This essay is about too many things at once, but I want to start with this interesting reveal about his own writing process:
Every day I argue myself out of that childish and unkindly humour which makes us desire that our own ills should arouse compassion and mournful thoughts in those we love. So as to bring on their tears we exaggerate our misfortunes beyond all measure. And that steadfastness in supporting ill-fortune which we eulogize in everyone else, we arraign and condemn in close relatives when the ill-fortune is ours. We are not content that they should sympathize with our ills unless they are also afflicted by them. Joy we should spread: sadness, prune back as much as we can. Whoever evokes pity without cause is not to be pitied when cause there is. To be always lamenting is to have none to lament you; so often to look pitiful arouses pity in nobody. Act dead when you are living, and you are likely to be treated as alive when you are dying. I have known it get the goat of some invalids if you said they had a healthy colour or a regular pulse; they would hold back their laughter since it would betray that they were cured; they hated good health because it aroused no compassion.
I like getting a glimpse at Montaigne’s inner thoughts as he writes, and also a small explanation of some of the impulses he has to hold back. He goes to great lengths to explain writers’ tendency towards self pity that he finds so off putting. But a close read would show that he may not express it, but he certainly feels it. To me, there’s always a difficult balance regarding discussions of disappointment and weakness. I think in the right doses, the vulnerability shown in self deprecation is humanizing and appealing, especially when revealed to a small circle of people, or just one. But I do agree with Montaigne that when used not to ground others’ in your reality but instead to elicit pity from them, it goes too far.
Since this essay is about vanity, bragging should be it’s overt concern, and Montaigne does discuss it periodically. I agree with him that there’s similarity between pity seeking and bragging. Both are exaggerations for effect. Bear these thoughts as this essay continues, because Montaigne fills this essay with self examination, sometimes in the form of critiques, sometimes as veiled self praise. Where the essays is most relatable to me is when he discusses travel:
Travel keeps the mind continually exercised observing unfamiliar and novel things. And I am aware of no better school, as I have often said, for shaping one’s life than to offer the mind an uninterrupted demonstration of the diversity of so many other lives, ways of thinking and customs, and to give it a taste of such an infinite variety of the forms that human nature takes.
Changes of air and climate don’t affect me. All weathers suit me. The only thing that troubles me is the internal distempers I produce in myself, and they occur less often while I’m travelling. I’m difficult to get moving: but once I’m on my way, I can keep going as long as anyone wants.
The traveler’s mindset was central to Montaigne’s worldview. He believed we need to act with openness and appreciation for all cultures and to take from them ways to approach the varieties of our own culture.
I admire this aspect of Montaigne. When I someday reach retirement age, my goal is to find the tiniest place possible to call home and never be in it. I hope to decamp to different locations and pretend to be a local everywhere. Terence Cave offered a very interesting perspective on this essays that makes me think Montaigne has influenced me in this belief:
Thus one of the various reasons he gives for travelling is that it enables him to leave behind the day-to-day worries of running his family’s finances and overseeing the management of his estate; similarly, he speaks at some length of the value of periods of absence for keeping one’s marital relations in good order. These reasons are given as answers to questions that are scattered at intervals throughout the chapter and provide a kind of skeletal rhetorical structure, or at least a leitmotif. They are the questions people presumably asked Montaigne before he embarked on his journey to Italy: Why travel at your age? Aren’t you concerned that your domestic and economic affairs will deteriorate while you’re away? What happens if you’re taken seriously ill? What happens if you die in foreign parts?
The travel section of the essay is the clearest and most interesting, but Cave’s point that the meandering elements in the rest of the essay allude to points raised tangentially to travel reframes the piece in an interesting way that I hadn’t considered.
