'The Boundless Complexity of Life'

The poet W.S. Di Piero introduces Montaigne without mentioning his name: “‘Essay’ has embedded in it ‘assay,’ ‘weighing,’ ‘testing,’ ‘proofing,’ ‘trying out,” ‘attempting.’ When writing prose I’m arguing mostly with myself and the friends and predecessors whose voices are in my head.”

What passes for essay writing today too often looks like someone laying down the law, telling readers what they ought to be doing, thinking or saying. It comes off as bullying monomania. I want more from an essay than a cavalcade of opinions, which are usually the least important and interesting things I can know about you. Tell me about your experience. Tell me what you know. Share your learning. Don’t just spout off like the drunk at the end of the bar or some crank on A.M. radio. How long since you last read an essay that moved you or illuminated some aspect of your life that has been puzzling or troubling? For me it happened Thursday while reading Joseph Epstein’s “Turning Ninety” in the September issue of Commentary.

 

In his first paragraph Epstein writes: “I should like to have written an essay in which I toted up how age has brought me wisdom and given me a decidedly sunny view of life. Alas, it is not so.” Old Epstein hands will recognize the tune and hum along. The essayist will turn ninety in January and his situation report is neither rosy nor despairing. He writes like an adult, rare in contemporary letters:

 

“While I am grateful to be arriving at 90, life now seems less amusing. More and more, it seems about loss, loss both personal and of so many of the things that made life interesting and often amusing. The loss of friends, to begin with.”

 

Throughout “Turning Ninety,” I experienced little shocks of recognition like that. What Epstein recounts isn’t peculiar to his life. For instance:

 

“Then there are the many things I have lost interest in. Travel is high among them.”

 

“An ‘expert economist’ is an oxymoron. In the current day, few are the experts who aren’t already lined up for or against Donald Trump. Some peddle opinions full-time; it is their job.”

 

“[M]y walk, too, has changed, almost but nearly qualifying for Monty Python’s ministry of silly walks. I fear falling, which I have done three or four times, and so when out of doors walk looking down at the pavement. ‘Don’t fall’ is my mantra.”

 

“I, at any rate, live on the culture of the past: the great Russian and English novelists, French and Italian painters, the American Songbook.”

 

Epstein concludes with a fine resolution in the musical sense: “Allow me to close this essay—disquisition? diatribe? sustained groan?—with a toast. May all who have read it attain the age of 90 and as far beyond as seems to give them more pleasure than pain. May they end their days on neither a bang nor a whimper but a quiet smile in recognition of the boundless complexity of life.”

 

Epstein devoted an essay to the first essayist, Montaigne, in the March 1993 issue of Commentary. It too nicely resolves:

 

“By being a man on whom not much was lost, by studying the complex variousness of human nature through looking first into his own soul, by carefully considering his experience of the world, by not asking the impossible of himself and being suspicious of those who asked it of others, by understanding that man’s problem on earth is to attain such wisdom as will help him live a fit and reasonably happy life, Montaigne, for those who read him more than four centuries after he wrote, continues to lessen life’s terror and to add to its pleasure. More than this no writer can hope to do, and none has done it better than Michel de Montaigne.”