'The Capacity to Spy on Himself From Close Up'

“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.