{"id":3459,"date":"2009-02-16T05:00:31","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T10:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=3459"},"modified":"2009-02-15T17:23:07","modified_gmt":"2009-02-15T22:23:07","slug":"monday-morning-montaigne-of-vanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-of-vanity","title":{"rendered":"Monday Morning Montaigne: Of vanity"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think Montaigne’s fighting with the Essays as much as I am. At least, after 56 pages of Of vanity<\/em> (pp. 876-932), I feel as if I have less of a grip on them than I did before. Since I haven’t read any background material or criticism, I have no idea if he knew he was approaching the end of the last book of Essays, or if he considered this an open-ended project, but it feels as though he’s trying to justify what he’s been writing for the previous 15 years, trying to explain how his style has changed, why his titles don’t seem to match their subjects, why his chapters have grown longer, how he can and can’t live up to his father’s legacy, how difficult it is to capture the fluidity of his own life (a life he considers rather stable and stolid).<\/p>\n

I grew frustrated plenty of times in this one, as M. flitted from subject to subject, as organized by , and then felt kicked in the nuts when M. wrote near the end (p. 927):<\/p>\n

It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room. I seek out change indiscriminately and tumultuously. My style and my mine alike go roaming. A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid, say the precepts of our masters, and even more so their examples.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

M. justifies his expansively longer essays by declaring that the reader needs to make a longer commitment to understanding them. That is, the shorter essays were over too soon to get the reader’s full attention. But this one covers so many topics, so many internal and external subjects, that it truly does live up to its title, but renders itself nearly useless in the process.<\/p>\n

I need to go back to this one and diagram the whole shebang, in hopes of finding some structure that makes sense of it. I won’t make you put up with that, unless I come up with something interesting. On the plus side, there should only be 4 more of these posts!<\/p>\n

But, to be fair, I offer up a neat passage near the end of this one:<\/p>\n

A thousand poets drag and languish prosaically; but the best ancient prose — and I scatter it here indiscriminately as verse — shines throughout with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and gives the effect of its frenzy. To poetry we must certainly concede mastery and preeminence in speech. The poet, says Plato, seated on the tripod of the Muses, pours out in a frenzy whatever comes into his mouth, like the spout of a fountain, without ruminating and weighing it; and from him escape things of different colors and contradictory substance in an intermittent flow. He himself is utterly poetic, and the old theology is poetry, the scholars say, and the first philosophy. It is the original language of the Gods.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think Montaigne’s fighting with the Essays as much as I am. At least, after 56 pages of Of vanity (pp. 876-932), I feel as if I have less of a grip on them than I did before. Since I haven’t read any background material or criticism, I have no idea if he knew he … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Monday Morning Montaigne: Of vanity”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[45],"tags":[118],"class_list":["post-3459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-montaigne","tag-montaigne"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-TN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3402,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-of-the-art-of-discussion","url_meta":{"origin":3459,"position":0},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: Of the art of discussion","author":"Gil","date":"February 9, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"With only six of the Essays remaining, I feel as though there should be some sort of growing imperative, a sense of completion in the final 200 pages. So I was a bit disappointed when I read (and re-read) Montaigne's Of the art of discussion (pp. 854-876), but I didn't\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3034,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-of-brain-cloud","url_meta":{"origin":3459,"position":1},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: Of brain-cloud","author":"Gil","date":"December 8, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"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.","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2704,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/montaigne-update","url_meta":{"origin":3459,"position":2},"title":"Montaigne update","author":"Gil","date":"October 16, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Hmm. Maybe I should have pushed my Montaigne-as-blogger idea, floated a few weeks ago when I wrote up Of presumption in my Monday Morning Montaigne series. Here's a piece from Andrew Sullivan's article \"Why I Blog\" in the new ish of The Atlantic: But perhaps the quintessential blogger avant la\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2411,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-back-next-week","url_meta":{"origin":3459,"position":3},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: Back Next Week","author":"Gil","date":"September 8, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I was too busy\/addled this weekend to write my Monday Morning Montaigne post, dear readers. But I did finish the Apology for Raymond Sebond, and have (what I think) are some neat observations about it. I was gratified to see that M. loosened up a bit more in this last\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2239,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-the-reloadening","url_meta":{"origin":3459,"position":4},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: The Reloadening!","author":"Gil","date":"August 12, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I gave up on my Monday Morning Montaigne project a year ago for two reasons. The first one was that I reached Apology for Raymond Sebond, the central essay of the second book. This essay -- the introduction to (and kindasorta defense of) Sebond\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Natural Theology, which Montaigne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dad asked\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1495,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/monday-morning-montaigne-of-taking-a-break","url_meta":{"origin":3459,"position":5},"title":"Monday Morning Montaigne: Of taking a break","author":"Gil","date":"May 7, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Monday Morning Montaigne"","block_context":{"text":"Monday Morning Montaigne","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/monday-morning-montaigne"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3459"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3461,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3459\/revisions\/3461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}