There was also a careerist purpose to much of Montaigne’s travel. At one point, he went to great lengths to earn the title “citizen of Rome.” As Phillipe Desan noted in his recent biography, Montaigne had to admit he was quite vain in seeking this recognition:
Our French traveler’s modesty was set aside for the occasion. Not exempt from a vanity that he nonetheless repeatedly denounced, Montaigne was more than a little proud of being a citizen of a city that represented in his view the best that Antiquity had achieved in matters of letters and culture: “Among [Fortune’s] empty favors there is none that so pleases that silly humor in me which feeds upon it, as an authentic bull of Roman citizenship, which was granted to me lately when I was there, pompous in seals and gilt letters, and granted with all gracious liberality.” Montaigne was a noble in France and a bourgeois in Italy: “Being a citizen of no city, I am very pleased to be one of the noblest city that ever was or ever will be.” Recognized by a monarchy and by a republic, he could pride himself on being above simple questions of governance or political regime. Lucid regarding the reproaches that might be made against him on this subject, he notes in his Journal: “This title is now altogether a vain one, nevertheless I felt much pleasure from the possession of the same.”
This stands in marked contrast to what Montaigne says in this essay:
Let us learn to be no more avid for glory than we deserve. Boasting of every useful or blameless action is for men in whom such things are rare and unusual: they want them to be valued at what it cost them! The more glittering the deed the more I subtract from its moral worth, because of the suspicion aroused in me that it was exposed more for glitter than for goodness: goods displayed are already half-way to being sold.
Montaigne’s Italian fetish went beyond the Roman citizenship. He wanted desperately to become France’s ambassador to Italy. But not only did that appointment not come through, the French crown arranged for him to be elected Mayor of Bordeaux while he was taking an extended Roman holiday, hoping his wishes worked out. He then took close to three months to return home, having little interest in claiming the elected post, but also knowing he had no cause to reject the King.
Montaigne had to do a great deal of genuflecting to the Pope, Roman authorities and the French crown to gain his honorary citizenship and be in line to become an ambassador. But when he achieved it, he was not honored for his writing, but for his nobility. He did not enter the pantheon of great artists honored by Rome, he was simply welcomed as another patrician of his time. But he still lays on his attack of fame very thick here:
Fame does not play the whore for so base a price. Those rare and exemplary deeds to which fame is due would not tolerate the company of such a countless mob of petty everyday actions. Marble can boast your titles as much as you like for having repaired a stretch of wall or cleaned up some public gutter, but men of sense will not. Renown does not ensue upon anything done well unless difficulty and unusualness are involved. Indeed, according according to the Stoics, simple esteem is not due to every action born of virtue: they would not even faintly praise a man for having abstained from some sore-eyed old whore for temperance’ sake!
So that’s Montaigne’s view of travel, but as Cave noted, the essay has many other topics to cover. As he often does, Montaigne begins with disparaging words about his project:
The Law ought to impose restraints on silly useless writers as it does on vagabonds and loafers. Then my own book and a hundred others would be banished from the hands of our people. I am not joking. Scribbling seems to be one of the symptoms of an age of excess. When did we ever write so much as since the beginning of our Civil Wars? And whenever did the Romans do so as just before their collapse? Apart from the fact that to make minds more refined does not mean that a polity is made more wise, such busy idleness arises from everyone slacking over the duties of his vocation and being enticed away. Each individual one of us contributes to the corrupting of our time: some contribute treachery, other (since they are powerful) injustice, irreligion, tyranny, cupidity, cruelty: the weaker ones like me contribute silliness, vanity and idleness. When harmful things are compelling then, it seems, is the season for vain ones; in an age when so many behave wickedly it is almost praiseworthy merely to be useless.
Despite his protests, I think Montaigne senses the actual work — and the value of that work — even as he’s hesitant to (publicly) surrender his modesty. He has to give a disgusting counterexample to show his project’s relative worth:
Anyone can see that I have set out on a road along which I shall travel without toil and without ceasing as long as the world has ink and paper. I cannot give an account of my life by my actions: Fortune has placed them too low for that; so I do so by my thoughts. Thus did a nobleman I once knew reveal his life only by the workings of his bowels: at home he paraded before you a series of seven or eight days‚ in chamber-pots. He thought about them, talked about them: for him any other topic stank. Here (a little more decorously) you have the droppings of an old mind, sometimes hard, sometimes squittery, but always ill-digested.
