Montaigne

1533-1592

1. A book to read and to write

Montaigne’s Essays are a model for writers, that species of people who think with a pen.

I think every writer should try to write a book like Montaigne’s, or, even better, a shorter version of it.

The book is important for two reasons. It’s good to read, giving you a look into a curious, quirky mind. It’s also a model for a book that you should write for yourself.

2. Who was Montaigne?

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was a nobleman. He was born in 1533 and died, just shy of 60, in 1592. He considered himself more Gascoigne than French, once saying that his love of Paris made him French. He was frequently exasperated by the manners of the French … but also of the English, Germans and Italians. He seemed to be perplexed and fascinated by all kinds.

He lived in troubled times. A standard history of warfare lists 59 named wars in Europe during the 16th century, including one that lasted, allegedly, 80 years and another, far more famous, that lasted 30. A lot of the fighting was about religion — this was the Reformation and Counterreformation. Political leaders used the turmoil to grab land and wealth. Europeans massacred each other with unprecedented efficiency. One historian guessed that one out of three Europeans died as a result of the constant warfare.

Montaigne, a Catholic, was an advocate of tolerance. He left his doors unlocked. He wrote that social order depended on trust. He had to be able to trust his neighbors.

Montaigne was raised by his father to do some public service. Michel’s father was rural gentry — he was a good farmer and soldier but could barely read. He also had novel ideas about the education of children.

When Michel was born, his father hired a tutor who would speak to him only in Latin. Montaigne’s father and mother learned just enough Latin to speak to the child. When Michel was packed off to college, he was as fluent in the language of education as his professors.

Young Michel was educated as a lawyer. He was, for a time, mayor of Bordeaux. He also did some soldiering in the endless wars. He did his duty, although he didn’t like it much, and retired, at 38, to his chateau in Montaigne.

He fixed up his library in an old tower and asked himself a single question: What do I know?

He asked the question so often that he had an artisan strike a jeton, a kind of medal, with that phrase — Que-sais je? — and wore it around his neck.

When he retired, Montaigne felt old, used up, disillusioned. He was skeptical that life had taught him much of anything.

4. The Essays

Nevertheless, he wanted an accounting of what he did know, so he began to write essays. “Essais” are simply “attempts” or “trials.” Montaigne, a lawyer, also used “essais” as a legal term. It was as if he were giving an idea a preliminary hearing.

His first essay, “We reach the same ends by discrepant means,” was about the practical question of what you should when surrounded. This was the typical battle of the 30 Years War. Armies besieged rival cities.

Is it better to surrender and hope for leniency, or does showing weakness just encourage more cruelty from the superior force? Are you better off fighting it out? And what kind of emotion is pity anyway? Can you rely on it? Isn’t it kind of vicious, sometimes bringing out the worst in us?

We think submission will result in leniency, but sometimes the victors are so contemptuous of the conquered they slaughter everybody. Sometimes the victors are more impressed with a show of courage — but sometimes not. When Emperor Conrad II besieged the Duke of Bavaria at Guelph, he said he’d let the noblewomen out of the city with what they could carry on their backs. The emperor was surprised when the women carried out children, husbands and the duke. On the other hand, Alexander, enraged by the courage of Betis in defense of Gaza, had him dragged behind a cart when the city finally fell.

Montaigne loved exempla — it was almost as if were reviewing the striking cases of human experience in court before the question was decided.

Montaigne concluded the best thing to do is not get trapped in a situation in which your fate is in someone else’s hands.

Montaigne’s early essays sometimes have the taste of a college exercise. He copied down what Plato and Aristotle and other famous people had to say about a subject. Gradually, Montaigne stopped worrying quite so much about what his beloved ancient authors had said. The maxims of the ancient sages were still important, and the case studies were still vital. But the more he wrote the more he searched his own mind for what he believed and thought. And he thought about everything.

5. Topics

Montaigne wrote 107 essays. He had things to say about trust, travel, books, medicine, combat, anger. But his real subject was himself.

