How to live.
or, A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer.
by Sarah Bakewell.
Q. How to live?
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE IN ONE QUESTION AND TWENTY ATTEMPTS.
AT AN ANSWER.
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY is full of people who are full of themselves. A half-hour"s trawl through the online ocean of blogs, tweets, tubes, s.p.a.ces, faces, pages, and pods brings up thousands of individuals fascinated by their own personalities and shouting for attention. They go on about themselves; they diarize, and chat, and upload photographs of everything they do. Uninhibitedly extrovert, they also look inward as never before. Even as bloggers and networkers delve into their private experience, they communicate with their fellow humans in a shared festival of the self. is full of people who are full of themselves. A half-hour"s trawl through the online ocean of blogs, tweets, tubes, s.p.a.ces, faces, pages, and pods brings up thousands of individuals fascinated by their own personalities and shouting for attention. They go on about themselves; they diarize, and chat, and upload photographs of everything they do. Uninhibitedly extrovert, they also look inward as never before. Even as bloggers and networkers delve into their private experience, they communicate with their fellow humans in a shared festival of the self.
Some optimists have tried to make this global meeting of minds the basis for a new approach to international relations. The historian Theodore Zeldin has founded a site called "The Oxford Muse," which encourages people to put together brief self-portraits in words, describing their everyday lives and the things they have learned. They upload these for other people to read and respond to. For Zeldin, shared self-revelation is the best way to develop trust and cooperation around the planet, replacing national stereotypes with real people. The great adventure of our epoch, he says, is "to discover who inhabits the world, one individual at a time." The "Oxford Muse" is thus full of personal essays or interviews with t.i.tles like: Why an educated Russian works as a cleaner in OxfordWhy being a hairdresser satisfies the need for perfectionHow writing a self-portrait shows you are not who you thought you wereWhat you can discover if you do not drink or danceWhat a person adds when writing about himself to what he says in conversationHow to be successful and lazy at the same timeHow a chef expresses his kindness [image]
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By describing what makes them different from anyone anyone else, the contributors reveal what they share with else, the contributors reveal what they share with everyone everyone else: the experience of being human. else: the experience of being human.
This idea-writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity-has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a n.o.bleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Perigord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592.
Montaigne created the idea simply by doing it. Unlike most memoirists of his day, he did not write to record his own great deeds and achievements. Nor did he lay down a straight eyewitness account of historical events, although he could have done; he lived through a religious civil war which almost destroyed his country over the decades he spent incubating and writing his book. A member of a generation robbed of the hopeful idealism enjoyed by his father"s contemporaries, he adjusted to public miseries by focusing his attention on private life. He weathered the disorder, oversaw his estate, a.s.sessed court cases as a magistrate, and administered Bordeaux as the most easygoing mayor in its history. All the time, he wrote exploratory, free-floating pieces to which he gave simple t.i.tles: Of Friendship Of Cannibals Of the Custom Of Wearing Clothes How we cry and laugh for the same thing Of Names Of Smells Of Cruelty Of Thumbs How our mind hinders itself Of Diversion Of Coaches Of Experience Altogether, he wrote a hundred and seven such essays. Some occupy a page or two; others are much longer, so that most recent editions of the complete collection run to over a thousand pages. They rarely offer to explain or teach anything. Montaigne presents himself as someone who jotted down whatever was going through his head when he picked up his pen, capturing encounters and states of mind as they happened. He used these experiences as the basis for asking himself questions, above all the big question that fascinated him as it did many of his contemporaries. Although it is not quite grammatical in English, it can be phrased in three simple words: "How to live?"
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This is not the same as the ethical question, "How should should one live?" Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. He wanted to know how to live a good life-meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one. This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present. He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself. one live?" Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. He wanted to know how to live a good life-meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one. This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present. He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself.
A down-to-earth question, "How to live?" splintered into a myriad other pragmatic questions. Like everyone else, Montaigne ran up against the major perplexities of existence: how to cope with the fear of death, how to get over losing a child or a beloved friend, how to reconcile yourself to failures, how to make the most of every moment so that life does not drain away unappreciated. But there were smaller puzzles, too. How do you avoid getting drawn into a pointless argument with your wife, or a servant? How can you rea.s.sure a friend who thinks a witch has cast a spell on him? How do you cheer up a weeping neighbor? How do you guard your home? What is the best strategy if you are held up by armed robbers who seem to be uncertain whether to kill you or hold you to ransom? If you overhear your daughter"s governess teaching her something you think is wrong, is it wise to intervene? How do you deal with a bully? What do you say to your dog when he wants to go out and play, while you want to stay at your desk writing your book?