Montaigne then reveals a new piece of his psyche that somehow escaped all previous essays — he needs this project because he lacks a male heir. So I suppose that makes it a brainchild:
My chief aim in life being to live it lazily and leisurely rather than busily, she has taken from me the need to proliferate in wealth to provide for a proliferation of heirs. For a single heir, if what has been plenty enough for me is not enough for him, that is just too bad. His foolishness would not justify my wishing him more.
And even if his project was worthless, just providing him an escape from the world of toil would have been rewarding enough:
What would I not do to avoid reading through a contract and shaking the dust off piles of papers, a slave to my affairs and, worse still, a slave to other people‚ like so many folk who do it for the money! For me nothing is expensive save toil and worry: all I want is to be indifferent and bovine. I was made, I think, more for living off somebody else, if that could be done without servitude and obligation. And when I look at things closely I am not sure whether, for a man of my temperament and station, what I have to put up with from business and agents and servants does not entail more degradation, bother and bitterness than there would be in following a man born greater than I who would give me a bit of guidance and comfort. Slavery is the obedience of a weak and despondent mind lacking in will.
He isn’t really calling all work slavery in this passage. Rather, he’s discussing a form of political servitude, especially if it involves the loss of personal liberty simply to gain the favor of power. Think again of that trip to Rome that didn’t quite work out as planned and the annoying journey back for his command performance as Mayor of Bordeaux:
We cheat ourselves of what is rightly useful to us in order to conform our appearances to the common opinion. We are not so much concerned with what the actual nature of our being is within us, as with how it is perceived by the public. Even wisdom and the good things of the mind seem fruitless to us if we enjoy them by ourselves, if they are not paraded before the approving eyes of others.
So, he feels a little stuck at this point. No matter what he does, Montaigne serves at the pleasure and whim of the king. When viewed in this context, the following paragraph (even though it used the easy target of King Philip) is a devastating critique on the social structure of his age:
I learn from our example that, whatever the cost, human society remains cobbled and held together. No matter what position you place them in, men will jostle into heaps and arrange themselves in piles, just as odd objects thrust any-old-how into a sack find their own way of fitting together better than art could ever arrange them. King Philip made just such a pile from the most wicked and depraved men he could find. He built them a city which bore their name and sent them there. I reckon that out of their very vices they wove for themselves a political fabric and an advantageous lawful society.
At times, Montaigne was lauded for his talent in navigating political terrain. But he was beginning to see that this talent got him nowhere. If anything, it just made him first in line for unpleasant assignments. And this is a sentiment I understand well.
Returning to a previous theme from several essays, Montaigne still holds that custom governs a society best. So there’s a contradiction in Montaigne’s thought that a successful culture requires a level of conformism, but this same conformism is keeping individuals from reaching their true potential and perhaps from attaining happiness:
The best and most excellent polity for each nation is the one under which it has been sustained. Its form and its essential advantages depend upon custom. It is easy for us to be displeased with its present condition; I nevertheless hold that to yearn for an oligarchy in a democracy or for another form of government in a monarchy is wrong and insane.
It’s entirely possible that Montaigne was playing to his own audience with this passage. He’s always playing a political game, even when he’s decrying politics. He knew better than to challenge a monarchy. So he moves off the point quickly and returns to talking about how often he repeats himself:
In these ravings of mine, what I fear is that my treacherous memory should make me inadvertently record the same thing twice. I hate going over my writings and only unwillingly probe a topic again once it has got away. I have no freshly learned doctrines; these are my normal ideas. Having doubtless conceived them a hundred times I am afraid that I may have mentioned them already.
