Storytelling isn’t always a strength of Michel de Montaigne. He designs disjointed narratives. He prefers to use quotes and anecdotes to illustrate his points. This essay stands out as an example of Montaigne’s flexibility as a writer. He, in fact, can write in the personal narrative style of which contemporary readers are most familiar.
The centerpiece of this essay is a near-death experience that Montaigne previously alluded to in his eighth essay, On Idleness. He describes the event beautifully here:
One of my men, a big strong fellow, was on a powerful farm-horse with a hopeless mouth but also fresh and vigorous. He wanted to show off and to get ahead of the others, but he happened to ride it full pelt right in my tracks and came down like a colossus upon me, a little man on a little horse, striking us like a thunderbolt with all his roughness and weight, knocking us over with our legs in the air. So there was my horse thrown down and lying stunned, and me, ten or twelve yards beyond, stretched out dead on my back, my face all bruised and cut about, the sword I had been holding lying more than ten yards beyond that, my belt torn to shreds; and me with no more movement or sensation than a log.
From here, he describes the experience of being unconscious and partially conscious, and almost certainly someone with a concussion:
After having been taken for dead for two good hours, on the way I began to make movements and to inhale because such a great quantity of blood had been discharged into my stomach that my natural powers had to be restored for me to void it. They got me on my feet, when I threw up a bucketful of pure clotted blood; and I had to do the same several times on the way. With that I began to get a bit of life back into me, but only little by little and over so long a stretch of time that at first my sensations were closer to death than to life.
The narrative of this partially conscious state and his recovery goes on for about 15 paragraphs and I can’t quote it all here, but I highly recommend this piece to anyone interested in Montaigne’s thoughts. Because of the style he adopts here, it might be the most accessible of his essays to contemporary readers. He closes the section with this thought:
I must not overlook the following: the last thing I could recover was my memory of the accident itself; before I could grasp it, I got them to repeat several times where I was going to, where I was coming from, what time it happened. As for the manner of my fall, they hid it from me for the sake of the man who had caused it and made up other explanations. But some time later the following day when my memory happened to open up and recall to me the circumstances which I found myself in on that instant when I was aware of that horse coming at me (for I had seen it at my heels and already thought I was dead, but that perception had been so sudden that fear had no time to be engendered by it), it appeared to me that lightning had struck my soul with a jolt and that I was coming back from the other world.
What makes this storytelling especially interesting is that Montaigne uses it wisely to illustrate a point—that we all need practice for the tough parts of life and it is quite difficult to attain the experience necessary to prepare yourself for and to control death. So he considers an episode like this, harrowing as it was, as a gift:
Yet it does seem that we have some means of breaking ourselves in for death and to some extent of making an assay of it. We can have experience of it, not whole and complete but at least such as not to be useless and to make us more strong and steadfast. If we cannot join battle with death we can advance towards it; we can make reconnaissances and if we cannot drive right up to its stronghold we can at least glimpse it and explore the approaches to it. It is not without good cause that we are brought to look to sleep itself for similarities with death.
After taking us on this journey and showing how the experience gave him an interesting, potentially useful perspective on death, Montaigne does something odd—he pulls back and explains why he just told this long story about himself. He makes some very interesting observations about what his project means and why he believes this kind of self-examination is useful—but for a contemporary reader, it all seems unnecessary.
It makes for interesting reading for me, given that I’m on a similar journey and relate to his writing-about-writing much more than his obsessions about death:
For many years now the target of my thoughts has been myself alone; I examine nothing, I study nothing, but me; and if I do study anything else, it is so as to apply it at once to myself, or more correctly, within myself. And it does not seem to me to be wrong if (as is done in other branches of learning, incomparably less useful) I share what I have learned in this one, even though I am hardly satisfied with the progress I have made. No description is more difficult than the describing of oneself; and none, certainly, is more useful. To be ready to appear in public you have to brush your hair; you have to arrange things and put them in order. I am therefore ceaselessly making myself ready since I am ceaselessly describing myself.
He closes by raising an interesting possible objection to this type of project: that it gives rise to narcissism. Montaigne disputes this in a way that I find very insightful. To Montaigne, true self knowledge is the best way to confront and defeat the narcissistic. His description of surface biographies also explains accurately why Hollywood biopics are so awful:
The sovereign remedy to cure self-love is to do the opposite to what those people say who, by forbidding you to talk about yourself, as a consequence even more strongly forbid you to think about yourself. Pride lies in our thoughts: the tongue can only have a very unimportant share in it. They think that to linger over yourself is to be pleased with yourself, to haunt and frequent yourself is to hold yourself too dear. That can happen. But that excess arises only in those who merely finger the surface of themselves; who see themselves only when business is over; who call it madness and idleness to be concerned with yourself; for whom enriching and constructing your character is to build castles in the air; who treat themselves as a third person, a stranger to themselves.
Leave a Reply