In place of abstract answers, Montaigne tells us what he he did in each case, and what it felt like when he was doing it. He provides all the details we need to make it real, and sometimes more than we need. He tells us, for no particular reason, that the only fruit he likes is melon, that he prefers to have s.e.x lying down rather than standing up, that he cannot sing, and that he loves vivacious company and often gets carried away by the spark of repartee. But he also describes sensations that are harder to capture in words, or even to be aware of: what it feels like to be lazy, or courageous, or indecisive; or to indulge a moment of vanity, or to try to shake off an obsessive fear. He even writes about the sheer feeling of being alive. did in each case, and what it felt like when he was doing it. He provides all the details we need to make it real, and sometimes more than we need. He tells us, for no particular reason, that the only fruit he likes is melon, that he prefers to have s.e.x lying down rather than standing up, that he cannot sing, and that he loves vivacious company and often gets carried away by the spark of repartee. But he also describes sensations that are harder to capture in words, or even to be aware of: what it feels like to be lazy, or courageous, or indecisive; or to indulge a moment of vanity, or to try to shake off an obsessive fear. He even writes about the sheer feeling of being alive.
Exploring such phenomena over twenty years, Montaigne questioned himself again and again, and built up a picture of himself-a self-portrait in constant motion, so vivid that it practically gets up off the page and sits down next to you to read over your shoulder. He can say surprising things: a lot has changed since Montaigne was born, almost half a millennium ago, and neither manners nor beliefs are always still recognizable. Yet to read Montaigne is to experience a series of shocks of familiarity, which make the centuries between him and the twenty-first-century reader collapse to nothing. Readers keep seeing themselves in him, just as visitors to the "Oxford Muse" see themselves, or aspects of themselves, in the story of why an educated Russian works as a cleaner or of what it is like to prefer not to dance.
The journalist Bernard Levin, writing an article on the subject for The Times The Times in 1991, said, "I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: "How did he know all that about me?""The answer is, of course, that he knows it by knowing about himself. In turn, people understand him because they too already know "all that" about their own experience. As one of his most obsessive early readers, Blaise Pascal, wrote in the seventeenth century: "It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there." in 1991, said, "I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: "How did he know all that about me?""The answer is, of course, that he knows it by knowing about himself. In turn, people understand him because they too already know "all that" about their own experience. As one of his most obsessive early readers, Blaise Pascal, wrote in the seventeenth century: "It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there."
The novelist Virginia Woolf imagined people walking past Montaigne"s self-portrait like visitors in a gallery. As each person pa.s.ses, he or she pauses in front of the picture and leans forward to peer through the patterns of reflection on the gla.s.s. "There is always a crowd before that picture, gazing into its depths, seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the longer they look, never being able to say quite what it is they see." The portrait"s face and their own merge into one. This, for Woolf, was the way people respond to each other in general: As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror...And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue.
Montaigne was the first writer to create literature that deliberately worked in this way, and to do it using the plentiful material of his own life rather than either pure philosophy or pure invention. He was the most human of writers, and the most sociable. Had he lived in the era of ma.s.s networked communication, he would have been astounded at the scale on which such sociability has become possible: not dozens or hundreds in a gallery, but millions of people seeing themselves bounced back from different angles.
The effect, in Montaigne"s time as in our own, can be intoxicating. A sixteenth-century admirer, Tabourot des Accords, said that anyone reading the Essays Essays felt as if they themselves had written it. Over two hundred and fifty years later, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing in almost the same phrase. "It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life." "So much have I made him my own," wrote the twentieth-century novelist Andre Gide, "that it seems he is my very self." And Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer on the verge of suicide after being forced into exile during the Second World War, found in Montaigne his only real friend: "Here is a "you" in which my "I" is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished." The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead. "Four hundred years disappear like smoke." felt as if they themselves had written it. Over two hundred and fifty years later, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing in almost the same phrase. "It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life." "So much have I made him my own," wrote the twentieth-century novelist Andre Gide, "that it seems he is my very self." And Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer on the verge of suicide after being forced into exile during the Second World War, found in Montaigne his only real friend: "Here is a "you" in which my "I" is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished." The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead. "Four hundred years disappear like smoke."
