`A Horse That Has Broken from Its Rider'

Against all evidence, I harbor a childish vision of Edenic old age. In retirement, after much toil, I will be unencumbered at last, free to live the life of the mind without distraction. My good health will be boundless, my needs modest, my children happy, flourishing and not in jail. I will read and write as I please. Then I remember: Oh hell, that’s what I’m doing already -- and that blindness is the childish part. Deferring life, putting off the essential things until we can address them single-mindedly, amounts to protracted suicide, low-grade death-in-life.

My fantasy erupted again when Frank Wilson announced his imminent retirement as book review editor from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Part of me thought: Now the lucky bastard can write his verse and pluck the lyre while the rest of us go on slaving. (Envy, sometimes, is the ugliest of sins.) Another part thought, rather self-servingly: This is merely the latest idiocy by newspaper management. What a waste.

By happy chance, Frank mentioned one of his enthusiasms on Tuesday – Montaigne, whom he calls, with disturbing intimacy, “Michel.” In 1571, when Montaigne famously retired from public life and took to his tower at the Château de Montaigne, he was 38. I don’t know what the conversion factor is. That might make him 103 in 21st-century years, especially with his kidney stones. Had Montaigne not retired, had he not spent a decade in solitude writing his Essais, there would be no Montaigne but for a minor footnote to French history. Above the bookshelves in his tower, in Latin, Montaigne inscribed these words:

“1571 A.D. Michel Montaigne, 38 years old, weary of long years of public service and while still vigorous, would teach the young by returning to the bosom of his ancestral home where all is quiet and free from care, and with this little effort finally overcome the censure of public life; if his candor has caused his exile, it is to this sweet sanctuary and his own sanctified freedom, tranquility, and leisure.”

Frank doesn’t impress me as a hermit. His gifts as a blog proprietor have always been social in nature. He’s good at linking kindred spirits – even hermits. Good writing is a good way not to be alone. This is what Montaigne wrote in “Of Idleness”:

“When I lately retired to my own house, with a resolution, as much as possibly I could, to avoid all manner of concern in affairs, and to spend in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live, I fancied I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth do, as being by time become more settled and mature; but I find—

“`Variam semper dant otia mentem,’
[`Leisure ever creates varied thought.’—Lucan, iv. 704]

“that, quite contrary, it is like a horse that has broke from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to, and creates me so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself.”

I’m not worried about Frank. He’s not being “put out to pasture.” Like Montaigne’s horse, he will gallop for the joy of it.