Of
the numberless books you’ve read in your life, how many would you happily
read again? Thirty years ago, you devoted a day, a week, to a book. You
submitted to the author’s presumption and inhabited his little kingdom. Would
you do it again? No, in most cases. Here’s a conceit worthy of Borges: write a
list of all the books you’ve read that you can no longer remember, not even the
titles or authors’ names. Do you even recognize those earlier reading selves, so
indiscriminate in taste? Is there any continuity with those strangers?
I
first read Montaigne in a high school literature text. I don’t remember which
essay but I’m certain I wasn’t impressed. Only when reading The Tempest and Tristram Shandy a few years later as a freshman at the university
did I circle back and discover what Shakespeare and Sterne already knew. The
latter acknowledges his debt to the essayist in a Sept. 9, 1760, letter to the
Rev. Robert Brown:
“`For
my conning Montaigne as much as my pray’r book’—there you are right again,--but
mark, a 2nd time, I have not said I admire him as much;--tho had he
been alive, I would certainly have gone twice as far to have smoaked a pipe
with him, as with Arch-Bishop Laud or his Chaplains, (tho’ one of ’em by the
bye, was my grandfather).”
The
passage quoted at the top is from Montaigne’s longest essay, “Apologie for
Raymond Sebond,” in the 1603 translation by John Florio (1553-1625). I’ve never
read this version except in extracts in connection with Shakespeare, who knew
Florio’s Montaigne. I know Donald Frame’s. Florio’s prose is a pleasure. In his
version of “Of the Institution and Education of Children,” Montaigne relates his
preferences in language:
“It
is a naturall, simple, and unaffected speech that I love, so written as it is
spoken, and such upon the paper, as it is in the mouth, a pithie, sinnowie,
full, strong, compendious and material speech, not so delicate and affected, as
vehement and piercing.”
The
effect is to be reading Montaigne for the first time, a more “pithie, sinnowie”
Montaigne, though still possessing the familiar acuity of mind. In his introduction to the
1983 North Point Press edition of Montaigne’s Travel Journal (collected in Every
Force Evolves a Form, 1987), Guy
Davenport writes:
“We
all lead a moral inner life of the spirit, on which religion, philosophy, and
tacit opinion have many claims. To reflect on this inner life rationally is a
skill no longer taught, though successful introspection, if it can make us at
peace with ourselves, is sanity itself. The surest teachers of such reflection,
certainly the wittiest and most forgiving, are Plutarch and Montaigne.”
2 comments:
For years I would append a note to the end of a book I had read, listing the exact date and place where I’d finished it. Now, many years later, I will sometimes come across one of those notes, and boggle. I can’t remember anything about the book—not even having read it.
I would, with a taste for irony, modify (and invert and trivialize) your Borges challenge, first setting aside the Montaigne issue, and suggest instead this challenge: Assuming an end-of-the-world scenario, one in which you are alone with only food, water, shelter, and one book, what is your preferred book. Collections do not count (i.e., you cannot take the works of Shakespeare or the Bible or Montaigne's essays or Proust's _Remembrance_ novels). I think I might choose something by Charles Dickens--probably _Bleak House_, which I am now reading again--because of the sublime combination of language and characterizations. After all, who could be lonely among all of Dickens' creations? Yes, I know that may strike you as a rather anti-intellectual choice, but--what the hell--we are talking about being alone during the end-of-the-world!
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