Enthusiastic buyers on the online bookstore Amazon.com still respond in the same way. One calls the still respond in the same way. One calls the Essays Essays "not so much a book as a companion for life," and another predicts that it will be "the best friend you"ve ever had." A reader who keeps a copy always on the bedside table laments the fact that it is too big (in its complete version) to carry around all day too. "There"s a lifetime"s reading in here," says another. "For such a big fat cla.s.sic of a book it reads like it was written yesterday, although if it "not so much a book as a companion for life," and another predicts that it will be "the best friend you"ve ever had." A reader who keeps a copy always on the bedside table laments the fact that it is too big (in its complete version) to carry around all day too. "There"s a lifetime"s reading in here," says another. "For such a big fat cla.s.sic of a book it reads like it was written yesterday, although if it had had been written yesterday, he"d"ve been all over been written yesterday, he"d"ve been all over h.e.l.lo! h.e.l.lo! magazine by now." magazine by now."
All this can happen because the Essays Essays has no great meaning, no point to make, no argument to advance. It does not have designs on you; you can do as you please with it. Montaigne lets his material pour out, and never worries if he has said one thing on one page and the opposite overleaf, or even in the next sentence. He could have taken as his motto Walt Whitman"s lines: has no great meaning, no point to make, no argument to advance. It does not have designs on you; you can do as you please with it. Montaigne lets his material pour out, and never worries if he has said one thing on one page and the opposite overleaf, or even in the next sentence. He could have taken as his motto Walt Whitman"s lines: Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain mult.i.tudes.)
Every few phrases, a new way of looking at things occurs to him, so he changes direction. Even when his thoughts are most irrational and dreamlike, his writing follows them. "I cannot keep my subject still," he says. "It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness." Anyone is free to go with him as far as seems desirable, and let him meander off by himself if it doesn"t. Sooner or later, your paths will cross again.
Having created a new genre by writing in this way, Montaigne created essais: essais: his new term for it. Today, the word his new term for it. Today, the word essay essay falls with a dull thud. It reminds many people of the exercises imposed at school or college to test knowledge of the reading list: reworkings of other writers" arguments with a boring introduction and a facile conclusion stuck into each end like two forks in a corncob. Discourses of that sort existed in Montaigne"s day, but falls with a dull thud. It reminds many people of the exercises imposed at school or college to test knowledge of the reading list: reworkings of other writers" arguments with a boring introduction and a facile conclusion stuck into each end like two forks in a corncob. Discourses of that sort existed in Montaigne"s day, but essais essais did not. did not. Essayer Essayer, in French, means simply to try to try. To essay something is to test or taste it, or give it a whirl. One seventeenth-century Montaignist defined it as firing a pistol to see if it shoots straight, or trying out a horse to see if it handles well. On the whole, Montaigne discovered that the pistol shot all over the place and the horse galloped out of control, but this did not bother him. He was delighted to see his work come out so unpredictably.
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He may never have planned to create a one-man literary revolution, but in retrospect he knew what he had done. "It is the only book in the world of its kind," he wrote, "a book with a wild and eccentric plan." Or, as more often seemed the case, with no plan at all. The Essays Essays was not written in neat order, from beginning to end. It grew by slow encrustation, like a coral reef, from 1572 to 1592. The only thing that eventually stopped it was Montaigne"s death. was not written in neat order, from beginning to end. It grew by slow encrustation, like a coral reef, from 1572 to 1592. The only thing that eventually stopped it was Montaigne"s death.
Looked at another way, it never stopped at all. It continued to grow, not through endless writing but through endless reading. From the first sixteenth-century neighbor or friend to browse through a draft from Montaigne"s desk to the very last human being (or other conscious ent.i.ty) to extract it from the memory banks of a future virtual library, every new reading means a new Essays Essays. Readers approach him from their private perspectives, contributing their own experience of life. At the same time, these experiences are molded by broad trends, which come and go in leisurely formation. Anyone looking over four hundred and thirty years of Montaigne-reading can see these trends building up and dissolving like clouds in a 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 comprehensible to anyone but historians.
