Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) from Book 1 Essay 42, ‘On the inequality there is between us’, to Book 2 Essay 7, ‘On rewards for honour’
Three months in and I’m coming to love my morning chat with Montaigne.
I was delighted to hear an echo of his voice in a session at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival. In conversation with Felicity Plunkett (my blog post here), the poet Nam Le was struggling to describe the complex way his mind works. According to my scribbled notes, he said:
Any attribute you can attribute to yourself, the opposite can also be yours.
That morning, I had been reading Montaigne’s Book 2, Essay 1, ‘On the inconstancy of our actions’, which begins:
Those who strive to account for a man’s deeds are never more bewildered than when they try to knit them into one whole and to show them under one light, since they commonly contradict each other in so odd a fashion that it seems impossible that they should all come out of the same shop.
I don’t know if Nam Le had Montaigne even at the back of his mind, but it’s fascinating to find in Montaigne, roughly Shakespeare’s contemporary, such a pre-echo of a 21st century way of seeing things. Fascinating, but not an isolated moment. His reflections on public life, oratory, warfare, frugality, education, suicide and so on often seem tailor-made for quotation in a discussion of anything from the US ex-president to drone warfare or the culture wars. He can be horribly sexist, and his class material is also horrible; but he’s often hard to take to task, because he’s likely to disagree with himself in the next paragraph.
At four pages a day, some essays extend over several mornings. I can see one coming over the horizon that will last me nearly a month. Mostly I ignore M A Creech’s prefatory notes, but sometimes I depend on them to make sense of an argument. Sometimes Montaigne piles up the anecdotes – drawing on ancient writers, recent history, contemporary gossip and personal experience – to such an extent that I lose track of his argument, and suspect he has lost track of it himself. Some of the anecdotes are bizarre in the extreme, especially when he is reporting on sexual or dietary habits of ‘exotic’ peoples.
I’m being fairly lazy in my reading. Whenever Montaigne quotes a line or two of poetry, usually in Latin, but sometimes in Old French or other languages, I skip straight to the translation provided by Mr Screech. I know I’m missing one of the pleasures of these texts, but it’s a pleasure that demands too much work for me (and, I expect, most 21st century readers).
One of the pleasures that is still alive and well is the constant delight of watching Montaigne’s mind chase after whatever rabbit catches his eye while he’s doing something else. This morning I read the essay, ‘On rewards for honour’, a short argument against adding a monetary or other material component to an award for valour, which morphs briefly into a reflection on why ‘valour’ is seen to be mostly a martial virtue when true valour in non-military circles is so much harder to achieve, and then ends in a sentence or two wondering at the way ‘virtue’ means different things for men and women, finishing up with a jokey note which, if he had continued his thoughtful wanderings, might have led in a proto-feminist direction:
Our passion, our feverish concern, for the chastity of women results in une bonne femme (‘a good woman’), and une femme d’honneur, ou de vertu (‘a woman of honour or of virtue’) in reality meaning for us a chaste woman – as though, in order to bind them to that duty, we neglected all the rest and gave them free rein for any other fault, striking a bargain to get them to give up that one.
‘On practice’, the longer essay that precedes ‘On rewards for honour’, is an even better example of the way Montaigne’s mind moves in unexpected directions. It turns out to be about death – which, he says, is the one thing you can’t get better at by practice. Or is it? The tone changes abruptly as he tells of a horrific near-death experience of his own, including a detailed account of the aftermath as he regained consciousness, pain, and memory. Then: ‘The account of so unimportant an event is pointless but for the instruction I drew from it: for in truth, to inure yourself to death, all you have to do it draw nigh to it.’ But that’s not the final swerve of the essay. It turns to the question of talking and writing about oneself, but first there’s this brief description – one of many – of what he is trying to do (essaying) in the essays:
Here you have not my teaching but my study: the lesson is not for others; it is for me. Yet, for all that, you should not be ungrateful to me for publishing it. What helps me can perhaps help somebody else.
Meanwhile I am not spoiling anything: I am only using what is mine. And if I play the fool it is at my own expense and does no harm to anybody.
I just read on Wikipedia that William Hazlitt described Montaigne as ‘the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man’. I’m loving his courage, and his humility, in putting his own experience and his own thinking out there for all the world to read.
This blog post, was written on Gadigal-Wangal land as the nights start earlier, spiderwebs multiply, and the rain buckets down. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of those Nations, and would love to hear from any First Nations people reading this blog.
Me fail? I fly! 