'Utterly Intoxicated by His Affection'

Montaigne’s charming opening to his essay “Of the Education of Children”:

“I have never seen a father who failed to claim his son, however mangy or hunchbacked he was. Not that he does not perceive his defect, unless he is utterly intoxicated by his affection; but the fact remains that the boy is his.”

And I have never suggested otherwise. My youngest son David graduates today from Rice University with a B.A. in political science. In September he will enter the Peace Corps, assigned to Peru. He’s already smarter and more mature than I was at his age, and is neither mangy nor hunchbacked. As the Frenchman puts it:

“There is not a child halfway through school who cannot claim to be more learned than I, who have not even the equipment to examine him on his first lesson, at least according to that lesson. And if they force me to, I am constrained, rather ineptly, to draw from it some matter of universal scope, on which I test the boy’s natural judgment: a lesson as strange to them as theirs is to me.”

Montaigne speaks for autodidacts everywhere. Our educations have been spotty and self-centered, but also passionate and memorable. We love to learn. David got a more complete formal education than mine, as did his older brothers. I never went to graduate school, except for the newspapers where I worked as a reporter. David will do his graduate studies helping the people of Peru.   

“Of the Education of Children” is dedicated and addressed to Madame Diane de Foix, the Comtesse de Gurson, wife of Louis de Foix, Montaigne’s friend killed in the Battle of Montraveau in 1587. The countess is pregnant as Montaigne addresses her, and he blithely assumes she is carrying a son (“you are too noble-spirited to begin otherwise than with a male”). The confidence with which he lectures her on children and their education is breathtaking. Montaigne had married in 1565 and with Françoise de la Chassaigne he had a daughter. Four other children died in infancy. He writes:

“Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men. We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose. Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not ‘Athens,’ but ‘The world.’ He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city, and distributed his knowledge, his company, and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot.”

Throughout most of the essay, Montaigne’s advice is admirably open-minded. He urges the countess to hire an accomplished tutor and expose the boy to the best of books and people. He particularly recommends Plutarch, Seneca and Tacitus, and says “the first taste I had for books” came with reading Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Montaigne writes of himself as a young man:

“Meanwhile, for all that, my mind was not lacking in strong stirrings of its own, and certain and open-minded judgments about the things it understood; and it digested them alone, without communication. And, among other things, I really do believe that it would have been wholly incapable of submitting to force and violence.”

Well done, David.

[The Montaigne excerpts are taken from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]