Montaigne defaults to discussing how the mind goes wrong — displacing anger onto objects and undeserving people or even inflicting self harm as a way of expressing helplessness. But there’s also, buried in his fourth essay, a productive escape value that he chose not to examine.

also as the sight, to make a pleasant view, must not be lost and led away in the vague reaches of the air, but must have some bound to sustain it at a reasonable distance.

This is, in fact, not a negative example. Here he is showing how a mind can gain something positive out of a random forward gaze, by affixing it on an object, transforming that stare to nothingness into a beautiful glimpse of the beyond.

In other words, he had an example of sublimation, of how the unruly human mind can be put to productive use. And he sticks with the positive frame for one more line before spending the rest of the essay on negative example:

So it seems that the soul, once stirred and set in motion, is lost in itself unless we give it something to grasp; and we must always give it an object to aim at and act on.

Unless we give it something to grasp. I think something important about our psychology is revealed in that line. We are led to believe that people achieve great things due to our drives — we want to attain wealth, power, possessions, sex, whatever our animal instincts tells us.

In my experience, this is not the case. I’m driven more by an indescribable absence to doing things far beyond my normal capabilities. Seven years ago, I decided in an ensemble class at the Old Town School of Folk Music that I would not only learn to play the bassline for the Elvis Costello song “Accidents Will Happen,” which is an extremely complicated piece that moves up and down the neck, but I would also sing the song at our public performance.

This is an insanely ambitious task. Paul McCartney once said that singing and playing bass is very difficult, but nearly impossible when the vocal and bass melodies are moving in opposite directions, and “Accidents Will Happen” does just that. And I am not a very accomplished singer.

Truth is, I didn’t record the performance and likely would find many ways to nit-pick my vocals in retrospect if I did. But just getting through this performance was, to me, one of the most difficult and rewarding accomplishments of my life, even if no one in the audience fully appreciated what I pulled off.

For whatever reason, doing something only me and maybe one or two bandmates could appreciate was somehow better than pulling off a feat that would bring wider recognition. Something similar happened a little over a year ago at work.

I created a Game Show segment in the middle of our International Convention that evolved in a highly chaotic, unpredictable manner. The day before the segment was to be shown live, it was looking like it could go down as a historically terrible segment.

The participants insisted on performing it all without a script, yet they changed their answers in every rehearsal. One of the hosts was not working out at all and had to be scrubbed. We had to streamline and simplify without any real stage time to iron it out.

And the final result was … something mid. Some people really liked it, others didn’t. But no one thought it was embarrassing and atrocious. And to me, that was a remarkable accomplishment. Sometimes rescuing something into mediocrity is an incredible success.

These are feats that I am personally proud of, but they didn’t bring me anything tangible and never had any hope of materially changing my life. And they lead me to ask a rhetorical question back to Montaigne: is the path to a more orderly mind to focus it away from the world, to difficulties only you understand?

It would be fair to ask back to me — if one of the usual drives didn’t stir me, what did? I accepted Montaigne’s premise, something inside me was put in motion. I had a need to perform a major, if somewhat obscure, feat in both cases. So, why?

Why did I decide to read Proust for the first time? Run a marathon? Write my books? In every case, I was filling an inexplicable absence. To name this absence would be to substitute an answer, the way Montaigne says we show fondness to a dog when lacking a “legitimate object.”

Perhaps that’s the answer, that these acts are about self-love, about demonstrating to myself that I’m worthy of my esteem. And if no one else recognizes their importance? That too fills my self-esteem. Only I have the taste to understand the things I do best.

As we move through Montaigne’s works again, this will actually become one of his themes, that one is enough. Does it create satisfaction or endless self compulsion? That too is inherent to Montaigne’s project.