The premise is rich and promising: a reader is interrupted and reflects on the nature of the interruption in light of the book he is reading. In Dick Davis’ “Near Coltishall” (The Covenant, 1984), it’s evening and the speaker is reading Montaigne when he hears the sound of “thunderous aircraft.” Coatishall is a village in East Anglia, home to a Royal Air Force base from 1938 to 2006. During the Cold War, when Davis’ poem is set, the base housed British bombers carrying nuclear weapons. Here is the second of the poem’s six stanzas:
“Distracted from my page
I watch each passing plane
–
The virtue of Montaigne
Is innocent to gauge
The wrath that they
contain.”
Montaigne witnessed the
French Wars of Religion that raged in the second half of the sixteenth century.
Catholics and Huguenots slaughtered each other. Between two and four million
were killed. As the civil wars dragged on – they usually are dated from 1562
to the Edict of Nantes in 1598, when the killing continued at a slower pace --
Montaigne wrote the first of his Essais, in 1570. But the speaker of the
poem says even Montaigne could not comprehend the sheer destructive power of
nuclear weapons: “Who shall escape defeat / From what we dream of war?” Davis
is too smart and subtle a thinker and poet to turn his poem into a
simple-minded anti-nuke screed. In the final two stanzas he turns to
Montaigne and asks:
“Which would you choose,
my lord—
The cant of government,
The smug cant of dissent?
Or would you turn toward
Your book's long argument
“That wisdom is to know
How blindly we descend
To where no arms defend
Our ignorance from no
Imaginable end?”
Davis cites no specific
essay but among Montaigne’s consistent themes is the inadequacy of his knowledge,
and by implication all knowledge. And yet few writers have known so much and deferred so
often to those who preceded him -- the wise ones such as Seneca and Plutarch. His admission of
ignorance implies humility, not an exhibitionistic declaration of false
humility. Out of such self-knowledge flows the possibility of all further knowledge. Montaigne 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.”
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