Category: Monday Morning Montaigne

Yeah, yeah, I know: who cares about what Montaigne has to say about Cato the Younger? Well, as usual, M. uses the occasion of a brief (3+ pages) essay on Cato to digress into the nature and impact of poetry.

The essay begins with a gorgeous little passage about M.’s unwillingness to judge other people by using himself as a baseline:

I believe in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life; and in contrast with the common run of men, I more easily admit difference than resemblance between us. I am as ready as you please to acquit another man from sharing my conditions and principles. I consider him simply in himself, without relation to others; I mold him to his own model.

From here, there’s a little digression about how virtue doesn’t exist in “modern times,” which unfortunately put me in mind of the great Ali G monologue about “Respek”:

Respek is important. Da sad ting is, there is so little respek left in the world that if you look up the word in the dictionary, you’ll find it’s been taken out. You should learn to Respek everyone: animals, children, bitches, mingers, spazmos, lezzies, fatty boombas, and even gaylords. So to all you lot out there, but mainly to the normal people: Respek, westside.

But that gets us off the subject, namely Montaigne’s vivid description of poetry, its audience, its critics and the chain of art:

We have many more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to create it than to understand it. On a certain low level it can be judged by precepts and by art. But the good, supreme, divine poetry is above the rules and reason. Whoever discerns its beauty with a firm, sedate gaze does not see it, any more than he sees the splendor of a lightning flash. It does not persuade our judgment, it ravishes and overwhelms it.

The frenzy that goads the man who can penetrate it also strikes a third person on hearing him discuss it and recite it, as a magnet not only attracts a needle but infuses into it its own faculty of attracting others. And it is seen more clearly in the theater that the sacred inspiration of the muses, after first stirring the poet to anger, sorrow and hatred and transporting him out of himself wherever they will, then through the poet strikes the actor, and through the actor consecutively a whole crowd. It is the chain of our needles, hanging one form the other.

Booyakasha.

This week’s Montaine passage comes from On the Education of Children, which was written to Madame Diane De Foix, Comtesse De Gurson, who was expecting the birth of her first son. How do we know it’s a son? Well, “[You] are too noble-spirited to begin otherwise than with a male,” Michel tells us.

Montaigne uses the occasion of this essay to praise the merits of a liberal arts education. I wish I had it on hand to explain my master’s degree to people. He’s telling us to learn how to think, and how to be curious (and also how to inure ourselves to torture in case we end up in the clutches of an Inquisition). In this passage, we find that it’s not so important to quote the great thinkers (which Montaigne still does a bunch) as it is to understand how they thought:

Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust: let not Aristotle’s principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or the Epicureans. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured.

“For doubting pleases me no less than knowing,” says Dante. For if he embraces Xenophon’s and Plato’s opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. He who follows another follows nothing. He finds nothing; indeed he seeks nothing. “We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom.” [Seneca] Let him know that he knows, at least. He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own. Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later. It is no more according to Plato than according to me, since he and I understand and see it in the same way. The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.

Let him hide all the help he had, and show only what he has made of it. The pillages, the borrowers, parade their buildings, their purchases, not what they get from others. You do not see the gratuities of a member of Parliament, you see the alliances he has gained and honors for his children. No one makes public his receipts; everyone makes public his acquisitions.

The gain from our study is to have become better and wiser by it.

Oh, and Montaigne also offers up some advice for tutors, in the off chance this liberal education doesn’t take:

If this pupil happens to be of such an odd disposition that he would rather listen to some idle story than to the account of a fine voyage or a wise conversation when he hears one; if, at the sound of a drum that calls the youthful ardor of his companions to arms, he turns asideto another that invites him to the tricks of the jugglers; if, by his own preference, he does not find it more pleasant sweet to return dusty and victorious from a combat than from tennis or a ball with the prize for that exercise, I see no other remedy than for his tutor to strangle him early, if there are no witnesses, or apprentice him to a pastry cook in some good town, even though he were the son of a duke.

Sorta undermining my whole Montaigne-project, but then bringing it back home, this passage is from On Pedantry:

In truth, the care and expense of our fathers aims only at furnishing our heads with knowledge; of judgment and virtue, little news. Exclaim to our people about a passer-by, “Oh, what a learned man!” and about another, “Oh, what a good man!” They will not fail to turn their eyes and respect toward the first. There should be a third exclamation: “Oh, what blockheads!” We are eager to inquire: “Does he know Greek or Latin? Does he write in verse or in prose?” But whether he has become better or wiser — which would be the main thing — that is left out. We should have asked who is better learned, not who is more learned.

We labor only to fill our memory, and leave the understanding and the conscience empty. Just as birds sometimes go in quest of grain, and carry it in their beak without tasting it to give a beakful to their little ones, so our pedants go pillaging knowledge in books and lodge it only on the end of their lips, in order merely to disgorge it and scatter it to the winds.

It is wonderful how appropriately this folly fits my case. Isn’t it the same thing, what I do in most of this composition? I go about cadging from books here and there the sayings that please me, not to keep them, for I have no storehouses, but to transport them into this one, in which, to tell the truth, they are no more mine than in their original place. We are, I believe, learned only with present knowledge, not with past, any more than with future.

Montaigne, on prognostications:

True, there remain among us some means of divination by the stars, by spirits, bodily dreams, and the like — a notable example of the frenzied curiosity of our nature, which wastes its time anticipating future things, as if it did not have enough to do digesting the present.