'He Is a Genial Companion'

Tess Lewis has translated one of Montaigne’s early essays, “Of Pedantry” (c. 1572-78), in which the Frenchman issues one caution and, mid-paragraph, seems to reverse himself: 

“I would be inclined to conclude that just as plants are suffocated with too much moisture and lamps with too much oil, so the action of our spirits is stifled with too much study and excessive knowledge. Encumbered and confused by a great variety of things, our minds can no longer extricate themselves and are left stooped and bowed beneath this burden. However, this is not the case: the more our souls are filled, the more they expand. And examples from antiquity clearly show, to the contrary, that men skilled in public affairs, great commanders, and great statesmen were also very learned.”

 

Few of us are in danger of being “very learned.” I remember one of my high-school English teachers telling me that students seemed to change around 1970, the year I graduated. They suddenly seemed to know less. In class she mentioned Winston Churchill, and no one recognized his name. The same happened when she brought up Duke Ellington. I was always proud to know things.

 

This is not to deny that pedantry is alive and well. When I make a factual error on Anecdotal Evidence, I’m happy for the correction, but there’s a species of corrector that is decidedly ego-driven. I’ve had readers who get angry and lecture me on my idiocy. Stick around, and you’ll meet all kinds on the internet. I conclude that pedantry is not the problem. It’s how the pedantry is inflicted on others. Often, it’s just another excuse for narcissism and all-around nastiness. I’ve known several unapologetic Casaubons.

 

In his address “Culture and Leisure,” delivered in 1966 at the Catholic University of America, W.H. Auden noted how “technical advance” had resulted in virtually effortless access to unprecedented amounts of print and other cultural materials, and added:

 

“This ease of access is in itself a blessing, but its misuse can make it a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more poetry and fiction, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly respond to properly, and the consequence of such over-indulgence is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces than yesterday’s newspaper.”

 

That was true sixty years ago but today few are are likely to read too much. Digital ease of access has knocked old-fashioned print-based reading into a dusty corner. Montaigne is a balm in such an age.

 

In the afterword to her translation of Montaigne’s essay, Lewis writes: “He is a genial companion, confiding, inquisitive and insightful, erudite and entertaining, self-ironic and self-aware, unabashed in admitting both his shortcomings and his talents as well as the flaws and strengths of others.” My love of Montaigne revived with my brother’s death last summer. The essayist was among the last subjects we talked about before he died. Like me, my brother was not an academic. He never attended a university and worked as a self-taught picture-framer and cabinetmaker for half a century. He was a wayward reader, a true autodidact, pragmatic not idealistic, an unselfconscious eccentric, and one of the smartest people I knew.  

 

[Lewis’ translation of “On Pedantry” will appear in How to Teach Children: A Renaissance Guide to a Real Education by Montaigne, edited by Scott Newstok and published later this year by Princeton University Press. The Auden address can be found in volume V of The Complete Works of W.H. Auden.]