'To Find Joy in the Everyday, in Life Itself'

“Everyday life is miraculous because it subjects the violent impulses to itself. The Essays of Montaigne are the revelation of the miracle of ordinary life.”

 

Much mischief is the product of dissatisfaction, of men and women looking for purpose, novelty or distraction in life and deciding they have not found it. Only extremity, an impulsive grab after an illusion, seems like an appropriate response to so imperfect a world. We’re spoiled. It’s always easier to complain and rebel than to give thanks for what we already have. The writer quoted above, sounding very much like Michael Oakeshott, is Ann Hartle, a Montaigne scholar teaching at Emory University, in her essay “Montaigne’s Radical Conservatism.” I have never encountered a utopian delusion in all of Montaigne’s thought. In an early essay not cited by Hartle, “Of a Saying of Caesar’s,” he writes:

 

“Everything, no matter what it is, that falls within our knowledge and enjoyment, we find unsatisfactory; and we go gaping after things to come and unknown, inasmuch as things present do not satiate us. Not, in my opinion, that they do not have the wherewithal to satiate us, but that we seize them with a sick and disordered grasp.”

 

And here is Hartle’s gloss on such thinking:

 

“Generosity is openness to human diversity and trust in the goodness of ordinary men. The conservative possesses and enjoys the good that is society. That is, he enjoys what we already have. One of the most delightful features of the Essays is the way in which Montaigne is always astonished at the familiar, ordinary, and common things. The most common human actions are miracles to him. This is the hallmark of the conservative character: to find joy in the everyday, in life itself.”

 

The spirit of such conservatism, which Oakeshott would identify as a “disposition” rather than a set of political provisions, has grown rare. In his Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014), Oakeshott writes:

 

“We spend our lives trying to discover how to live, a perfect way of life, sens de la vie. But we shall never find it. Life is the search for it; the successful life is that which is given up to this search; & when we think we have found it, we are farthest from it. Delude ourselves that we have found it, persuade ourselves that here at least there is a point at which we can rest – and life has become at once moribund. Just as to remain in love we must be continually falling in love, so to remain living we must be continually striving to live.”

 

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