'He Learned to Love Books'

“Though most of the teachers followed Erasmus in seeking to make learning palatable, Montaigne considers himself fortunate to have avoided getting 'nothing out of school but a hatred of books, as do nearly all our noblemen,’” writes Donald Frame in his 1965 biography of the essayist, suggesting that little has changed in the last half-millennium. 

Except that Montaigne (1533-92) changes, as many of us do, when he discovers his inner autodidact: “In his first or second year of school,” Frame continues, “he learned to love books—not the usual light reading of the time, the Amadis de Gaule, Huon de Bordeaux, or other such romances, but Ovid’s Metamorphoses—so much that he would steal away from any other pleasure to read them.”

 

Over the weekend my middle son, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, called to tell me he was reading Montaigne’s Essays (trans. Frame) for the first time. Then he told me the Frenchman reminded him of me. Flattering but blasphemous. What Michael referred to, I think, was Montaigne’s dedicated reading and independence of thought – respecting tradition but following no one else’s scheme.   

 

Michael seems especially taken with the essays “Of the Education of Children” and “Of Friendship.” The former is devoted to what may be our most important job as parents and citizens, but one that our culture pays only lip service to:

 

“For all this education I do not want the boy to be made a prisoner. I do not want him to be given up to the surly humors of a choleric schoolmaster. I do not want to spoil his mind by keeping him in torture and at hard labor, as others do, fourteen or fifteen hours a day, like a porter. Nor would I think it good, if by virtue of some solitary and melancholy streak he were found to be addicted to the study of books with too undiscerning application, for him to be encouraged in that direction; such application makes them unfit for social intercourse and diverts them from better occupations. And how many men I have seen in my time made stupid by rash avidity for learning!”

 

Life and learning are forever converging. They are not separate realms. That passage is a fair sample of Montaigne’s voice: tart, skeptical, confiding. In 1983, Guy Davenport wrote the introduction to the North Point Press reissue of Montaigne’s Travel Journal (trans. Donald Frame), later collected in Every Force Evolves a Form (1987). In that essay he writes:

 

“We all lead a moral inner life of the spirit, on which religion, philosophy, and tacit opinion have many claims. To reflect on this inner life rationally is a skill no longer taught, though successful introspection, if it can make us at peace with ourselves, is sanity itself. The surest teachers of such reflection, certainly the wittiest and most forgiving, are Plutarch and Montaigne.”