'Provocative Openness of Mind and Limitless Curiosity'

I think I understand a reader who fails to share my pleasure in reading Montaigne. It’s easy to think of the Frenchman as a blowhard whose essays are formless rambles stuffed with other men’s words, sometimes embarrassingly self-involved (more complaining about kidney stones?). Is he a precursor to a million contemporary narcissists? Perhaps, but don’t blame Montaigne. 

Few writers have so winningly mingled learning and life, books and experience. He’s never stuffy. A good essayist’s job is to reclaim a piece of the world we thought we understood and filed away on a shelf, and to remind us that humans are elusively complicated. We never exhaustively understand anyone, even the first-person singular.

 

The most stirring of Montaigne’s virtues for this reader is his relentless curiosity about the world. One wonders if he was ever genuinely bored. He is one of nature’s democrats. He will speak with anyone, including prostitutes and common laborers – and Pope Gregory XIII. He is fascinated by the commonplace – food, lodging, manners, the cost of everything. He writes a portion of his travel journal in Italian. Such omni-inquisitiveness is rare in any century, and seems almost freakish in our age of specialization, but think of such a sensibility enduring the sixteenth-century wars of religion in France, when perhaps as many as four million died. A pwonderful contemporary essayist, Victor Bombert, writes in “Lessons of Montaigne”:

 

“[H]e surprises his reader by his provocative openness of mind and limitless curiosity. At the opening of one of his most celebrated essays, ‘Of experience,’ he remarks that there is nothing more natural than the desire for knowledge. Montaigne’s desire is, however, not satisfied by mere facts and affirmed certitudes. He relishes playing with ideas and delights in unsettling his reader and himself by challenging commonly held moral and intellectual convictions. His tolerance for views opposed to his own helps him revise his opinions.”

 

Montaigne is the opposite of a modern-day idealogue. He has beliefs and convictions but no air-tight theories. He’s no dogmatist. It’s easy to think of him as just a smarter, more learned and deep-feeling version of ourselves. His humanity is always front and center.

 

To my skeptical reader I say: For now, leave Montaigne alone. Perhaps when you’re older and life has had its way with you, you’ll return to the old boy, chastened and grateful.

 

[The book  to have is The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]