Tag: montaigne

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Monday Morning Montaigne: On some verses of Virgil

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I had some trepidation going into On some verses of Virgil (pp. 774-831 in the Everyman’s edition), because it’s more than 50 pages long and I’ve, um, never read Virgil. My fears were unwarranted; “some” verses turned out to be 8 lines, and those 8 lines turned out to be the launching pad for a fantastic essay on love, sex and marriage. I should know better by now.

The actual verses he quotes are:

The goddess [Venus] ceased to speak, and snowy arms outflung

Around him faltering, soft fondling as she clung.

He quickly caught the wonted flame; the heat well-known

Entered his marrow, ran through every trembling bone.

Often a brilliant lightning flash, not otherwise,

Split by a thunderclap, runs through the cloudy skies

[. . .]

He spoke,

Gave the embraces that she craved; then on her breast,

Outpoured at last, gave himself up to sleep and rest.

With age and ill-health are wracking him, Montaigne uses those verses to explore the passions of his past, and sums up early that erotic love has no place in marriage. Not if you want your wife to keep her wits about her. “I see no marriages that sooner are troubled and fail than those that progress my means of beauty and amorous desires,” he tells us. “It needs more solid and stable foundations, and we need to go at it circumspectly, this ebullient ardor is no good for it.”

That said, M. doesn’t portray women as scheming, evil creatures. If anything, he finds them to be victims of the rules set up by men. His women have needs, desires, and sometimes make decisions as irrationally as his men do. By essay’s end, he contends that men and women “are cast in the same mold; except for education and custom, the difference is not great.” It’s a wonderful journey to this point, as M. uncovers the parts we keep covered and shows how we’re all prisoners of sex.

What makes this essay such a joy to me isn’t just M.’s hip take on gender issues, but his explanation for why he needs to write about the topic.

I am annoyed that my essays serve the ladies only as a public article of furniture, an article for the parlor. This chapter will put me in the boudoir. I like their society when it is somewhat private; when public, it is without favor or savor.

[. . .] What has the sexual act — so natural, so necessary and so just — done to mankind, for us not to dare talk about it without shame and for us to exclude it from serious and decent conversation? We boldly pronounce the words “kill,” “rob,” “betray”; and this one we do not dare pronounce, except between our teeth. Does that mean that the less we breathe of it in words, the most we have the right to swell our thoughts with it?

It’s as if he’s building Howard Stern’s platform, four hundred years early. Later in the essay, he even complains to Nature about being unable to satisfy a woman because his penis is too small: “Certainly she has treated me unfairly and unkindly, and done me the most enormous damage.”

In Howard Stern fashion, he explains his openness:

I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public. The wisdom of my lesson is wholly in truth, in freedom, in reality; disdaining, in the list of its real duties, those pretty, feigned, customary provincial rules; altogether natural, constant and universal; of which propriety and ceremony are daughters, but bastard daughters.

[. . .] Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it.

I wish I had time and space to write more about M.’s character. I feel like that’s my biggest failure with these writeups: an inability to convey the joy of meeting this man through his essays.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: On okay I didn’t finish this one

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.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of diversion

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!

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of three kinds of association

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.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of brain-cloud

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.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of the resemblance of children to fathers

With Of the resemblance of children to fathers (pp. 696-725), Montaigne closes out Book Two of the essays by ranting against medicine and the doctors who practice it. M. uses his standard practice of springboarding from his own experience into the wisdom and anecdotes of the ages. That portion of the essay takes up a full 20 pages, which I found way too long. I mean, as a man in my mid-to-late-30s, I can understand reticence about going to a doctor, but I don’t ramble on about the topic.

If the body of the essay was a bit tiresome, its introduction managed to catch my attention. M. starts out the piece by discussing his process of writing his essays. I quoted one bit a few weeks ago:

This bundle of so many disparate pieces is being composed in this manner: I set my hand to it only when pressed by too unnerving an idleness, and nowhere but at home. Thus it has built itself up with diverse interruptions and intervals, as occasions sometimes detain me elsewhere for several months.

In the seven or eight years since beginning the project, he tells us, he has made a “new acquisition”:

I have in that time become acquainted with the kidney stone through the liberality of the years. Familiarity and long acquaintance with them do not readily pass without some such fruit. I could wish that, out of many other presents that they reserve for those who frequent them long, they had chosen one that would have been more acceptable to me. For they could not have given me one that I had had in greater horror since my childhood.

M. tries to find an upside to his experience with the stone:

I have at least this profit from the stone, that it will complete what I have still not been able to accomplish in myself and reconcile and familiarize me completely with death: for the more my illness oppresses and bothers me, the less will death be something for me to fear.

