Montaigne

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

In 1571, on his thirty-eighth birthday, a Gascon nobleman named Michel de Montaigne retired from public life, climbed to a round tower at the corner of his estate, shut himself in with a thousand books, and set out on a strange ambition. He would write a book about the one subject no one had ever dared to put at the center of one: himself. Not himself as a hero or a saint or an example to follow, but himself in all his ordinary, contradictory particularity, his moods, his digestion, his shifting opinions, his fear of dying, his taste for radishes, the way his mind leapt from thought to thought. "I am myself the matter of my book," he warned the reader on the first page. It sounds like vanity, and it produced one of the most generous and beloved books ever written, because in studying himself with such relentless honesty Montaigne turned out to be studying all of us. He also, almost by accident, invented a literary form. He called these pieces essais, "attempts" or "tries," because that is exactly what they were: not treatises proving a thesis but the live record of a mind thinking, wandering, doubting, circling back, caught in the act on the page. We have been writing essays, in his sense, ever since.

What do I know? Carved on the beams of his tower, where he could see them as he wrote, were lines from the ancient skeptics, and over his whole project he hung a single question that became his motto: Que sais-je? What do I know? It was not the aggressive doubt of a man out to demolish other people's certainties; it was the disarming, lifelong humility of a man suspicious above all of his own. Montaigne had watched his fellow Europeans torture and butcher each other with perfect conviction over fine points of religious doctrine, and he had drawn a quiet, devastating conclusion: that the people most certain they are right are the most dangerous, and that a vast amount of human cruelty is committed by those who have simply stopped doubting. Look honestly, he says, at how much of what you believe is a mere accident of where you happened to be born; watch how your own certainties shift with your mood and your last meal; notice that the wisest minds of the past flatly contradicted one another. The only honest response is to hold your views more loosely, stay curious, keep asking. His skepticism is not despair but a kind of tolerance and a kind of freedom: if I do not truly know that I am right, I cannot in good conscience burn you for being wrong.

The barbarians are us. The same humility made Montaigne one of the first Europeans to take the proud question of "civilization" and turn it back on himself. In his famous essay on the cannibals of the New World, he reports what travelers had told him of the peoples of Brazil, and he flatly refuses the easy contempt his readers expected. These so-called savages, he observes, may eat their dead enemies, which horrifies us; but we, in our enlightened Europe, rack and burn living men over religious disagreements, which is surely worse. We call them barbarous, he says, but "each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice"; we merely mistake our own customs for the laws of nature. It was a startling thing to write in the sixteenth century, and it carries the seed of an idea that would take centuries to grow: that no culture, your own emphatically included, holds a monopoly on truth or virtue, and that the first step toward wisdom is to suspect that the way your particular people happen to do things is not the only way, or even the best. Montaigne is the gentle ancestor of every later attempt to look at one's own society from the outside, with a stranger's clear and faintly skeptical eye.

The one friend. There is a sorrow beneath all the warmth, and it is the secret engine of the book. Once, as a young man, Montaigne had a friend, Étienne de La Boétie, and the friendship was the kind most people only read about, a meeting of two minds so complete that, as he put it, "if you press me to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be expressed by answering: because it was he, because it was me." For a few short years he had the rarest thing in the world, a person to whom he could say everything and be perfectly understood. And then it was over, and he never found its equal again. Some readers have felt that the Essais, that endless, confiding, intimate conversation Montaigne carries on with whoever happens to be reading, are in part his way of going on talking after the one perfect listener was gone, reaching through the page, and across the centuries, for the understanding he had briefly known and lost. If so, it worked. Four hundred years later, readers report the same uncanny thing over and over: that Montaigne seems to be describing them, that this long-dead Frenchman is somehow their friend. He set out to fill a single silence, and ended by keeping company with everyone.

Learning to live. For all his doubt, Montaigne arrived, in the end, at a wisdom, and it is the warmest thing in him. As a younger man he had dutifully repeated the old Stoic line that to philosophize is to learn to die, and braced himself, grimly, for the end. But as he aged he quietly turned the formula around. The point of philosophy, he decided, is not to learn to die but to learn to live, fully and gratefully, in the only place life ever actually happens, which is the ordinary present. He made peace with his body, writing frankly about his aches and his appetites and his kidney stones at a time when philosophers pretended to hover above such things; he made peace with change, accepting that he was a different man at fifty than at thirty and that this was no failure but the very texture of being alive; he made peace with his own limits, not by conquering his fears but by refusing to let them spoil the days that came before. His final counsel, in the great last essay, is almost shocking in its plainness: stop straining after some grander, more spiritual existence; the truly beautiful lives, he says, are the ones lived "according to the common human model, with order, but without miracle and without extravagance." To sit lightly, to pay attention, to relish what is actually here, to be kind, and to meet the end without too much fuss: this, from the most learned man of his age, is very nearly the whole of wisdom.

The art of the attempt. The room reads Montaigne in the old translations, including the very one Shakespeare knew, cited by book and essay; the chat will point you to the cannibals and to the great closing essay on experience. What he left us is not a doctrine but a practice, and it is among the most quietly useful things philosophy has ever produced. To essay, in his sense, is to think on the page without pretending to a system you do not have: take a question genuinely on your mind, let your attention wander honestly across it, see what the ancients said, watch what actually happens in your own case, and write it down without forcing it to a tidy conclusion. He even kept revising his own copy for the rest of his life, scribbling second and third thoughts in the margins, so that you can watch his mind changing across the decades, never embarrassed to have grown. The form he invented out of this became one of the central ways the modern world thinks: Shakespeare lifted whole passages from him, Pascal argued with him, Descartes founded modern philosophy by turning that same first-person gaze toward certainty instead of doubt, and Nietzsche called the Essais the truest book ever written. But the deepest legacy is simpler, and more personal. Montaigne was the first human being to sit down and put a whole, particular, ordinary self honestly onto paper, with all its doubt and contradiction and change, and to discover that this private, unheroic, self-questioning creature was worth a book. He invented, in other words, the modern individual, and he remains the best company that individual has ever had.