'He Would Not Be Bored'

“The very catalogue of the authors whom he knew is apt to repel modern readers. We forget that we read countless ephemeral books, magazines, and newspapers, far less worth reading: stuff which bears the same relation to literature as chewing-gum does to food.” 

And that was written in 1949, long before the internet and the Age of Perpetual Trivia it ushered in. A friend tells me he is reading for the first time Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition, the ultimate, satisfyingly fat bedside book. I pulled my copy from the shelf and killed an hour reading pages at random. It’s an eminently browsable book, the sort Max Beerbohm called “dippable-into.”

 

Above, Highet is writing about Montaigne, our forebear and contemporary, whose father gave him a thorough classical education and instructed family members and servants to speak only Latin with the boy. The first book he enjoyed reading was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Highet looks at the essay “Of Books” (1578-80):

 

“Two general points emerge. The first is that he read for pleasure. He would not be bored. He would not read tedious authors. He would not read difficult authors at all, unless they contained good material. The standard he uses is one of pleasure. However, his pleasure was not merely that of pastime, but that which accompanies a high type of aesthetic and intellectual activity, far above the vulgar escape-reading and narcotic-reading.”

 

Secondly, Highet notes that Montaigne had little Greek. “That still puts him head and shoulders above the moderns,” Highet writes, “but it explains a certain slackness we [!] often feel in his thinking, a certain lack of clarity in his appreciation of the ideals on antiquity.” Montaigne relied heavily on Plutarch in French translation and Seneca. Highet lists more than fifty classical writers cited by Montaigne, calls it an “enormous mass of learning” and writes:

 

“He did not want to be a classic in modern dress any more than he wanted to be a polymath. He wanted to be Michel de Montaigne, and he loved the classics because they could help him best in the purpose. So he assimilated them, and used them, and lived them.”

 

Highet tells us Montaigne used his vast reading in three ways in his Essays: as “sources of general philosophical doctrine,” “treasuries of illustration” and “stores of compact well-reasoned argument” – not unlike the way certain bloggers use the works of ancients and moderns to combine autobiography and the best of literature. Montaigne writes in “Of Books”:  

 

"If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there, after making one or two attacks on them. If I planted myself in them, I would lose both myself and time; for I have an impulsive mind. What I do not see at the first attack, I see less by persisting. I do nothing without gaiety; continuation and too strong contention dazes, depresses, and wearies my judgment. My sight becomes confused and dispersed. I have to withdraw it and apply it again by starts, just as in order to judge the luster of a scarlet fabric, they tell us to pass our eyes over it several times, catching it in various quickly renewed and repeated glimpses.”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]