That is, it’s not that he craves death to escape the pain; rather, the pain helps him lessen his fear of the end. He writes about other sufferers through history and their willingness to cling to life no matter how horrible their afflictions. It’s as if the immediacy of the body solves the questions of philosophy. Or, as Mike Tyson put it, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”

This “news” of M.’s kidney stone put me in mind of the close of Quicksilver, the first book of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. After a lavish and drunken party, Daniel Waterhouse awakes to find himself strapped into an operating table in Bedlam hospital, about to be “cut for the stone.” This being the late 17th century, there’s no anesthesia for the procedure. His friend Robert Hooke prepares him for the surgery, calmly telling Daniel, “Please do not go insane.”

M. contends that the pain doesn’t exactly unman him, that his years of studying and thinking have left his mind “in a considerably better condition of life than a thousand others, who have no fever or illness but what they give themselves by the fault of their reasoning.”

This brings M. to the ostensible topic of his essay. See, M.’s dad also suffered from the stone, although he didn’t develop it until he was 67, more than 25 years after M.’s birth. And so, M. asks:

Where was the propensity to this infirmity hatching all this time? And when he was so far from the ailment, how did this slight bit of his substance, with which he made me, bear so great an impression of it for its share? . . . [H]ow did it remain so concealed that I began to feel it forty-five years later, the only one to this hour out of so many brothers and sisters, and all of the same mother?

His father’s legacies play out in other essays — in fact, it was at his father’s behest that he translated Raymond Sebond’s work, which led to my least favorite portion of the Essays — but this is the first time that he explores this aspect of parents and children. Sadly, he doesn’t stick with the subject, soon launching into his 20-page diatribe against medicine.

On to Book Three! Let’s hope he doesn’t end it with Of airplane food.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Women and Men

I finished reading Book Two of the essays last weekend, but didn’t have time to write. I’m going to hold off on the final essay for now, because I’m still thinking about the beginning of it (the last 20 pages are a sorta by-the-book rant about doctors, but the first few pages are troubling me).

Anyway, Of three good women (pp. 683-690) starts out by telling us how most wives only show feelings for their husbands after the men’s deaths. “Life,” writes Montaigne, “is full of fireworks; death, of love and courtesy.” He contends that the measure of a marriage isn’t how much the wife laments and wails after her husband’s death, but how they got along while both were living.

To that end, he offers us three examples of good women.

One: inspected her husband’s genital ulcers, decided they were incurable and agonizing to him and . . . proposed double suicide!

Two: followed her P.O.W. husband back to Rome, tried bashing her head against a wall to demonstrate her grief, then stabbed herself fatally in front of her husband so he would find the courage . . . for double suicide!

Three: After Nero sentenced Seneca to death, the teacher’s young wife volunteered to . . . join him in suicide!

In that last case, she was prevented from dying because Nero was aghast that someone so beautiful and well-connected would give up her life. So she lived out her days virtuous and pale (she’d tried slitting her wrists, see?).

M. thinks stories like these could be strung together like Ovid’s Metamorphoses to create some sorta tapestry of, um, women who propose double suicide.

This essay redeemed itself by giving us Seneca’s perspective in its closing paragraphs. See, Seneca was a stoic and thus spent his life preparing for death. The thing is, he wrote in a letter to Lucilius that the love of his young wife inspired him to keep himself alive when he was sick and could’ve let himself die. It’s a touching passage, because S. tells his friend that, despite all his years and his training, holding onto life is important because of what we mean to other people:

Since I cannot bring her to love me more courageously, she is bringing me to love myself more solicitously; for we must allow something to honorable affections. And sometimes, even though occasions urge us to the contrary, we must call back life, even with torment; we must stop the soul from leaving between our teeth, since the law of living, for good men, is not as long as they please but as long as they ought.

To me, that story beats the Great Chain of Double Suicides that M. proposes.

* * *

M. follows women with men. In Of the most outstanding men (pp. 690-696), he ranks his top three men in history. The first two were obvious picks, but I have to admit that I’d never heard of the third one.

Homer comes up first. M. praises him for being first, best, and, well, Homer.

Being blind and poor, living before the sciences were reduced to rules and certain observations, he knew them so well that all those who since have taken it upon themselves to establish governments, to conduct wars, and to write about either religion or philosophy, of whatever sect they might be, or about the arts, have used him as a master very perfect in the knowledge of all things, and his books as a nursery of every kind of ability.