He examined the nature of his own beliefs, looking at how we form our ideas and opinions. His observed that we believe most strongly what we know least about. We have strong religious beliefs, although we know nothing about the nature of the gods. Our beliefs about human nature are less firm. We’re ready to believe almost anything about another human being.

No one wrote more movingly about friendship. Montaigne had one great friend, Etienne de la Boetie, who died young. Montaigne observed that we have many common friendships in our lives, but there is a greater friendship that occurs rarely. That idea is famous, but most people miss his theory on the test of friendship: that friends know each other’s motives.

Speculating about the motives of other people is treacherous business. We frequently judge others incorrectly — get it all wrong. But it’s not like that with real friends. Whatever one does, the other knows exactly what he was thinking.

Often, it’s hard to say what a particular essay is about. Montaigne will start on one topic and then digress to another topic — and then digress again.

“On the power of the imagination,” Montaigne talks about marriage and then detours into the topic of sex, and then he wonders about the connection between body and mind. How it is that our lusts, mere thoughts in our mind, can affect our bodies? How can a naughty thought give a lad an erection?

That line of thought leads to a digression in which he puts the penis on trial —he’s a lawyer, after all — and he conducts an inquiry into all the trouble that part of the body causes mankind.

Some people complain that, with all the digressions, it can be difficult to say what any one essay is about. That, in turn, makes if it hard to say what the book as a whole is about. But you can get a sense of the book by considering one short essay that’s relatively simple, though not well known.

6. ‘A Custom of the Isle of Cea’

Montaigne wrote far more famous essays — his last one, “On Experience,” is probably the best-seller among anthologists — but this one is a good introduction.

In the first century B.C., Sextus Pompeius, the son of Pompey the Great, was visiting the Greek island of Chios. He watched a matriarch of 90 commit suicide.

Montaigne, a Catholic, could not approve of suicide. But he admired the ancient Greeks, who spoke of making “a reasonable exit.”

The theologies of Judaism and Christianity have made that old Greek idea a crime. Notice the usage. We commit suicide, as we commit a crime. In theology, suicide is an abandonment of hope, a theological crime.

Suicide is against divine law, at least in the prevalent religions of the West, which means it’s against the law in states where theological beliefs still intrude on secular society. But in the Greek world, people recognized that people killed themselves for different reasons. Plato recognized that some people kill themselves because of lost courage — and proposed a law that mandated an ignominious funeral for anyone who took his life out of cowardice and weakness. But he recognized that people kill themselves for nobler reasons. His account of Socrates’s decision to accept the death penalty, when he could have escaped, is a story about principle, not cowardice.

Montaigne summed up the principles of the ancients:

• The wise person should choose good life, rather than long life.

• It’s better to end a bad life than to live in shameful, intolerable circumstances.

• To end your life, you need only the will to do so.

Because of that ancient custom, public hemlock was kept in Marseilles. It was free, but you had to give the authorities a reasonable reason to use the public property.

Sextus Pompey was invited to watch as an old woman called her children around her and drank the elixir. She did four things. She recounted her life. She blessed her children. She told of the progress of the poison. And, at the appropriate time, she called her daughters to close her eyes.

7. Why Everyone Should Write Essays

When I was a boy, my mother used to quote a line from the First Epistle of St. Peter: “and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you … “

If you believe something, have a reason to back it up. If you’re doing something and someone asks, be able to give an explanation.

I had a poor record when it came to listening to my mother. But on this point I think she was right.

The first reason to write essays is to find out what you think, to sort out your own mind.

The second reason to write your own essays is that someone else might like them.

When my father turned 70, he wrote an essay about what he considered the defining moments of his life.

His father died when he was 7, during the heart of the Great Depression. He was raised on a small cotton farm in Tennessee with no prospects for education or any other road out of poverty.

When he was 17, he was playing touch football when news came that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. He was drafted and trained with the 10th Armored Division, which was assigned to Gen. George Patton’s Third Army. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge. 

After the war, he got a chance to get an education on the G.I. Bill. He excelled at academics, and eventually got a Ph.D. He had little to say about the war when I was growing up.

