“Montaigne finds much to enjoy and admire wherever he goes.”
Such a
simple observation is rarely applied with accuracy to the writers we admire. Writers
are grumps, we’re told, forever disaffected, yet Joseph Epstein once wrote that
he relies on three writers to “lift one out of gloom, and away from the valley
of small and large woes” – Montaigne, Justice Holmes (in his letters) and H.L. Mencken.
Montaigne is the most companionable of writers, endlessly curious, amused, amusing and
self-questioning. He possesses a rare balance of introversion and extraversion.
Because he knows himself and enjoys his own company, he welcomes the company of
others.
In the
passage quoted above, Donald Frame in his biography is writing
of Montaigne the traveler. At the risk of oversimplification, we might
characterize travel writers as belonging to one of two groups: complainers or celebrators. In the first group, Tobias Smollett and Evelyn Waugh. In the
second, Patrick Leigh Fermor and, unequivocally, Montaigne. His posthumously
published Travel Journal (not
discovered until two centuries after his death) is based on the journey he made
through Germany, Switzerland and Italy in 1580-81. It is in part an account of Montaigne’s
attempts to treat the kidney stones that had plagued him for years – the mineral
baths taken, the waters drunk, the stones and urine passed.
Montaigne is
one of nature’s democrats. He will speak with anyone, including prostitutes and
common laborers – and Pope Gregory XIII. He is fascinated by the commonplace –
food, lodging, manners, the cost of everything. He writes a portion of his
travel journal in Italian. Frame tells us:
“Montaigne’s
interest in machines and even gadgets is surprising. He describes in detail
systems of water supply at Neufchâteau, Constance, and Augsburg, a clipped and
trained tree at Schaffhausen, a postern gate at Augsburg that lets travelers into
the city by night for a fee with elaborate precautions, and the pleasure houses
and gardens of the Fuggers [no, not Norman Mailer’s euphemism; the German
banking family] at Augsburg, the duke of Florence at Pratolino and Castello,
and the cardinal of Ferrara at Tivoli.”
Such
omni-inquisitiveness is rare in any century, and seems freakish in our age of
specialization, but think of such a sensibility enduring the sixteenth-century
wars of religion in France, when perhaps as many as four million died.
Montaigne’s
masterwork, of course, is the Essays.
Few writers have so winningly mingled learning and life, books and experience. Part
of a good essayist’s job is to reclaim a piece of the world we thought we
understood and had stowed on the shelf, and to remind us that humans are
elusively complicated. We never exhaustively know anyone, even the first-person
singular. Here is how Simon Leys concludes the fourth of his ABC Boyer Lectures
(1996):
“Since my
introduction started in the garden of a philosopher-friend, let me conclude in
a similar setting—only this time I shall call upon a friend from four hundred
years ago—Montaigne, to whom the final word should now belong: ‘May death find
me as I am working in my cabbage patch, indifferent to its coming, and even
more indifferent to the imperfection of my garden.’”
One often
suspects that many of the crimes and outrages in this life can be
attributed to our refusal to accept mortality. The sentence quoted by Leys
is taken from an early essay, “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die” (trans.
Donald Frame). The deaths of his brother Arnaud and his friend Estienne de La
Boétie, and a protracted immersion in the writings of the Stoics left Montaigne
not so much depressed as anxious. In the essay just cited he writes of death:
“Let us rid
it of strangeness, come to know it, get used to it. Let us have nothing on our
minds as often as death. At every moment let us picture it in our imagination
in all its aspects.”
In middle
age, Montaigne reached a rapprochement with death – and life. In a late essay, “Of
Practice,” he describes falling from his horse and thinking he would die. In
fact, his physical injuries were minimal but in Montaigne’s understanding the accident
represented a philosophical/emotional revelation. He writes:
“This
account of so trivial an event would be rather pointless, were it not for the
instruction that I have derived from it for myself; for in truth, in order to
get used to the idea of death, I find there is nothing like coming close to it.
Now, as Pliny says, each man is a good education to himself, provided he has
the capacity to spy on himself from close up. What I write here is not my
teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.”
Some will conclude that life trumps books, that experience takes precedence over Seneca and Plutarch as
a teacher. Montaigne is the most bookish of writers, and at the same time the
most studiously immersed in his life and times (wife, children, mayor of Bordeaux). In his posthumously published
monograph, Montaigne (1960; trans.
Will Stone, Pushkin Press, 2015), Stefan Zweig writes:
“His
relationship with books is like everything else, for here too he guards his
freedom. With them too he knows no obligation to duty. He wants to read and
learn, but only so far as he can savour the experience. As a young man he had
read, he states, ‘ostentatiously’, merely to show off his knowledge; later, to
acquire a measure of wisdom, and now only for pleasure, never to gain an
advantage.”
Michel
Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne was born 490 years ago, on February 28, 1533, and reads
like our contemporary.
2 comments:
Thanks for reminding me to dig out my copy of Donald Frame's translation of the "Complete Works" (essays, travel writings, letters) in the Everyman's Library edition (2003).
Although I studied Montaigne in college in French, most of that has been washed away by the tides. I recently very much enjoyed "How to Live, Or, a Life of Montaigne, in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer" by Sarah Bakewell.
(2020 Other Press, New York)
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