Montaigne apologizes for changing subjects frequently, but also explains the method behind the madness:
I change subject violently and chaotically. My pen and my mind both go a-roaming. If you do not want more dullness you must accept a touch of madness, so say the precepts of our past masters and, even more so, their example. There are hundreds of poets who drag and droop prosaically, but the best of ancient prose, and I scatter prose here no differently from verse sparkles throughout with poetic power and daring…. Since I cannot hold my reader’s attention by my weight, it is no bad thing if I manage to do so by my muddle. Yes, but afterwards he will be sorry he spent time over it. I suppose so: but still he would have done it! And there are humors so made that they despise anything which they can understand and which will rate me more highly when they do not know what I mean. They will infer the depth of my meaning from its obscurity, a quality which (to speak seriously now) I hate most strongly; I would avoid it if there were a way of avoiding myself. Aristotle somewhere congratulates himself on affecting it: a depraved affectation!
He then explains why the third edition essays are so much longer — never realizing that the quality of the product has markedly improved as well:
Because the very frequent division into chapters which I first adopted seemed to me to break the reader‚ attention before it was aroused and to loosen its hold so that it did not bother for so slight a cause to apply itself and to concentrate, I started making longer chapters which require a decision to read them and time set aside for them. In this kind of occupation, whoever is not prepared to give a man one hour is prepared to give him nothing; and you do nothing for a man if you only do it while doing something else. Besides I may perhaps have some personal quality which obliges me to half-state matters and to speak confusedly and incompatibly.
There’s actually very little confusion in the third volume — but there is a substantial amount of muddle in this very long, highly meandering piece. Montaigne suggests at one point that his entire project might be a massive, unedited mess. Untrue overall, but perhaps in particular:
Reader: just let this tentative essay, this third prolongation of my self-portrait, run its course. I make additions but not corrections: firstly, that is because when a man has mortgaged his book to the world I find it reasonable that he should no longer have any rights over it. Let him put it better elsewhere if he can, not corrupt the work he has already sold. From such folk you should buy nothing until they are dead. Let them do their thinking properly before they publish. Who is making them hurry? My book is ever one: except that, to avoid the purchaser going away quite empty-handed when a new edition is brought out, I allow myself, since it is merely a piece of badly joined marquetry, to tack on some additional ornaments. That is no more than a little extra thrown in, which does not damn the original version but does lend some particular value to each subsequent one through some ambitious bit of precision. From this there can easily arise however some transposition of the chronological order, my tales finding their place not always by age but by opportuneness.
There is one amusing sidebar element to Montaigne’s essay worth mentioning — he imagines how future readers might interpret what he writes. This is interesting, for one, because it’s the first time that Montaigne recognizes that the project might have lasting value.
When all is said and done I have no wish (as I know often happens whenever the dead are recalled to memory) that people should start arguing, claiming ‘This is how he thought; this is how he lived’; ‘If only he had uttered a few last words he would have said this or given away that‚”I knew him better than anyone else.’ Here I make known, as far as propriety allows, my feelings and inclinations. I do so more freely and readily by word of mouth for any who want to know; nevertheless if you look into these memoirs of mine you will find that I have said everything or intimated everything. What I have been unable to express in words I point towards with my finger: Those slight traces are enough for a keen mind and will safely lead you to discover the rest.
Which I believe is right — and I find it amazing how previous generations badly misinterpreted parts of the essays, especially regarding his views of religion. Montaigne may be unclear in parts, but his worldview is remarkably clear. His contemporaries misunderstood him too, probably because he didn’t enjoy their company:
My own manners deviate from current morality by hardly more than an inch, yet even that makes me intractable for this age and unsociable. I do not know whether I am unreasonable in losing my taste for the society I frequent, but I do know that it would be unreasonable if I complained that it had lost its taste for me more than I for it.
Montaigne ends with one of his most rebellious statements — that for all the support he lends throughout the project for the status quo and for respecting culture, his genuine affections might be on the side of the troublemakers and rabble rousers in life:
I, on the contrary, strive to give worth to vanity itself, to doltishness, if it affords me pleasure, and I follow my natural inclinations without accounting for them thus closely.
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