Here’s where his story gets interesting: My father was a medic. He trained as an infantryman, in support of the tanks, but he had religious beliefs against killing. When he expressed them, his officers thought he was trying to get out of the army. He was the sole support of a widowed mother. He had a case.

But my father did not want out of the army. He wanted to serve — but not with a rifle. And so the story for him was not the fighting in the Ardennes but of the agony of conscience about what his small role in a great war would be.

His essay runs to about 80 pages. That typescript is one of the most valuable possessions I have.

8. A Top Three

If you are convinced you should give Montaigne a try, the question is where to start. My edition of The Essays runs 1,284 pages with index. But “An Apology for Raymond Sebond,” a treatise on the limits of reason, runs almost 200. Some of the essays are just a couple of pages long.

With essays, you can start anywhere. If you are trying to get a taste of the fellow, here are three suggestions:

• “On the Cannibals.” This essay appeared in anthologies, especially during the era of the tolerant 1960s. Montaigne got to meet three natives of Brazil, who were viewed almost as residents of a zoo by Europeans. Montaigne’s message: Don’t call others barbarians or savages until you’ve taken a look at your own society. It was, after all, the age of the rack and public burnings in Europe. As far as Montaigne could tell, the Brazilians preached bravery before your enemies and love of your wife.

He said the Brazilians made three points: First, after seeing the royal guards, they found it odd that such warriors would obey a boyish king rather than choose a commander from among themselves. Second, they didn’t understand disparity of wealth. And then — and this is characteristic Montaigne — he expresses annoyance with himself for forgetting the third.

• “On Experience.” This is a longer essay, written three years before Montaigne died, summarizing what he’d learned about himself. His view was that the route to wisdom begins with self-knowledge. But part of wisdom is appreciating how treacherous our claims to knowledge are. While our social constructions seem firm, just consider how feeble our notion of justice is. The laws that hold society together have little foundation.

Montaigne said that age takes away life slowly. The death of an old man is not to be mourned: “it will only be killing off half a man or a quarter.” What would be wrong, because it would be unnatural, would be to wish for longer life. Montaigne was satisfied with the good measure of life he’d been given. He wished to leave quietly.

In his view, the most beautiful life is lived according to the common measure, following the customs of the place. A beautiful life includes the human joys of dining with friends and loving your spouse. It rejects notions of transcendence. It accepts that an essential feature of life is that it must end.

Montaigne goes nowhere without diversions, so he detours into the pleasures of soldiering, advice on raising boys and the joys of scratching an itch.

But no summary, no quotation, can give you the effect of the whole essay. It  includes a digression on natural pleasures, including defecation. That sections begins: “Kings and philosophers shit: and so do ladies. The lives of public figures are devoted to etiquette: my life, an obscure and private one, can enjoy all the natural functions.”

Some say it’s the greatest essay ever written.

• It’s hard to leave out his classic essay on marriage and erotic love, “On some lines of Virgil,” and it’s hard to leave out the trial of the penis in “On the power of the imagination,” even on a short list. Book lovers will not excused the omission of “On Books.” But I’d read “The Art of Conversation,” with its claim that conversation is the most delightful activity in our lives. Montaigne says it’s the natural exercise of our minds. We ought to seek out good companions as trainers in exercising our minds, people who will challenge us, disagree with us, provoke us. It includes an account of what makes a good storyteller, with a reminder that not even the greatest we’ve seen is perfect.

So there are three places to start — and don’t forget “A Custom of the Isle of Cea,” already outlined, perhaps at excessive length. Like Montaigne, I’ll claim to offer one number of suggestions while giving another.

9. Bibliography

• Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993. The best way to read Montaigne is simply to read him.

• Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or A Life of Montaigne; New York: Other Press, 2010. This is a fine biography. Bakewell, following Montaigne, makes 20 attempts to answer the question: How should one live? 

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Montaigne: Or, The Skeptic,” in The Portable Emerson; London: Penguin Books, 1979. Many writers have taken tried to take the measure of Montaigne in the form he made famous, and I include Emerson as an example. This part of his appraisal seems perfect: “The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book.”