Monday Morning Montaigne: Of the inconsistency of our actions

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.