'Speak Knowledge Meagerly and Piteously'

“Montaigne is heavy going, it has to be said.” 

For once the commonsensical Jules Renard is wrong. There’s no context for the remark in his journal (October 1, 1898), so I take his words as given. Montaigne’s prose, at least in translation, seems clear and readily understood. The classical tags can slow you down but his essays often read with a modern clarity and verve. His sensibility is quick and curious, and he’s blessed with a spacious memory. One thought leads rapidly to the next and then to a remark by Plutarch or Seneca. His mind is a river. In a late essay, “Of Physiognomy,” he returns to his recurrent theme – preparations for our deaths:

 

“We trouble our life by concern about death, and death by concern about life.  One torments us, the other frightens us. It is not against death that we prepare ourselves; that is too momentary a thing. A quarter hour of suffering, without consequence, without harm, does not deserve any particular precepts. To tell the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations for death.”

 

The theme may be “heavy going” but not its expression. The prose is as clean and orderly as a syllogism. He next takes up the trial and death of Socrates. After quoting the philosopher at length he writes: “Besides, isn’t the method of arguing that Socrates uses here equally admirable in its simplicity and its vigor? Truly it is much easier to talk like Aristotle and live like Caesar than it is to talk and live like Socrates. There lies the extreme degree of perfection and difficulty; art cannot reach it.”

 

Montaigne is unashamedly devoted to scrutinizing his “I.” Can you think of another writer who takes himself as his principal subject and yet is not a narcissist? Next he reflects on his own reliance on allusions, most often classical. This is one of those moments in Montaigne when we sense the presence of a living, breathing, fretting, pondering man sitting across the table from us and talking:

 

“Even so someone might say of me that I have here only made a bunch of other people’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the thread to tie them. Indeed I have yielded to public opinion in carrying these borrowed ornaments about on me. But I do not intend that they should cover and hide me; that is the opposite of my design, I who wish to make a show only of what is my own, and of what is naturally my own; and if I had taken my own advice I would at all hazards have spoken absolutely all alone. I load myself with these borrowings more and more heavily every day beyond my intention and my original form, following the fancy of the age and the exhortation of others. If it is unbecoming to me, as I believe it is, no matter; it may be useful to someone else.”

 

Here it seems that Montaigne speaks for me. We quote because someone else has already said it better. Montaigne’s proud humility is inspiring: “I speak ignorance pompously and opulently, and speak knowledge meagerly and piteously, the latter secondarily and accidentally, the former expressly and principally.”

 

A Howard Nemerov poem in Gnomes & Occasions (1973) shares a title with Montaigne’s final essay, “Of Experience”:

 

“Nature from life by piece and piece

Gently disparts us; power fails

Before desire does. It needs not sex

To illustrate what Montaigne saith.

But only what’s befallen X—

Now he no longer has his teeth

He can no longer bite his nails.”

 

Dispart is a rare word meaning "to separate" or "divide."

 

[The Renard sentence comes from his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020). The Montaigne passages are from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, 1957).]