'If Our Fear Did Not Give It Weight'

A knack for memorable metaphor is the most generous of gifts. It promotes understanding, stocks the mind with meaning and hones our taste for wit. Some of the finest minds think metaphorically. Melville couldn’t write a check without likening two unlike things. In On History (1983), Michael Oakeshott, who at the end of his life lived in Dorset, compares the writing of history (and, by implication, our understanding of it) to building a “dry” stone wall in the country. Its stones, like “antecedent events,” are “joined and held together, not by mortar, but in terms of their shapes.” Such a wall, he writes, “has no premeditated design; it is what its components, in touching, constitute.” So much for the “laws of history” and Marxist “intelligent design.” In Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014), Oakeshott writes:

“We spend our lives trying to discover how to live, a perfect way of life, sens de la vie. But we shall never find it. Life is the search for it; the successful life is that which is given up to this search; & when we think we have found it, we are farthest from it. Delude ourselves that we have found it, persuade ourselves that here at least there is a point at which we can rest – and life has become at once moribund. Just as to remain in love we must be continually falling in love, so to remain living we must be continually striving to live.”

One metaphor spawns another, and one thinker another. Montaigne was among Oakeshott’s forebears. The passage above echoes Montaigne’s late essay “Of Physiognomy” (trans. Donald Frame):

“[D]eath is indeed the end, but not therefore the goal, of life; it is its finish, its extremity, but not therefore its object. Life should be an end unto itself, a purpose unto itself; its rightful study is to regulate, conduct, and suffer itself. Among the many other duties comprised in this general and principal chapter on knowing how to live is this article on knowing how to die; and it is one of the lightest, if our fear did not give it weight.”