The Essays Essays is thus much more than a book. It is a centuries-long conversation between Montaigne and all those who have got to know him: a conversation which changes through history, while starting out afresh almost every time with that cry of "How did he know all that about me?" Mostly it remains a two-person encounter between writer and reader. But sidelong chat goes on among the readers too; consciously or not, each generation approaches Montaigne with expectations derived from its contemporaries and predecessors. As the story goes on, the scene becomes more crowded. It turns from a private dinner party to a great lively banquet, with Montaigne as an unwitting master of ceremonies. is thus much more than a book. It is a centuries-long conversation between Montaigne and all those who have got to know him: a conversation which changes through history, while starting out afresh almost every time with that cry of "How did he know all that about me?" Mostly it remains a two-person encounter between writer and reader. But sidelong chat goes on among the readers too; consciously or not, each generation approaches Montaigne with expectations derived from its contemporaries and predecessors. As the story goes on, the scene becomes more crowded. It turns from a private dinner party to a great lively banquet, with Montaigne as an unwitting master of ceremonies.
This book is about Montaigne, the man and writer. It is also about Montaigne, the long party-that acc.u.mulation of shared and private conversations over four hundred and thirty years. The ride will be a strange and b.u.mpy one, for Montaigne"s book has not slid smoothly through time like a pebble in a stream, becoming ever more streamlined and polished as it goes. It has tumbled about in no set direction, picking up debris, sometimes snagging on awkward outcrops. My story rolls with the current too. It goes "befuddled and staggering," with frequent changes of tack. At first, it sticks more closely to the man himself: Montaigne"s life, personality, and literary career. Later, it diverges ever further into tales of his book and his readers, all the way up to very recent ones. Since it is a twenty-first-century book, it is inevitably pervaded by a twenty-first-century Montaigne. As one of his favorite adages had it, there is no escaping our perspective: we can walk only on our own legs, and sit only on our own b.u.m.
Most of those who come to the Essays Essays want something from it. They may be seeking entertainment, or enlightenment, or historical understanding, or something more personal. As the novelist Gustave Flaubert advised a friend who was wondering how to approach Montaigne: want something from it. They may be seeking entertainment, or enlightenment, or historical understanding, or something more personal. As the novelist Gustave Flaubert advised a friend who was wondering how to approach Montaigne: [image]
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Don"t read him as children do, for amus.e.m.e.nt, nor as the ambitious do, to be instructed. No, read him in order to live in order to live.
Impressed by Flaubert"s command, I am taking the Renaissance question "How to live?" as a guide-rope for finding a way through the tangle of Montaigne"s life and afterlife. The question remains the same throughout, but the chapters take the form of twenty different answers-each an answer that Montaigne might be imagined as having given. In reality, he usually responded to questions with flurries of further questions and a profusion of anecdotes, often all pointing in different directions and leading to contradictory conclusions. The questions and stories were were his answers, or further ways of trying the question out. his answers, or further ways of trying the question out.
Similarly, each of the twenty possible answers in this book will take the form of something anecdotal: an episode or theme from Montaigne"s life, or from the lives of his readers. There will be no neat solutions, but these twenty "essays" at an answer will allow us to eavesdrop on snippets of the long conversation, and to enjoy the company of Montaigne himself-most genial of interlocutors and hosts.
1. Q. How to live? A. Don"t worry about death
HANGING BY THE TIP OF HIS LIPS.
MONTAIGNE WAS NOT always a natural at social gatherings. From time to time, in youth, while his friends were dancing, laughing, and drinking, he would sit apart under a cloud. His companions barely recognized him on these occasions; they were more used to seeing him flirting with women, or animatedly debating a new idea that had struck him. They would wonder whether he had taken offense at something they had said. In truth, as he confided later in his always a natural at social gatherings. From time to time, in youth, while his friends were dancing, laughing, and drinking, he would sit apart under a cloud. His companions barely recognized him on these occasions; they were more used to seeing him flirting with women, or animatedly debating a new idea that had struck him. They would wonder whether he had taken offense at something they had said. In truth, as he confided later in his Essays Essays, when he was in this mood he was barely aware of his surroundings at all. Amid the festivities, he was thinking about some frightening true tale he had recently heard-perhaps one about a young man who, having left a similar feast a few days earlier complaining of a touch of mild fever, had died of that fever almost before his fellow party-goers had got over their hangovers. If death could play such tricks, then only the flimsiest membrane separated Montaigne himself from the void at every moment. He became so afraid of losing his life that he could no longer enjoy it while he had it.
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In his twenties, Montaigne suffered this morbid obsession because he had spent too much time reading cla.s.sical philosophers. Death was a topic of which the ancients never tired. Cicero summed up their principle neatly: "To philosophize is to learn how to die." Montaigne himself would one day borrow this dire thought for a chapter t.i.tle.