M. marvels over both Homer’s art qua art and at the contents of his tales, which have lasted millennia. He writes that it was “against the order of nature” that such poetry was written at the beginning of the form, because things start out imperfect and need to develop. It put me in mind of how titans like Winsor McCay and George Herriman were the early practitioners of the comic strip, yielding a golden age without true precursors.

This idea of precursors comes up a few times in this essay. Originality, is important to M. He admits that Virgil may be unsurpassable as a poet, but the Aeneid is “one single detail” of the Iliad. While this put me in mind first and foremost of the episode where Achilles get his new armor that reflects the entirety of his world, it also reminded me of a more important debate: Michael Jordan vs. Kobe Bryant.

It’s long been my contention that Kobe’s never going to step out from MJ’s shadow precisely because his career was modeled after Jordan’s, right down to needing Phil Jackson to get him over the hump for a championship. Jordan, meanwhile, had no model upon which to base his career. (Some would argue that Dr. J was his strong precursor, but I don’t think it holds up, esp. with Erving spending time in the ABA.)

So Homer is both Winsor McCay and Michael Jordan.

The second man on M.’s list is Alexander, for being even more super-awesome than Caesar, and not living long enough to run his empire into the ground. Dying at 33 helped, even if some of his successes required more luck than Caesar needed.

The third guy was Epaminondas, whom I’d never heard of. He does seem to have a pretty good pedigree as a soldier and as a man, getting named “first among the Greeks,” even if little of his record passed down to us (and Wikipedia). Sez M.:

Antiquity judged that if one examines minutely all the other great captains, there is found in each some special quality that makes him illustrious. In this man alone can be found a virtue and ability full and equal throughout, which, in all the functions of human life, leaves nothing to be desired, whether in public or private occupation, in peace or war, whether in living or in dying greatly and graciously. I know no form or fortune of man that I regard with so much honor and love.

These were kinda neat essays to include back to back, but I’m a little sad that the men are judged by their martial and artistic accomplishments, while the women were praised for their willingness to commit suicide.

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What It Is: 11/17/08

What I’m reading: You Know Me, Al, by Ring Lardner. A pal gave this to me for my birthday a few years ago. I haven’t read it, but I noticed that it’s available on Manybooks for my Kindle, so I loaded it up for this trip. Oh, and I finished Book Two of Montaigne’s essays, which means I’m heading into the home-stretch. Zowie. But I was too busy this weekend to write about it, so Monday Morning Montaigne is on hiatus this week.

What I’m listening to: Radio Retaliation by Thievery Corporation, La Radiolina by Manu Chao, and OK Computer by Radiohead. But not Radio Radio by Elvis Costello.

What I’m watching: Ricky Gervais’ standup special, the first half of Dog Day Afternoon, and The Savages. Gervais was a hoot, but I found it even funnier that I have no idea who “he” is, in relation to his two best-known characters.

What I’m drinking: G&Ts with this Q Tonic, a high-end tonic I picked up. And boy, are they awesome. Down with corn syrup!

What Rufus is up to: Probably pining away for me by now. And it looks like he convinced one of my neighbors to adopt a greyhound when her husband retires and they get a new dog.

Where I’m going: Atlanta for the AAPS meeting. In fact, I’m in Atlanta right now!

What I’m happy about: I had The Realization about the novel I should write. Now I gotta get writin’!

What I’m sad about: Being away from Amy & Rufus.

What I’m pondering: Whether I was tempting fate by time-stamping this post for Monday morning right before getting on a plane Sunday.

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Too unnerving an idleness

I feel guilty when I don’t manage to write for a day or so. It’s not like there’s a massive audience hanging on my every post, but I get mad at myself when I fall out of the habit of offering up at least a daily snippet of my psyche.

Yesterday, I was pretty swamped with work and bad work-vibes. This morning, I decided to read some Montaigne rather than engage in my usual routine of scanning through the 400 or so items in my RSS reader. I’m pretty close to finishing Book Two of the essays and, while I don’t feel as though I’m in a race, I did find the final three essays pretty compelling and complementary: Of three good women (pp. 683-690), Of the most outstanding men (pp. 690-696), and Of the resemblance of children to fathers (pp. 696-725).

I’ll try to write about them this weekend (I’m still working on the last one), but I’m traveling to Atlanta on  Sunday for a conference, so I may have to pare back. Regardless, M. managed to help me get over my guilt with his intro to Of the resemblance . . .:

This bundle of so many disparate pieces is being composed in this manner: I set my hand to it only when pressed by too unnerving an idleness, and nowhere but at home. Thus it has built itself up with diverse interruptions and intervals, as occasions sometimes detain me elsewhere for several months.