'How to Live With Ourselves As We Are'

“What’s essential is not Montaigne’s wisdom, but his wise recognition of his foolishness; not his virtue, but his good cognizance of his vices; not his ‘honesty,’ but his honesty, his complete leveling with the reader.” 

I tried a little experiment, a variation on bibliomancy. I closed my eyes, opened Donald Frame’s translation of Montaigne’s Complete Essays at random and pointed at a passage in “Of Vanity” on Page 726:

 

“For as regards my own personal inclination, neither the pleasure of building, which is said to be so alluring, nor hunting, nor gardens, nor the other pleasures of a retired life, can amuse me very much. That is a thing for which I am annoyed with myself, as I am for all other notions that are a nuisance to me. I do not care so much that ideas be vigorous and learned, as I care that they be easy and suitable for life; they are true and sound enough if they are useful and pleasing.”

 

Not surprisingly, Montaigne’s sentences meet all three of the criteria outlined in the passage at the top – admission of foolishness and vice, and honesty about unflattering personal qualities. None is a mortal sin so I readily confess to all three failings. The author of the first passage above is L. Rust Hills, longtime fiction editor at Esquire and author of How to Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man (1993), a compilation of three essay collections he published in the 1970s. The section is titled “Pursuing Montaigne, as Against Pursuing Thoreau.”

 

Before Montaigne’s retirement to his tower, he served as counselor to the Parliament of Bordeaux, and was a courtier at the court of Charles IX, with whom he witnessed the siege of Rouen. He was married and had five daughters. His understanding of the world was rooted in its day-to-day workings, not theories or abstraction. Montaigne “teaches us to be tolerant of the wretched human-ness of humanity” (something Thoreau neither taught nor recognized), Hills writes, and concludes:

 

“What we could learn from Montaigne is how to live with ourselves as we are. What we could learn from Thoreau is a much better way to live. It is, I suppose, a matter of two kinds of pleasure. Thoreau distinguishes between pure pleasure and impure pleasure. Montaigne does not.”

 

Thoreau is a familiar American type: a crank and a scold. What a bore he would have been in conversation. I outgrew him, finally. Hill also dismisses Emerson’s understanding of Montaigne.  

 

My niece, daughter of my late brother, asked me last week via text what I was reading. I had four books going: Frame’s Montaigne (rereading several essays), Late Montale (trans. George Bradley), Jonathan Cole’s Chekhov’s Sakhalin Journey and a rereading of parts of Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. Six days later she texted me photos of two books she had ordered: Frame's Montaigne and William Arrowsmith’s translation of the Collected Montale. Hannah is thirty-one, married and has a daughter who recently turned one. Montaigne writes in “Of Presumption”:

 

“I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.”

 

Montaigne died on September 13, 1592 at age fifty-nine.