How to Live Happily (42)
Michel de Montaigne (1533 –1592). A bestseller as a first modern man of Me, I and Myself?
Montaigne
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Happiness is no idle thing
In the midst of the time’s upset, especially the French Wars of Religion, the philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533 –1592) advises on how to live happily: “In my opinion, it is living happily, not, as Antisthenes said, dying happily, that constitutes human felicity.” In his deeply realistic outlook Montaigne mocked the notion that something of us will survive our own demise. We have to accommodate to reality, in order to achieve happiness, it cannot be achieved on make-belief. In this he follows antiquity’s philosophy that accommodated to the science of Alexandria. Yes, this science shows that the world dwarfs us, but we can be happy as dwarfs. And so, by laying out philosophy for an old science, Montaigne prepared us for the new science that was to be built on the old in short order.
Feeling happy was for Montaigne the true purpose of life. This was quite a revolutionary perspective for the times. It was to prepare enlightenment thinking. His skepticism towards most other sentiments and the degree of knowledge one can have, was to foster the imminent burst of interest in realism that was to usher in science.
In today’s thinking one can assume that Montaigne meant both a synchronic and diachronic meaning of happiness. Synchronic meaning depends on your state of being happy at any one moment in time: Montaigne is happy because he is out in the sunshine with his cabbages. Diachronic meaning depends on the journey. Montaigne is happy because he is in a program of writing essays in his mind to his old dead friend. So, perhaps it is a tossup: cabbages or essays to friend? But one can feel his happiness in both.
A new art
I am told that every French school child knows how one of their great compatriots withdrew to a castle tower, the citadel, after a life’s fruitful work, to write and think. It was his birthday in 1571 and he at age 38, a time when some of nowadays youth starts thinking of slithering into the productive life, when Montaigne went out of it. Here, in calm and freedom from all cares, he thought he would spend what little remains of his life, already more than half expired. Isn’t everybody tempted to eventually take the leisure to look over one’s life in this way?
Montaigne pursued a character he called Myself but who more accurately should be called Me, I and Myself: “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal”. His writing phase lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation that he called “essais”. He made, of a chemical word, a literary occupation, and a new art. And he gave us a warning: “I am myself the matter of my book; You would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.” Yet his writing is full of life. Waldo Emerson, in a classic essay on Montaigne, wrote that the “marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. . . . Cut these words, and they would bleed.”
Montaigne was one of the first authors who can reach us directly in their unadorned sobriety and truthfulness and so I kept reading him, from teen years on till today.
Reading Montaigne as a teen? What kind of kid were you? Well, one who could be amused by Montaigne’s musing on the vagaries of penises, say: “We are right to note the licence and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it; it imperiously contests for authority with our will: it stubbornly and proudly refuses all our incitements, both of the mind and hand.”
The great hallmarks he observed during his life were the discovery of America and its indigenous population which he much esteemed. He witnessed the stirring of scientific thought but not yet its unfolding, but he was critical about its aspirations to know more fully by its methods. He didn’t think this as that promising. But he picked up its sober mood and translated it into personal experience. He followed and helped create some of this new mood.
Early intellectual education and life
The early intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor who spoke no French, as his father hired only servants who could speak Latin. All people were admonished to speak to the boy in Latin. Even though there was great refinement in the methods of his upbringing, the boy experienced a spirit of "liberty and delight". He would later describe this atmosphere as making him "relish... duty by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion...without any severity or constraint". A musician woke him every morning, exemplifying an education with minimal boredom.
Montaigne married in 1565, probably as arranged. Marriage appears not to have contributed much to his happiness though, although he was fond of his one surviving daughter.
Montaigne’s Catholic family was financially well off from salted herring (today the name of Château d’Yquem depicts the perhaps greatest of all French sweet wines). He was never interested in it even though he admired the good husbandry of his father: “I wish that, in lieu of some other part of his inheritance, my father had bequeathed me that passionate love for the running of his estates. If only I can acquire the taste for it as he did, then political philosophy can, if it will, condemn me for the lowliness and barrenness of my occupation.” The Montaigne’s were not old aristocracy and money, as the origin of their trade tells. They had to fend for this place.
Never fully stepping into his father’s interest, although staying close, he still loved him. It is his father he mourns and, more than anyone, his “soul’s” friend Étienne de la Boétie, a Bordeaux poet who was arguably the love of his life and whose early death, he once said, drove him to marriage in the hope of solace and then into his tower for escape.
Montaigne was struck with occasional misfortune, as his younger brother died of an errand tennis ball. While on a trip to Italy, to find relief from kidney stones, of which his father had died, Montaigne had been elected mayor of Bordeaux, as his father was. In this capacity he moderated between the warring Catholics and Protestants.
Within all that turmoil the plague broke out in Bordeaux toward the end of his second term in office. Montaigne had heard of it from the comfort of his nearby chateau. And now his last official duty was to attend the transition ceremony. But he as mayor rode to the city’s edge and wrote to the municipal council to ask whether his life was worth a transition ceremony. As there appears to have been no reply, Montaigne returned to his chateau. By the time the plague subsided, about a third of the city’s population had died ghastly deaths. But his new and splendid isolation now allowed Montaigne to discover himself and invent the writing of essays. More than a millennium earlier, thinkers like Epicurus and Seneca had already attempted to go this route. And Montaigne read them voraciously, annotating the pages of his essays and the roof beams of his library with their words.