But if his problems began with a surfeit of philosophy at an impressionable age, they did not end just because he grew up. As he reached his thirties, when he might have been expected to gain a more measured perspective, Montaigne"s sense of the oppressive proximity of death became stronger than ever, and more personal. Death turned from an abstraction into a reality, and began scything its way through almost everyone he cared about, getting closer to himself. When he was thirty, in 1563, his best friend etienne de La Boetie was killed by the plague. In 1568, his father died, probably of complications following a kidney-stone attack. In the spring of the following year, Montaigne lost his younger brother Arnaud de Saint-Martin to a freak sporting accident. He himself had just got married then; the first baby of this marriage would live to the age of two months, dying in August 1570. Montaigne went on to lose four more children: of six, only one survived to become an adult. This series of bereavements made death less nebulous as a threat, but it was hardly rea.s.suring. His fears were as strong as ever.
The most painful loss was apparently that of La Boetie; Montaigne loved him more than anyone. But the most shocking must have been that of his brother Arnaud. At just twenty-seven, Arnaud was struck on the head by a ball while playing the contemporary version of tennis, the jeu de paume jeu de paume. It cannot have been a very forceful blow, and he showed no immediate effect, but five or six hours later he lost consciousness and died, presumably from a clot or hemorrhage. No one would have expected a simple knock on the head to cut off the life of a healthy man. It made no sense, and was even more personally threatening than the story of the young man who had died of fever. "With such frequent and ordinary examples pa.s.sing before our eyes," wrote Montaigne of Arnaud, "how can we possibly rid ourselves of the thought of death and of the idea that at every moment it is gripping us by the throat?"
Rid himself of this thought he could not; nor did he even want to. He was still under the sway of his philosophers. "Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death," he wrote in an early essay on the subject: At every moment let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects. At the stumbling of a horse, the fall of a tile, the slightest pin p.r.i.c.k let us promptly chew on this: Well, what if it were death itself?
If you ran through the images of your death often enough, said his favorite sages, the Stoics, it could never catch you by surprise. Knowing how well prepared you were, you should be freed to live without fear. But Montaigne found the opposite. The more intensely he imagined the accidents that might befall him and his friends, the less calm he felt. Even if he managed, fleetingly, to accept the idea in the abstract, he could never accommodate it in detail. His mind filled with visions of injuries and fevers; or of people weeping at his deathbed, and perhaps the "touch of a well-known hand" laid on his brow to bid him farewell. He imagined the world closing around the hole where he had been: his possessions being gathered up, and his clothes distributed among friends and servants. These thoughts did not free him; they imprisoned him.
Fortunately, this constriction did not last. By his forties and fifties, Montaigne was liberated into light-heartedness. He was able to write the most fluid and life-loving of his essays, and he showed almost no remaining sign of his earlier morbid state of mind. We only know that it ever existed because his book tells us about it. He now refused to worry about anything. Death is only a few bad moments at the end of life, he wrote in one of his last added notes; it is not worth wasting any anxiety over. From being the gloomiest among his acquaintances, he became the most carefree of middle-aged men, and a master of the art of living well. The cure lay in a journey to the heart of the problem: a dramatic encounter with his own death, followed by an extended midlife crisis which led him to the writing of his Essays Essays.
The great meeting between Montaigne and death happened on a day some time in 1569 or early 1570-the exact period is uncertain-when he was out doing one of the things that usually dissipated his anxieties and gave him a feeling of escape: riding his horse.
He was about thirty-six at this time, and felt he had a lot to escape from. Following his father"s death, he had inherited full responsibility for the family chateau and estate in the Dordogne. It was beautiful land, in an area covered, then as now, by vineyards, soft hills, villages, and tracts of forest. But for Montaigne it represented the burden of duty. On the estate, someone was always plucking at his sleeve, wanting something or finding fault with things he had done. He was the seigneur: seigneur: everything came back to him. everything came back to him.
Fortunately, it was not usually difficult to find an excuse to be somewhere else. As he had done since he was twenty-four, Montaigne worked as a magistrate in Bordeaux, the regional capital some thirty miles away-so there were always reasons to go there. Then there were the far-flung vineyards of the Montaigne property itself, scattered in separate parcels around the countryside for miles, and useful for visits if he felt so inclined. He also made occasional calls on the neighbors who lived in other chateaus of the area; it was important to stay on good terms. All these tasks formed excellent justifications for a ride through the woods on a sunny day.
