Of Old Men and Groundhogs

Donald Frame, in his biography Montaigne, writes of the French essayist:

“His task is to see and describe himself as accurately as he can. His ideas may not be true; his account of them must be. What he aims to make known, he says, is not things but himself; not the measure of things but the measure of his sight. The only certainty he guarantees is `to make known what I think, and to what point, at this moment, extends the knowledge I have of what I am treating.’ Hence he speaks out freely even outside his competence. `For likewise these are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed.’”

And this is Emerson in his essay “Montaigne; or the Skeptic”:

“The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random topic that comes into his head; treating every thing without ceremony, yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for.

“The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it that he feels in listening to the necessary speech of men about their work, when any unusual circumstance gives momentary importance to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech; it is a shower of bullets.”

Now Montaigne, from his essay “On Some Verses of Virgil” (trans. Donald Frame):

“For this purpose of mine it is also appropriate for me to write at home, in a backward region, where no one helps me or corrects me, where I usually have no contact with any man who understands the Latin of his Paternoster and who does not know even less French. I would have done it better elsewhere, but the work would have been less my own; and its principal end and perfection is to be precisely my own. I would indeed correct an accidental error, and I am full of them, since I run on carelessly. But the imperfections that are ordinary and constant in me it would be treachery to remove.”

I first heard of Montaigne in high school, when I wrote a paper on Richard Eberhart’s poem “The Groundhog”:

“In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he; my senses shook,
And mind outshot our naked frailty.
There lowly in the vigorous summer
His form began its senseless change,
And made my senses waver dim
Seeing nature ferocious in him.
Inspecting close his maggots' might
And seething cauldron of his being,
Half with loathing, half with a strange love,
I poked him with an angry stick.
The fever rose, became a flame
And Vigor circumscribed the skies,
Immense energy in the sun,
And through my frame a sunless trembling.
My stick had done nor good nor harm.
Then stood I silent in the day
Watching the object, as before;
And kept my reverence for knowledge
Trying for control, to be still,
To quell the passion of the blood;
Until I had bent down on my knees
Praying for joy in the sight of decay.
And so I left: and I returned
In Autumn strict of eye, to see
The sap gone out of the groundhog,
But the bony sodden hulk remained.
But the year had lost its meaning,
And in intellectual chains
I lost both love and loathing,
Mured up in the wall of wisdom.
Another summer took the fields again
Massive and burning, full of life,
But when I chanced upon the spot
There was only a little hair left,
And bones bleaching in the sunlight
Beautiful as architecture;
I watched them like a geometer,
And cut a walking stick from a birch.
It has been three years, now.
There is no sign of the groundhog.
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.”

As I recall, I identified Alexander as representing the worldly man; Montaigne, the man of intellect; St. Theresa, the woman of the spirit. Montaigne was the one who interested me. When I spent the summer of 1973 in Europe, mostly in France, The Complete Essays, in the Frame translation, was one of the books I carried in my knapsack (with Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and a complete Blake – what was I thinking?). While I enjoyed Montaigne then, and continued to read him periodically, only in the last decade has he entered my essential pantheon. He has the crankiness and prejudice of a middle-aged man combined with the wonder and openness to experience of a young man. His persona is so modern and at times almost too personal, too revealing – he goes on and on about passing kidney stones: “But the imperfections that are ordinary and constant in me it would be treachery to remove.” In a contemporary essayist, such picking at scabs is repulsive. In Montaigne, it seems like the inevitable act of an overflowing mind that wishes to leave out nothing for fear it might be important, even essential.

By the way, “The Groundhog” remains a very stirring poem, one of those works that unostentatiously rips the mask of weariness and conventionality off the world and reveals the wonder beneath. I think of Eberhart’s poem every time I see a dead animal in the wild – or even in the backyard. How odd that Eberhart died last year, at the grand age of 101, in June, the same month as the groundhog.