… Readers approach him from their private perspective, contributing their own experience of life. At the same time, these experiences are moulded by broad trends, which come and go in leisurely formation. Anyone looking over four hundred and thirty years of Montaigne-reading can see these trend building up and dissolving like clouds in the sky, or crowds on a railway platform between commuter trains. Each way of reading seems natural while it is on the scene; then a new style comes in and the old one departs, sometimes becoming so outmoded that it is barely incomprehensible to anyone but historians.
… From now on, when Montaigne read about death, he would show less interest in the exemplary ends of the great philosophers, and more in those of ordinary people, especially those whose deaths took place in a state of ‘enfeeblement and stupor.’ In his most mature essays, he wrote admiringly of men such as Petronius and Tigillinius, Romans who died surrounded by jokes, music and everyday conversation, so that death simply flowed into them amid the general good cheer. Instead of turning a party into a death scene, as Montaigne has done in his youthful imagination, they turned their death scenes into parties.
… We do better to ‘slide over this world a bit lightly and on the surface’.
… Thus, around the middle of his life, Montaigne lost his bearings and found himself reborn.
… Montaigne’s change of gear during his mid- to late thirties has been compared to the most famous life-changing crises in literature: those of Don Quixote, who abandoned his routine to set off in search of chivalric adventure, and of Dante, who lost himself in the woods ‘midway of life’s path’.
… The library also marked Montaigne out as a man of fashion. The trend for such retreats had been spreading slowly through France, having began in Italy in the previous century. Well-off men filled chambers with the books and reading-stands, then used them as a place to escape to on the pretext of having to work. Montaigne took the escape factor further by removing the library from the house altogether. It was both a vantage point and a cave, or, to use a phrase he himself like, an arriere-boutique: a ‘room behind the shop’. He could invite visitors there if he wished – and often did – but was never obliged to. He loved it. ‘Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!’.
… ‘If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on the trial’.
… The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience – but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simple describing an object on your table, or the view from the window, opens your eyes to how marvellous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.
… ‘If others examined themselves as attentively, as I do, they would find themselves ,as I do, full on inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off – thought I don’t know’
That final coda - ‘though I don’t know’ – is pure Montaigne. One must imagine it appended, in spirit, to almost everything he ever wrote. Yes, he says, we are foolish, but we cannot be any other way so we may as well relax and live with it.
… Plutarch was to Montaigne what Montaigne was to many later readers: a model to follow, and a treasure chest of idea, quotations and anecdotes to plunder. ‘He is so universal and so full that on occasions, and however eccentric the subject you have taken up, he makes his way into your work.’ The truth of this last part is undeniable: several sections of the Essays are paste-ins from Plutarch, left almost unchanged. No one thought of this as plagiarism: such imitation of great authors was then considered an excellent practice. Moreover, Montaigne subtly changed everything he stole, if only by setting it in a different context and hedging it around with uncertainties.
… he took up books like they were people, and welcomed them into his family. The rebellious Ovid-reading boy would one day accumulate a library of thousand volumes: a good size but no an indiscriminate assemblage. Some were inherited from his friend L Boetie; others he bought himself. He collected unsystematically, without considering fine bindings or rarity value. Montaigne would never repeat his father’s mistake of fetishising books or their authors. One cannot imagine him kissing books like holy relics, as Erasmus or the poet Plutarch reportedly used to, or putting on his best clothes before reading them, like Machiavelli; who wrote: ‘ I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workaday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them’. Montaigne would have found this ridiculous.
… Whenever Montaigne did exert himself to flick through a book, according to him, he promptly forgot almost everything he had read. ‘Memory is a wonderfully useful took, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty’, he wrote, before adding, ‘it is entirely lacking in me’.
“There is no man who has less business talking about memory. For I recognise almost no trace of it in me, and I do not think there is another one in the world so monstrously deficient”.
He admitted this was a nuisance. It was annoying to lose his most interesting ideas simply because they came to him while he was out riding and had no paper on which to write them down. … As he wrote, quoting Terrence, ‘I’m full of cracks, and leak out on all sides.’
… Either he was less leaky than he claimed, or he was less lazy, for if he did not remember the quotations, he must have written them down.
… ‘Forget much of what you learn’ and ‘Be slow-witted’ became two of Montaigne’s best answers to the question of how to live. They freed him to think wisely rather than glibly; they allowed him to avoid the fanatical notions and foolish deceptions that ensnared other people; and they let him follow his own thoughts wherever they led – which was all he really wanted to do.
Slow wits and forgetfulness could be cultivated, but Montaigne believed he was lucky in having by his birth.
… Slowness and forgetfulness were good responses to the question of how to live, so far as they went. They made for good camouflage, and they allowed room for thoughtful judgements to emerge.
… All the schools had the same aim: to achieve a way of living known in the original Greek as eudaimonia, often translated as ‘happiness’, ‘joy’, or ‘human flourishing’. This meant living well in every sense: thriving, relishing life, being a good person. They also agreed that the best path to eudaimonia was ataraxia, which might be rendered as ‘imperturbability’ or ‘freedom from anxiety’. Ataraxia means equilibrium: the art of maintaining an even keel, so that you neither exult when things go well not plunge into despair when they go awry. To attain it is to have control over your emotions, so that you are not battered and dragged about like a bone fought over by a pack of dogs.
… Each culture, in doing these things, takes itself as the standard. If you live in a country where teeth are blackened, it seems obvious that ebony ivories are the only beautiful ones. Reciting diversities helps us to break free of this, if only for brief moments of enlightenment. ‘This great world,’ writes Montaigne, ‘is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognise ourselves from the proper angle.’ After running through such a list, we look back upon our own existence differently. Our eyes are opened to the truth that our customs are no less weird than anyone else’s.
… ‘My excesses do not carry me very far away. There is nothing extreme or strange about them.’
… ‘The archers who overshoots the target misses as much as the one who does not reach it.’
… Montaigne knew that some of the things he had done in the past no longer made sense to him, but he was content to presume he must have been a different person at the time, and leave it to that. His past selves were as diverse as a group of people at a party. Just as he would not think of passing judgement on a room full of acquaintances, all of whom had their own reasons and points of view to explain what they had done, so he would not think of judging previous versions of Montaigne. ‘We are all patchwork,’ he wrote, ‘and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.’ No overall point of view existed from which he could look back and construct the one consistent Montaigne that he would have liked to be. Since he did not try to airbrush his previous selves out of life, there was no reasons for him to do it in his book either. The Essays had grown alongside him from twenty years: they were what they were, and he was happy to let them be,
His refusal to repent did not stopping him re-reading his book, however, and frequently adding to it. He never reached the point where he could lay down the pen and announce, ‘Now, I, Montaigne, have said everything I wanted to say. I have preserved myself on paper.’ As long as he lived, he had to keep writing. The process could have gone on forever.
… It is true that the Essays was beginning to strain at the limits of comprehension. One can sometimes make out the skeleton of the first edition through the tangle, especially in those modern editions which supply small letters to mark out the three stages: A for the 1580 edition, B for 1588, and C for everything after that. … Had Montaigne lived another thirty years, would he have gone on adding to it until it became truly unreadable, like the artist in Balzac’s ‘Unknown Masterpiece’ who works his painting into a meaningless black mess? Or would he have known exactly when to stop?
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