I admire
Montaigne for his large, elastic, skeptical mind. In A Stroll with William James (1983), Jacques Barzun writes that it
is “unnecessary to hold incompatible convictions cached in distant parts of the
mind. This keeping a double set of books is technically called Fideism.
Pompanazzi, who named it in the sixteenth century, argued that he was not a
heretic, because ‘I believe as Christian what I cannot believe as a
philosopher.’ Many fine minds—Montaigne, Pico della Mirandola, Pascal [no fan
of Montaigne], Sir Thomas Browne—have been fideists.” Human sensibility is not
renowned for consistency. Beware of it. Lenin and Mao were consistent.
Speaking of inconsistency,
it’s reassuring to know that Tolstoy, that embodiment of human contradiction at
the level of genius, when he died in the railway station at Astapovo had two
books with him – The Brothers Karamazov
and Montaigne’s Essays. Cyril
Connolly writes in Enemies of Promise:
“If I were to arrange a row of busts around a library and crown them with sacred
myrtle, I would begin with Montaigne.” “In taking up his pen,” William Hazlitt writes
of Montaigne, “he did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or moralist,
but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his
mind.” And another enthusiast, Lewis Thomas, in “Why Montaigne Is Not a Bore” (The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a
Biology Watcher, 1979), writes: “For the weekend times when there is
nothing new in the house to read, and nothing much to think about or write
about, and the afternoon stretches ahead all bleak and empty, there is nothing
like Montaigne to make things better.”
You’ve tried
Montaigne and he bored or disappointed you? Hard to believe. I’m disappointed
in you. Of course, in his essay “Of Books” he writes: “I can do nothing without
gaiety; if one book wearies me I take up another.”
2 comments:
Your goal of "introducing people to essential books" is met in my case. I've added about bazillion books to my lengthening list through reading your blog (and read several). So thanks!
I see that you wrote last year that you were reading Montaigne: A Life by Philippe Desan. What did you think of it? I'm always glad to read anything about Montaigne, but I was put off by Jeffrey Collins' review in the Wall St. Journal:
"Philippe Desan’s “Montaigne: A Life” is animated by the purpose of detonating this carefully cultivated image. It is an effort at disenchantment. Montaigne’s informality and transparency, in Mr. Desan’s telling, were rhetorical strategies and triumphs of artifice. Montaigne’s exploration of the private self was not a natural impulse but an adjustment required by the defeat of his considerable political ambitions. Previous biographers, Mr. Desan argues, have piously replicated the self-portrait of the “Essays.” He seeks to drag the solitary genius back into his social milieu, exposing his conventionality. Montaigne claimed to have portrayed himself “naked” to posterity. Mr. Desan removes the last of his garments."
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