'The Beautiful Light of Health'

Montaigne died in his château on September 13, 1592. He was fifty-nine and for the last fourteen years of his life he had endured the agony of kidney stones. I remember my father, a self-identified “tough guy,” moaning on the floor while passing a stone. Montaigne suffered but seldom complained. In the late essay “Of Experience,” he proposes an unlikely understanding of illness, one I hope to put into practice when it becomes necessary: 

“But is there anything so sweet as that sudden change, when from extreme pain, by the voiding of my stone, I come to recover as if by lightning the beautiful light of health, so free and so full, as happens in our sudden and sharpest attacks of colic? Is there anything in this pain we suffer that can be said to counterbalance the pleasure of such sudden improvement? How much more beautiful health seems to me after the illness, when they are so near and contiguous that I can recognize them in each other’s presence in their proudest array, when they vie with each other, as if to oppose each other squarely!”

 

In the final week of his life, lying in his hospice bed, my brother could no longer speak and probably heard little of what we – me, his son, nurses, the occasional doctor – had to say. He made no sounds except low moaning when the nurses shifted him in bed to clean him and change his sheets. But before he entered that torpid state, we talked about Montaigne and his attitude to death. Ken accepted its approach as the inevitable end of the life he had lived. I’ve always admired the Frenchman but those end-of-life talks with my brother lifted him into secular sainthood. The theoretical had become the applied. Ken could be contrary and defiant but he seemed to accept Montaigne as a guide, someone to be trusted. Montaigne continues in “Of Experience”:

 

“Just as the Stoics say that vices are brought into the world usefully to give value to virtue and assist it, we can say, with better reason and less bold conjecture, that nature has lent us pain for the honor and service of pleasure and painlessness. When Socrates, after being relieved of his irons, felt the relish of the itching that their weight had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure, how they are associated by a necessary link, so that they follow and engender each other in turn. And he called out that goodly Aesop should have taken from this consideration a subject fit for a fine fable.”

 

In his biography of Montaigne, his translator, Donald Frame, celebrates the sensibility of so heroic a writer: “Montaigne finds much to enjoy and admire wherever he goes.”