Category: literature

I made two discoveries when I started my Montaigne reading this weekend: the essays are actually divided into three books, and I was about 20 pages from the end of the first book! So my self-imposed project of reading the Essays and writing about them each Monday was actually going to reach some sorta milestone. Yippee.

My other discovery this weekend is that M.’s essays “only” comprise 1,045 pages of the collection, while the remaining 300 are from letters and his travel journal. So the project has become slightly easier, I guess.

Now, I know there are plenty of things that are bizarre about this Monday Morning Montaigne project, but I guess the most bizarre is that I did zero research into Montaigne before starting it. Honestly, I only knew two things about him prior to starting out:

1. The undergraduates at St. John’s College read some of the essays (but we didn’t in the Graduate Institute).
2. Harold Bloom included him among the greatest writers in his Western Canon (but I don’t recall reading the chapter on Montaigne, which was combined with Moliere).

So, soon after finishing at St. John’s (c. 1995), I figured I oughtta read them thar essays sometime. Problem is, the paperback edition I bought used a terrible typeface, so I wish-listed the Everyman’s hardcover edition of his complete works, which my in-laws-to-be got for me at the holidays in 2005.

Then the goofy “3M” title of these posts hit me, and I got started. Early on, I would try to read at least one essay and post a quote-of-the-week sorta thing, but eventually I decided I’d try to write a little about these essays. Fortunately for you, you can always just scroll down to the next post.

So, what I know of Montaigne I’m getting from the essays themselves (along with an occasional biographical footnote in the text). I don’t necessarily advise this course, but I feel like I’m learning about him and myself, and that’s making it all worth it for me.

This week I thought I was going to have to write on Of Prayers, in which M. complains about the commonplace of prayer, its overuse, the deceitfulness of those who pray in public, and the problems with translating the holy word into the languages of Jews and Mohammedans:

There is . . . a certain passage in Xenophon where he shows that we should pray to God more rarely, since it is not likely that we can restore our soul so often to that orderly, reformed, and devout state in which it must be for that purpose; otherwise, our prayers are not only vain and useless, but vicious. “Forgive us,” we say, ” as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.” What do we mean by that, if not that we offer him our soul free from vengeance and rancor? However, we call on God and his aid to conspire in our faults, and invite him to our injustice.

Or, to paraphrase Jayson Williams, “I don’t pray before big games. God doesn’t care about basketball till the playoffs anyway.” So sez the guy went on to suffer a monstrous injury that ended his career and ended up drunkenly shooting a limo-driver in the chest.

Of Prayer is a worthy essay, but I felt that writing about it would be too, well, preachy, and I didn’t feel like moralizing this weekend. Fortunately, it turns out that the final essay in Book One interested me more. Of Age discusses the changing conceptions of age, retirement, and what makes for a “natural death”. Writing around 1580, M. laughs off the idea of death from old age as “natural”:

What an idle fancy it is to expect to die of a decay of powers brought on by extreme old age, and to set ourselves this term for our duration, since that is the rarest of all deaths and the least customary! We call it alone natural, as if it were contrary to nature to see a man break his neck by a fall, be drowned in a shipwreck, or be snatched away by the plague or pleurisy, and as if our ordinary condition did not expose us to all these mishaps. Let us not flatter ourselves with these fine words: we ought perhaps rather to call natural what is general, common, and universal.

Which is to say, “Life’s too short,” and this leads to M.’s real point: too much of our time is scheduled for apprenticeship and retirement, and not enough for working in the world:

Augustus . . . declared that it was enough for those assuming the office of judge to be thirty [. . .] Augustus had been universal judge of the world at nineteen, and yet would have a man be thirty in order to pass judgment on the position of a gutter.

“As for me,” he tells us, “I think our souls are as developed at twenty as they are ever to be, and give the promise of all they ever can do.”

Cue cold knife of dread.

“Well,” I thought, “he’s talking about a time when life expectancy was still pretty short. I mean, 40 is the new 20! I’ve still got some great years ahead of me, right?”

I hold it as certain that since that age [thirty] my mind and my body have rather shrunk than grown, and gone backward rather than forward. It is possible that in those who employ their time well, knowledge and experience grow with living; but vivacity, quickness, firmness and other qualities much more our own, more important and essential, wither and languish.

Sigh. It put me in mind of a story I heard from official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon. As the story goes, Tommy Lee Jones was once asked when he decided to focus seriously on acting.

“When I realized I wasn’t going to be the quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys,” he replied.

“How old were you?” the interviewer asked.

“Forty.”

You can’t imagine how happy I was to reach “END OF BOOK ONE” a paragraph or so later.

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.