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Out on the forest paths, Montaigne"s thoughts could wander as widely as he wished, although even here he was invariably accompanied by servants and acquaintances. People rarely went around alone in the sixteenth century. But he could spur his horse away from boring conversations, or turn his mind aside in order to daydream, watching the light glinting in the canopy of trees over the forest path. Was it really true, he might wonder, that a man"s s.e.m.e.n came from the marrow of the spinal column, as Plato said? Could a remora fish really be so strong that it could hold back a whole ship just by fastening its lips on it and sucking? And what about the strange incident he had seen at home the other day, when his cat gazed intently into a tree until a bird fell out of it, dead, right between her paws? What power did she have? Such speculations were so absorbing that Montaigne sometimes forgot to pay full attention to the path and to what his companions were doing.
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On this occasion, he was progressing calmly through the woods with a group of other mounted men, all or most of them his employees, some three or four miles from the chateau. It was an easy ride and he was expecting no trouble, so he had chosen a placid horse of no great strength. He was wearing ordinary clothes: breeches, a shirt, a doublet, probably a cloak. His sword was at his side-a n.o.bleman never went anywhere without one-but he wore no armor or other special protection. Yet there were always dangers outside town or chateau walls: robbers were common, and France was presently suspended in a lawless state between two outbreaks of civil war. Groups of unemployed soldiers roamed the countryside, looking for any loot they could get in lieu of wages lost during the peace interlude. Despite his anxieties about death in general, Montaigne usually remained calm about such specific risks. He did not flinch from every suspicious stranger as others did, or jump out of his skin at hearing unidentified sounds in the woods. Yet the prevailing tension must have got to him too, for when a great weight slammed into him from behind, his first thought was that he had been attacked deliberately. It felt like a shot from an arquebus, the rifle-like firearm of the day.
He had no time to wonder why why anyone should fire a weapon at him. The thing struck him "like a thunderbolt": his horse was knocked down, and Montaigne himself went flying. He hit the ground hard, meters away, and instantly lost consciousness. anyone should fire a weapon at him. The thing struck him "like a thunderbolt": his horse was knocked down, and Montaigne himself went flying. He hit the ground hard, meters away, and instantly lost consciousness.
There lay the horse bowled over and stunned, and I ten or twelve paces beyond, dead, stretched on my back, my face all bruised and skinned, my sword, which I had had in my hand, more than ten paces away, my belt in pieces, having no more motion or feeling than a log.
The arquebus idea came to him later; in fact, there was no weapon involved. What had happened was that one of Montaigne"s servants, a muscular man riding behind him on a powerful horse, had goaded his mount into a full gallop along the path-"in order to show his daring and get ahead of his companions," as Montaigne surmised. He somehow failed to notice Montaigne in his way, or perhaps miscalculated the width of the path and thought he could pa.s.s. Instead, he "came down like a colossus on the little man and little horse."
The rest of the riders stopped in consternation. Montaigne"s servants dismounted and tried to revive him; he remained unconscious. They picked him up and, with difficulty, started carrying his limp body back towards the castle. On the way, he came back to life. His first feeling was that he had been hit on the head (and his loss of consciousness suggests that this was right), yet he also started coughing, as if he had received a blow to the chest. Seeing him struggling for air, his men lifted him into a more upright position, and did their best to carry him at that awkward angle. Several times, he threw up lumps of clotted blood. This was an alarming symptom, but the coughing and vomiting helped to keep him awake.
As they approached the castle, he regained his wits more and more, yet he still felt as if he were slipping towards death, not emerging into life. His vision remained blurred; he could barely make out the light. He became aware of his body, but what he saw was hardly comforting, for his clothes were spattered with the blood he had been throwing up. He just had time to wonder about the arquebus before drifting back into semi-oblivion.
During what followed, as witnesses later told him, Montaigne thrashed about. He ripped at his doublet with his nails, as if to rid himself of a weight. "My stomach was oppressed with the clotted blood; my hands flew to it of their own accord, as they often do where we itch, against the intention of our will." It looked as if he were trying to rip his own body apart, or perhaps to pull it away from him so his spirit could depart. All this time, however, his inward feelings were tranquil: It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go. It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep.
