Can anyone reconcile us with death?
Michel de Montaigne, one of the great sages of the Renaissance, tried his best; and he was trying to reconcile himself as much as any readers he might have. ‘We must always be booted and ready to go,’ he writes in an early essay. To be ready we need to familiarize our- selves with this final destination. ‘So,’ he tells us, ‘I have formed the habit of having death continually present, not merely in my imagination, but in my mouth . . . He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.’
When in 1571 Montaigne retired from his position at the parliament of Bordeaux to the estate he had recently inherited, he wasn’t yet 40. Though no subject preoccupied him so much as death, he was still in good health, still free of the crippling kidney stones that would make his later years a torment. But to his surprise, all set as he was to dedicate the rest of his days to ‘liberty, tranquillity and leisure’, he found himself overwhelmed by depression. The only remedy he could think of was to write, as he explains to a friend in one essay:
It was a melancholy humour, and consequently a humour very hostile to my natural disposition, produced by the gloom of the solitude into which I had cast myself some years ago, that first put into my head this daydream of meddling with writing.
He could think of nothing to write about, however; so, with no other subject suggesting itself, ‘I offered myself to myself as theme and subject matter.’ If others could make portraits of themselves in pictures, why shouldn’t he portray himself with the pen?
In doing so, Montaigne takes as his watchword a motto from Plato: ‘Do what thou hast to do, and know thyself.’ To which he adds a characteristic rider: ‘Whoever would do what he has to do would see that the first thing
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Subscribe now or Sign inCan anyone reconcile us with death?
Michel de Montaigne, one of the great sages of the Renaissance, tried his best; and he was trying to reconcile himself as much as any readers he might have. ‘We must always be booted and ready to go,’ he writes in an early essay. To be ready we need to familiarize our- selves with this final destination. ‘So,’ he tells us, ‘I have formed the habit of having death continually present, not merely in my imagination, but in my mouth . . . He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.’
When in 1571 Montaigne retired from his position at the parliament of Bordeaux to the estate he had recently inherited, he wasn’t yet 40. Though no subject preoccupied him so much as death, he was still in good health, still free of the crippling kidney stones that would make his later years a torment. But to his surprise, all set as he was to dedicate the rest of his days to ‘liberty, tranquillity and leisure’, he found himself overwhelmed by depression. The only remedy he could think of was to write, as he explains to a friend in one essay:It was a melancholy humour, and consequently a humour very hostile to my natural disposition, produced by the gloom of the solitude into which I had cast myself some years ago, that first put into my head this daydream of meddling with writing.
He could think of nothing to write about, however; so, with no other subject suggesting itself, ‘I offered myself to myself as theme and subject matter.’ If others could make portraits of themselves in pictures, why shouldn’t he portray himself with the pen? In doing so, Montaigne takes as his watchword a motto from Plato: ‘Do what thou hast to do, and know thyself.’ To which he adds a characteristic rider: ‘Whoever would do what he has to do would see that the first thing he must learn is to know what he is.’ It was to learn what he was, and in the process learn what humankind was, that this first writer of essays (in French, literally, tests or attempts) embarked on his work. What does he find when he examines this thing, his own self, critically and dispassionately? Something very shaky, very susceptible to outside influences – the weather, for one – variable, inconsistent, self-contradictory. ‘Others fashion man, I repeat him; and represent a particular one, but ill made, and whom, were I to form anew, he should be far other than he is; but he is now made.’ Other people may believe they are wise and reasonable, in control of their destinies; all he can say is that he can lay claim to very little of that. Not only is he not master of his own body; his mind is also out of control. When he first withdrew to the privacy of the tower- cum-library on his Périgord estate, he thought the best he could do was to leave his mind in total idleness, calmly thinking of itself. What did he find? That ‘it bolted off like a runaway horse’, giving birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities that he began to keep a record of them, ‘hoping in time to make [his] mind ashamed of itself’. It is not only the weather, events and our bodies that play havoc with our plans and intentions; emotions do likewise. Crucially, they unbalance our judgement: anger, for instance, to which he devotes a whole essay, or fear, and its child, cowardice. From cowardice springs the cruelty which Montaigne despised, not least because he witnessed so much of it in the religious wars that raged with such ferocity in his own area of France: ‘What is it that makes all our quarrels end in death nowadays?’ he asks. ‘Whereas our fathers knew degrees of vengeance we now begin at the end and straightway talk of nothing but killing. What causes that, if not cowardice?’
Montaigne hates excess of all kinds. We human beings are so inconsistent, so changeable, that we should learn to live within our limitations. Similarly with opinions: they vary from one person to another but even within one person they can be self-contradictory and change from one day to the next. By piling up examples and counter-examples, and arguing first this way then that, Montaigne thinks aloud to himself, trying to sift the true from the false, and work out what is useful for him, and us, in living our lives. Having discovered himself to be comprised of so many ‘feeble and failing pieces’, he is struck by the ‘over-high opinion which Man has of himself’. Humankind in general, whether ancient or modern, has few grounds for believing itself the crown of creation. Are we really so superior to the animals, he asks. Why do we assume that the animals are just dumb brutes obeying only their instincts? ‘When I play with my cat,’ Montaigne wonders, ‘how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?’ As for the supposed superiority of European civilization, the Spanish conquistadors’ treatment of the peoples of the New World (of which Montaigne sought out first-hand accounts) was clear evidence of how little claim to moral superiority the Europeans of his time had over other peoples. Montaigne was avid for information about other peoples; he loved travelling partly for that reason, noting with relish the differences in manners and the variety of customs and behaviour. ‘I am of the opinion that no fantasy so mad can fall into human imagination that meets not with the example of some public custom,’ he writes, going on to list a number of odd customs, including people ‘who, when the King spitteth, the most favoured Lady in his court stretcheth forth her hand; and in another country, where the noblest about him stoop to the ground to gather his ordure in some fine linen cloth’.
