'If I Am a Man of Some Reading'

I read Montaigne’s Essays as a sort of oversized secular breviary. Wisdom is seldom so amusing. He entertains the way a gracious old friend entertains. Seasoned readers will know his hobbyhorses and wait for the punchlines. He is consolation. Theodore Dalrymple in “Montaigne’s Humanity” calls the Frenchman’s essays “a soothing balm.” Part of the reason, I suspect, is that Montagne is “the least ideological of writers,” as Dalrymple notes. Ideologues are strident, tedious and formulaic, and seldom recognize life's nuances and flux. Montaigne’s thoughts, even when ridiculous, are his own. Reading Montaigne, we can seldom guess the content of his next sentence. Dalrymple writes: 

“Montaigne repeatedly warns us against too great a certainty about our knowledge and our conviction that our way is the only right way. He warns against pride in our own learning and intelligence.”

 

The snobbery of the purportedly educated classes has metastasized and grown more stubborn as the worth of higher education has plummeted. A friend said in conversation the other day that a college degree has become a certification of illiteracy and cultural ignorance, which is only a modest exaggeration. It’s an empty trophy. Montaigne defers to such forbears as Plutarch and Seneca while our contemporaries dismiss them. He writes in “Of Books” (trans. Donald Frame):

 

“I have no doubt that I often happen to speak of things that are better treated by the masters of the craft, and more truthfully. This is purely the essay of my natural faculties, and not at all of the acquired ones; and whoever shall catch me in ignorance will do nothing against me, for I should hardly be answerable for my ideas to others, I who am not answerable for them to myself, or satisfied with them. Whoever is in search of knowledge, let him fish for it where it dwells; there is nothing I profess less. These are my fancies, by which I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself. The things will perhaps be known to me some day, or have been once, according as fortune may have brought me to the places where they were made clear. But I no longer remember them. And if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.”

 

More than twelve years ago I read Donald Frame’s 1965 biography of Montaigne with Dalrymple in mind, and noted their affinities in a post for Anecdotal Evidence. Here is a passage from the biography still pertinent to both men:

 

“I believe it is above all his sturdy, honest independence, his cheerful self-acceptance, that draws the crowd of readers to his book today. Our love of moral independence is ambivalent; our anxiety and sense of guilt make us often hanker rather for an `escape from freedom.’ And here we have a man, not the best that ever lived no doubt but assuredly far from the worst and better than most of us, who with scandalous serenity lays himself on the line and says in effect, quite simply, Here I am.”