'Uneven, Irregular, and Multiform Movement'

“There are readers—and I am one of them—whose reading is rather like a series of intoxications.”

 

Driving while reading is discouraged. Once, in Bellevue, Wash., while stopped at a red light, I was intoxicated by the book propped against the wheel until a cop pulled up, rolled down his window and barked, “You gonna move?” I hadn't let the green light distract me. I apologized and moved.  

 

The Oxford English Dictionary includes an alternative definition of intoxication apart from the contemporary usage, one obsolete since the eighteenth century: “The action of corrupting a person morally or spiritually.” Yes, books have done that to me, too, on occasion, though not often since I left puberty. The current meaning, as defined by the OED -- “having lost control of one’s behaviour or mental faculties” -- also applies to books.

 

Logan Pearsall Smith’s best-known quip is “Some people say life is the thing, but I prefer reading,” so the sentence at the top comes as no surprise. You’ll find it in his essay on Montaigne (1918) in Reperusals and Re-Collections (1937). The rest of the opening paragraph goes like this:

 

“We fall in love with a book; it is our book, we feel, for life; we shall not need another. We cram-throat our friends with it in the cruellest fashion; make it a Gospel, which we preach in a spirit of propaganda and indignation, putting a woe on the world for a neglect of which last week we were equally guilty.”

 

Smith calls it a “youthful susceptibility” but I find that book-intoxication remains in remission into adulthood and periodically flares into recurrence. That’s what has happened to me since August when my brother died in hospice. A few days before his death we talked about Montaigne’s understanding of death. Smith defines Montaigne’s place among the world’s writers:

 

“[H]e did something which brought him into worse discredit. It was a strange, unheard-of, undignified thing to do, a thing that had never been done before, and indeed has never been done since with the same boldness. For Montaigne told the truth about himself, he threw off his clothes and took himself to pieces in public.”

 

Miraculously, the Frenchman seldom comes off as a tiresome narcissist. Rather, he's thinking about us while talking about himself. Smith continues:

 

“He did not indeed begin with this design; the amazing simplicity and interest of it dawned gradually upon him, and grew clearer and clearer as he proceeded. For this reason a beginner in Montaigne will do well to read the later essays first, for it is in these that he carries out his purpose with the completest frankness, turning his detached, disinterested mind on his own personality, and giving a long account, not of his actions, but of his essence and being.”

 

This is true. Think of those great, later essays, like “Of Some Verses of Virgil” and “Of Experience.” In “Three Kinds of Association,” written in this final phase, 1585-88 (he died in 1592), he writes:

 

“Life is an uneven, irregular, and multiform movement. We are not friends to ourselves, and still less masters, we are slaves, if we follow ourselves incessantly and are so caught in our inclinations that we cannot depart from them or twist them about. I say this now because I cannot easily shake off the importunity of my soul, which cannot ordinarily apply itself unless it becomes wrapped up in a thing, or be employed unless with tension and with its whole being.”

 

If read aloud in a blindfold test, this passage might be mistaken for the product of a twentieth- or twenty-first-century sensibility. He sounds like our contemporary. Later in the same essay he writes:

 

“[F]ew conversations hold my interest if devoid of vigor and effort. It is true that pleasantness and beauty satisfy and occupy me as much as weight and depth, or more. And inasmuch as I grow sleepy in any other sort of conversation, and lend it only the rind of my attention, it often happens in such abject and feeble sort of talk, small talk, that I make silly and stupid remarks and replies, ridiculous and unworthy of a child, or, still more awkwardly and impolitely, maintain an obstinate silence. I have a dreamy way of withdrawing into myself, and, besides, a dull and childish ignorance of many common things.”

 

Few passages in all of literature remind me so immediately of myself. “Perhaps not only in his attitude towards truth,” Smith writes, “but in his attitude towards himself, Montaigne was a precursor. Perhaps here again he was ahead of his own time, ahead of our time also, since none of us would have the courage to imitate him.”

 

[All quotes from Montaigne are taken from The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame, 1957.]