Clothes were another example of this variety, as were eating habits, religious rites and relations between the sexes. As far as he could tell, from his reading and from talking to people, these varied across the world, from the New World to China. They were all evidence of the power of custom, which makes up so great a part of what we con- sider our nature. ‘We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom.’ Nature, Montaigne argues, following one of his favourite schools of philosophy, the Stoics, embodies Reason: our duty as human beings is to live in conformity with her laws, which are universal, and then with the customs of our particular place and time. And the first of Nature’s laws is to live virtuously. However, virtue for Montaigne is not rejection of the pleasures of life; on the contrary, the good life consists in knowing how to enjoy those pleasures. The key is to resist the temptation to extremes of enjoyment, or of any behaviour: it is no better to shun pleasures entirely than to pursue them to excess. In fact, forgoing them completely is, he thinks, easier than enjoying them reasonably. One such pleasure is drinking, which he says we should make ‘more expansive and vigorous’ in our daily habits, especially as we get older, since drinking ‘is almost the last pleasure that the years steal from us’. Try telling that to our modern health czars! Even on the subject of virtue Montaigne is never didactic, ‘feeling myself too ill-instructed to instruct others’. Nor should one look too much to scholars or books for instruction, he advises: from books he seeks only to give himself pleasure ‘by honest amusement’ or to encounter the learning that ‘instructs me in how to die well and live well’. As for scholars, ‘I have seen in my time hundreds of craftsmen and ploughmen wiser and happier than University Rectors – and whom I would rather be like’. Acutely aware of his own (and our) faults and failings, Montaigne wants rules of life which are fitting for such an imperfect creature. His attempt to understand himself has revealed so many inconsistencies, inadequacies and contradictions in his make-up that neither he nor anyone else has grounds for pontificating. This is why he has put his thoughts down in the form of essays – they are still tentative: ‘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 trial.’
His difficulty in reaching a view was one reason why Montaigne loved conversation. He could not stand people who were over-enamoured of their own views or so arrogant as to dismiss others’ arguments out of hand, a vice he thought lay at the root of the cruelty of the religious wars. ‘What a loathsome malady it is’, he writes, ‘to believe you are so right that you convince yourself that nobody can think the opposite.’ People needed to take time to think, weigh up all the arguments and learn to exercise their judgement. Judgement is for Montaigne the critical human faculty, since by exercising it we have the chance to live the moderate, tranquil life we should seek. Montaigne’s style of writing is in keeping with his conversational approach. He does not aim to write beautifully: his purpose is to try to describe what he is and to pin down his thoughts. All sorts of stories and illustrations, tales and sayings are grist to his mill, many taken from the Greeks and Romans – Montaigne’s first language in child- hood was Latin – or the Bible. He also takes examples from his own times, though less readily – he was aware of the potential dangers of talking freely about contemporary matters in a time of civil war. The longer Montaigne spent on his essays, the keener he became to throw off the shackles of convention when it came to talking about our human lives, particularly our physical lives. One of his insistent themes is how closely knitted together are our bodies and our souls. We are physical beings and must not spurn or deride the body and its pleasures: ‘For it is indeed reasonable . . . that the body should not follow its appetites to the disadvantage of the mind; but why is it not also reasonable that the mind should not pursue its appetites to the disadvantage of the body?’
His wish to be sincere required straightforwardness of language. Erudite works treated their subjects in too artificial a style, he thought. In contrast, he tells us, ‘I have ordered myself to dare to say all that I dare to do.’ One area to which he applied this principle was sex.
Well now, leaving books aside and talking more simply and plainly, I find that sexual love is nothing but the thirst for enjoyment of that pleasure within the object of our desire, and that Venus is nothing but the pleasure of unloading our balls.This in the case of men, clearly, but he does not believe women are so different in their motivation. Males and females are cast in the same mould: ‘except for education and custom,’ he argues, ‘the difference is not great’. Like any other pleasure, though, sex ‘becomes vitiated by a lack of either moderation or discretion’. The key, as in so many other aspects of life, is to follow ‘the fine and level road that Nature has traced for us’. As he reached the end of his great undertaking – by the time of the second edition of the Essays (1588), he had written 107 of them, ranging in length from a single page to 170 pages – he laid increasing stress on the virtues of experience over intellectual knowledge. In his last essay, he gives us his conclusion: ‘Nothing is so beautiful, so right, as acting as a man should: nor is any learning so arduous as knowing how to live this life naturally and well.’ As for death, the subject to which he has returned so frequently, by his last essays his thinking has changed. ‘If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry,’ he comforts us. ‘Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately.’ You will only have to follow the example of his own farm workers at the time of a recent plague: ‘Here a man, healthy, was already digging his grave; others lay down in them while still alive. And one of my labourers, with his hands and feet, pulled the earth over him as he was dying. Was that not taking shelter so as to go to sleep more comfortably?’
Montaigne himself died in 1592. In the twenty years of his ‘retirement’ – interrupted by a return to Bordeaux in the 1580s for two spells as its mayor – he had simultaneously invented a new literary form and written a book of such winning, entertaining and thought-provoking candour and originality that it would be read for centuries. One early reader of Montaigne is thought to have been William Shakespeare. What greater inspiration could there be to read the Essays for yourself?
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 69 © Anthony Wells 2021
About the contributor
Like Montaigne, Anthony Wells has retired from the world of work and has plans to write a book. There any comparison ends.