restrict them and make them appropriate only for princes; make them commonplace and watch as the masses lose interest in them.

Instead, I decided to write about Of names, a little meditation on the nature (and transience) of celebrity, fame, self-invention and brand awareness.

M. sets out by telling us how throughout history certain names seem “earmarked by fate” in the genealogy of princes: Ptolemy, Henry, Charles, Baldwin, William/Guillaume. In fact, we learn, Henry II once held a feast in which he divvied up the knights by name: there were 110 named William.

Names are funny like that. I’ve only met one other Gil in my life (not a Gilbert, of whom I’ve met plenty), and no one with my brother’s name, Boaz. Having names like this in suburban NJ in the ’70s got a bit rough, but I’m sure the other kids would’ve found something else to goof on, if they didn’t have our names.

By the late ’80s, we would find ourselves in a world in which the biggest action-movie stars were named Bruce, Arnold and Sylvester (later followed by a Wesley), so I suppose some progress was made since M.’s time. (Of course, at present, we actually have no big action-movie stars.)

Montaigne later moves from the felicity of pleasant-sounding names to the inevitabilities of being forgotten and/or debased, as a function of calling “everyone by the name of his land or lordship”:

Coats of arms have no more security than surnames. I bear azure powdered with trefoils or, with a lions paw of the same, armed gules in fesse. What privilege has this design to remain privately in my house? A son-in-law will transport it into another family; some paltry buyer will make of it his first coat of arms; there is nothing which more change and confusion is found.

It’s here that he grows most ruminative, for he’s finally latched onto the subject he seems to care about the most; how we accommodate ourselves toward death. Why focus so intently on symbols of glory and reputation, he wonders, remarking, “Oh, what a brave faculty is hope, which, in a mortal subject and in a moment, usurps infinity, immensity, eternity!”

Soon, names themselves become part of the same group of symbols for M., reduced to penstrokes and syllables: “What is that [name], when all is said and done, but a sound, or three or four strokes of a pen, so easy to vary in the first place?” The great martial names that he cites throughout his works are benumbed by repetition over generations. Ultimately, he asks, “What prevents my groom from calling himself Pompey the Great?”

But after all, even if he does, what means or powers exist that can attach and join this glorious sound or the honored pen strokes that represent this name to my groom when he is dead, or to that other Pompey who had his head cut off in Egypt, in such a way that they can get advantage out of them? “Do you think buried ghosts, or ashes, care for this?” [Virgil]

He ends with an epigram from Juvenal about how Romans, barbarians and Greeks “endured all risks and labors with this aim, / so much more burning is the thirst for fame / than that for virtue.”

All of which would seem pretty run-of-the-mill except for the fact that M. never gets around to discussing God or heaven. That is, he denounces the pursuit of fame, but outside of a small reference to virtue, doesn’t discuss an alternative. He’s saying that the fixation on “making one’s name” is inane, but he doesn’t postulate some greater glory to be found in the hereafter.

And you guys wonder why I keep subjecting you to this on a Monday morning.

This one follows Of Solitude, which covers the best way to approach retirement. Of Solitude ends with a lengthy paraphrase of Epicurus and Seneca, meant to contrast with not-so-good advice from Pliny the Younger and Cicero. It looks like the latter felt that retirement is the time to start burnishing one’s rep through books & letters, while the former figured that one had time enough for that in one’s prime. M. paraphrases

“Seek no longer that the world should speak of you, but how you should speak to yourself. Retire into yourself, but first prepare to receive yourself there; it would be madness to trust in yourself if you do not know how to govern yourself. There are ways to fail in solitude as well as in company.”

In the next essay, he writes a little more about Cicero, and the practice of publishing one’s letters. M. finds this pretty sleazy, but what I enjoyed most was his description of his own letter-writing, mainly because it sums up my own conversational style awfully well:

I have naturally a humorous and familiar style, but of a form all my own, inept for public negotiations, as my language is in every way, being too compact, disorderly, abrupt, individual; and I have no gift for letters of ceremony that have no other substance than a fine string of courteous words. I have neither the faculty nor the taste for those lengthy offers of affection and service. I do not really believe all that, and I dislike saying much of anything beyond what I believe. That is a far cry from present practice, for there never was so abject and servile a prostitution of complimentary addresses: life, soul, devotion, adoration, serf, slave, all these words have such vulgar currency that when letter writers want to convey a more sincere and respectful feeling, they have no way left to express it.

I mortally hate to seem a flatterer; and so I naturally drop into a dry, plain, blunt way of speaking, which, to anyone who does not know me otherwise, verges a little on the disdainful. I honor most those to whom I show the least honor; and where my soul moves with great alacrity, I forget the proper steps of ceremony. I offer myself meagerly and proudly to those to whom I belong. And I tender myself least to those to whom I have given myself most; it seems to me that they should read my feelings in my heart, and see that what my words express does an injustice to my thought.

In welcoming, in taking leave, in thanking, in greeting, in offering my services, in all those verbose compliments imposed by the ceremonial laws of our etiquette, I know no one so stupidly barren of words as myself. And I have never been made use of to write letters of favor and recommendation but that the man for whom they were written found them dry and weak.

Last week, I fussed endlessly over a recommendation letter for a member of my magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. He’s an Indian pharma-scientist, trying to get a green card so he can take a new job here in the U.S. I felt defeated by the time I was done writing it, ashamedly e-mailed the text to him, and heard back minutes later, “This is great! Thank you so much! Please put it on letterhead and send it over!”

So maybe M. & I just have low self-esteem.