The servants continued to carry him towards the house, in this state of inward languor and outward agitation. His family noticed the commotion and ran out to him-"with the outcries customary in such cases," as he later put it. They asked what had happened. Montaigne was able to give answers, but not coherent ones. He saw his wife picking her way awkwardly over the uneven path and considered telling his men to give her a horse to ride. You would think that all this must have come from "a wide-awake soul," he wrote. Yet, "the fact is that I was not there at all." He had traveled far away. "These were idle thoughts, in the clouds, set in motion by the sensations of the eyes and ears; they did not come from within me"-chez moi, a term usually meaning "at home." All his actions and words were somehow produced by the body alone. "What the soul contributed was in a dream, touched very lightly, and merely licked and sprinkled, as it were, by the soft impression of the senses." Montaigne and life, it seemed, were about to part company with neither regret nor formal farewells, like two drunken guests leaving a feast too dazed to say goodbye.
His confusion continued after he was carried indoors. He still felt as if he were borne aloft on a magic carpet instead of being heaved around by servants" hands. He suffered no pain, and no concern at the sight of those around him in emergency mode. All he felt was laziness and weakness. His servants put him to bed; he lay there, perfectly happy, not a thought in his head apart from that of how pleasurable it was to rest. "I felt infinite sweetness in this repose, for I had been villainously yanked about by those poor fellows, who had taken the pains to carry me in their arms over a long and very bad road." He refused all medicines, sure that he was destined just to slip away. It was going to be "a very happy death."
This experience went far beyond Montaigne"s earlier imaginings about dying. It was a real voyage into death"s territory: he slipped in close and touched it with his lips. He could taste taste it, like a person sampling an unfamiliar flavor. This was an essay of death: an exercise or it, like a person sampling an unfamiliar flavor. This was an essay of death: an exercise or exercitation exercitation, the word he used when he came to write about the experience. He would later spend much time going over the sensations in his mind, reconstructing them as precisely as possible so as to learn from them. Fortune had handed him the perfect opportunity to test the philosophical consensus about death. But it was hard to be sure that he had learned the right answer. The Stoics would certainly have looked askance at his results.
Parts of the lesson were correct: through his exercitation exercitation, he had learned not to fear his own nonexistence. Death could have a friendly face, just as the philosophers promised. Montaigne had looked into this face-but he had not stared into it lucidly, as a rational thinker should. Instead of marching forward with eyes open, bearing himself like a soldier, he had floated into death with barely a conscious thought, seduced by it. In dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there. You die in the same way that you fall asleep: by drifting away. If other people try to pull you back, you hear their voices on "the edges of the soul." Your existence is attached by a thread; it rests only on the tip of your lips, as he put it. Dying is not an action that can be prepared for. It is an aimless reverie.
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 Tigillinus, 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 had done in his youthful imagination, they turned their death scenes into parties. He particularly liked the story of Marcellinus, who avoided a painful death from disease by a gentle method of euthanasia. After fasting for several days, Marcellinus laid himself down in a very hot bath. No doubt he was already weakened by his illness; the bath simply steamed the last breaths of life out of him. He pa.s.sed out slowly, and then he pa.s.sed away. As he went, he murmured languorously to his friends about the pleasure he was experiencing.
One might expect pleasure in a death like that of Marcellinus. But Montaigne had learned something more surprising: that he could enjoy the same delightful floating sensations even while his body seemed to be convulsed, thrashing around in what looked to others like torment.
This discovery of Montaigne"s ran counter to his cla.s.sical models; it also defied the Christian ideal which dominated his own era. For Christians, one"s last thought should be the sober commending of one"s soul to G.o.d, not a blissful "Aaaaah..." Montaigne"s own experience apparently included no thoughts of G.o.d at all. Nor did it seem to occur to him that dying inebriated and surrounded by wenches might jeopardize a Christian afterlife. He was more interested in his purely secular realization that human psychology, and nature in general, were the dying man"s best friends. And it now seemed to him that the only people who regularly died as bravely as philosophers should were those who knew no philosophy at all: the uneducated peasants in his local estates and villages. "I never saw one of my peasant neighbors cogitating over the countenance and a.s.surance with which he would pa.s.s this last hour," he wrote-not that he would necessarily have known if they did. Nature took care of them. It taught them not to think about death except when they were dying, and very little even then. Philosophers find it hard to leave the world because they try to maintain control. So much for "To philosophize is to learn how to die." Philosophy looked more like a way of teaching people to unlearn the natural skill that every peasant had by birthright.