Introspection
So, to further concentrate, Montaigne had retired from public life to the tower of his Château de Montaigne. There he lived a Spartan life, if in the luxury of keeping distractions away. In an extreme form of the new fashion for privacy he largely isolated himself from social and family affairs (he still attended festivities and weddings though).
On his 38th birthday he had the following inscription placed on the crown of the bookshelves of his working chamber: “In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.”
During war and plague, he became a close friend of the humanist poet Étienne de la Boétie, both having partly Jewish ancestry. Of him he says: “If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.” Conversation was what Montaigne loved most and so he continues: “In love, 'tis no other than frantic desire for that which flies from us.”
Étienne de la Boétie died of the plague in his early thirties with Montaigne at his bedside. After his friend’s death in 1563, Montaigne began his foundational Essays as a new "means of communication". In his case, the reader fills the place of the dead friend, becoming privy to the thousand small sanities the two had exchanged between them and were keeping at it beyond death. Their suspended observational exchange made candor literary. Montaigne writes in the first person, as some others had done before, but they typically imposed their opinions with authority. Montaigne simply wrote as himself: there is a fellow at his midpoint in life trying to sort himself out. He has been bereaved, yet he mentions his experience with various enemas as “farting endlessly”. His essays breathe with the texture of everyday notions: “I can dine without a tablecloth, but hardly without clean napkins, as the Germans do; for I soil them more than they or the Italians, since I make little use of a spoon or fork. I regret that the royal custom of changing napkins, together with the plates, after every course, is not more widespread.”
And then there are his stoic philosophical quotes about living: “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know… The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness… My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened… A man who fears suffering, is already suffering from what he fears… I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself… Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it… Every man has within himself the entire human condition… Not being able to govern events, I govern myself... Other people do not see you at all, but guess at you by uncertain conjectures… There are no truths, only moments of clarity passing for answers…I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself…The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.”
And there are his quotes about death that are so different from the expectations of a hereafter of medieval times: “There is nothing of evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil; to know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint… We haunt our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life… Death pays all debts… It is equally pointless to weep because we won't be alive a hundred years from now as that we were not here a hundred years ago… God is favorable to those whom he makes to die by degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age. The last death will be so much the less painful: it will kill but a quarter of a man or but half a one at most… Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it… I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden.” His metaphorical beloved cabbages make Montaigne see the pattern in human life as he put it in 1580, ‘the beliefs, judgments and opinions of men . . . have their cycles, seasons, births and deaths, every bit as much as cabbages do.’
Montaigne expresses his own personality, and with it the one of the rest of humanity, as an organism of contradictions and variety: “I contain in some fashion every contradiction, as the occasion provides. Bashful, insolent, chaste, lustful, …”
The author who warned potential readers of his unabashed self-centered questioning, nevertheless, became something of a bestseller and not only in our time with its interest in Me, I and Myself. Everyone in France with a philosophic bent and a decent classical education had read at least the first two of his books. By the standard of the time, they were bestsellers and that all over Europe. The educated public was perhaps lured by the writer’s promise that “my defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed”. Yet he pretended that he wrote only for himself or, at most, “for a few men and a few years”, even as he acknowledged that “The public favor has given me a little more confidence than I expected.”
Opinions
Shakespeare appears to have read Montaigne’s essays, working their insights into his plays. The late Essayist Lewis Thomas was another admirer: “For the weekend times when there is nothing new in the house to read, and nothing much to think about or write about, and the afternoon stretches ahead all bleak and empty, there is nothing like Montaigne to make things better.” Gore Vidal wrote: “The greatest action of this man of action was to withdraw to his library to read and think and write notes to himself that eventually became books for the world.” Twentieth-century literary critic Erich Auerbach called Montaigne the first modern man. "Among all his contemporaries he had the clearest conception of the problem of man's self-orientation; that is, the task of making oneself at home in existence without fixed points of support". The American philosopher Eric Hoffer said of Montaigne, "He was writing about me. He knew my innermost thoughts." For me Montaigne is the first writer who holds my interest fully as a modern person. He was contributing in forming my worldview, if perhaps somewhat wanting on the concept of connubial love and family life.
Montaigne and his contemporaries were brilliantly glib. It is little wonder, had they not exquisite new material at hand to write about? America is discovered with its new religions, animals and plants; telescopes were soon looking to the moon. Isn’t the world becoming a new place? The lands across the Atlantic riveted Montaigne. In “On the Cannibals,” he suggests that these man-eaters of Brazil might be more ethically pure than residents of the Old World. Wouldn’t you have expected something as unexpected from the man? He writes: “I am sometimes seized with irritation at their not having been discovered earlier, in times when there were men who could have appreciated them better than we do.”
Montaigne died in 1592 at the age of 59 of quinsy, a tonsil infection. Infectious disease was a rampant killer of the time. In his case the disease brought about paralysis of the tongue. It was especially disappointing for one who once said, "the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is conversation.” But at this time, he spoke mainly with his mind to his dead friend.
Out of this concentrating life, Montaigne had built philosophical structures to restrain fanaticism, directing eventually to the liberalism of the later John Stuart Mill or Abraham Lincoln. Montaigne’s constant practical questioning of “what can I know” places him amongst the movers of his time towards scientific realism. He prepared the coming scientific observation, within a generation. Montaigne deeply influenced people like the scientist-philosopher Pascal, the one with his sad arguments about the human condition. Pascal keeps building where his compatriot had left, even more introspective, perhaps, not as cheerfully though. And both are still eminently readable today. In fact, it is an encouraging aspect of our civilization that both have never gone out of print.
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