Since I am a father of three boys, I tend to jump right into the parental advice parts of this essay, but perhaps I have paid too little attention to the introduction and Montaigne’s vulnerable self reveal:
It was a melancholy humour (and therefore a humour most inimical to my natural complexion) brought on by the chagrin caused by the solitary retreat I plunged myself into a few years ago, which first put into my head this raving concern with writing. Finding myself quite empty, with nothing to write about, I offered myself to myself as theme and subject matter. It is the only book of its kind in the world, in its conception wild and fantastically eccentric.
This is one of the first essays in volume 2, so it is written after Montaigne received his first round of public attention and praise for his essays. It’s the first time that Montaigne admits to a bout of melancholia. He wrote the essay On Sadness early in his project, but in it he kept a distance from it and criticized a certain kind of poseur ennui.
He doesn’t explain why he went into solitary retreat—biographers assume he was driven there by the death of La Boetie—but he identifies that loneliness as the cause of his deep sadness and need to “heed this raving concern with writing.” I am probably similar to Montaigne in that regard. But this complicated for me, because a feeling of aloneness is not necessarily the same as a sense of loneliness. I can feel quite content when alone, but also lonely when among people.
Anyway, that’s enough on melancholia, onto children; Over time, I have moved closer to the way Montaigne thought of father-child relationships. For example, Montaigne describes the differences between the love of a parent for small children and for ones who are closer to fully formed adults:
We feel ourselves more moved by the skippings and jumpings and babyish tricks of our children than by their activities when they are fully formed, as though we had loved them not as human beings but only as playthings or as pet monkeys.
As much as I loved my children when they were small, I agree with Montaigne on this point—many parents have a young child bias, but the relationships I have with my sons are so much more meaningful to me now. I see some of my habits good and bad in each, but mostly I’m just overjoyed to have three teenagers who still want to talk to me.
Montaigne’s view of discipline is pretty similar to my own as well:
We should make ourselves respected for our virtues and our abilities and loved for our goodness and gentlemanliness. The very ashes of a rare timber have their value, and we are accustomed to hold in respect and reverence the very bones and remains of honourable people.
For an estate owner like Montaigne, being a parent also meant having heirs and something to pass down. As someone with a lifelong allergy to possessing things of value worthy of being kept and desired, I do not have that kind of problem, although I see some emotional value in having gained skills and ideas about life that I can share with my children:
I have always thought that it must be a great happiness for an old father to train his own children in the management of his affairs; he could then, during his lifetime, observe how they do it, offering advice and instruction based on his own experience in such things, and personally arranging for the ancient honour and order of his house to come into the hands of his successors, confirming in this way the hopes he could place in their future management of them.
I recently had the experience of noticing that my three sons had all taken up one of my major hobbies—Finn has his workouts, Mac now plays guitar and Quinn immerses himself in extensive writing projects. Speaking of my youngest, his math teacher recently emailed a note pointing out that he had forgotten to turn in a major math project that he needed to make up right away. But she appended to this (all too typical) academic reminder:
Quinn showed such sincere enthusiasm when he was engaging in a gallery walk on Tuesday to view his peers’ projects. He is truly a remarkable young man- so genuinely kind, which is such a breath of fresh air to observe as a middle school teacher.
Since I’d already known that Quinn turns in big assignments late and hates math, the email in total was a pleasant surprise. He further reinforced his position as his father’s son by recently running for his school’s Local School Council and followed in my footsteps by losing the election.
I would think that Montaigne would agree with my pride in this circumstance and would wish it to grow as they become full adults:
It is also unjust, and mad, to deprive our grown-up children of easy relations with their fathers by striving to maintain an austere and contemptuous frown, hoping by that to keep them in fear and obedience. That is a quite useless farce which makes fathers loathsome to children and, what is worse, makes them ridiculous.
Divorce is difficult on children. This is something I experienced and, sadly, so too have my children. My ex-wife and I have worked on remaining equally involved in their lives and put an end to any disputes we had with each other once we made the decision to split. This thought from Montaigne relates to father-son relationships, but also more broadly, to the way we relate to everyone in life:
Every day, every hour, we say things about others which ought more properly to be addressed to ourselves if only we had learned to turn our thoughts inward as well as widely outward. Similarly, many authors inflict wounds on the cause they defend by dashing out against the attackers, hurling shafts at their enemies which can properly be hurled back at them.
Montaigne closes out his essay talking about how brain-children can mean just as much to an individual as actual children. I noticed today that a project I’ve been working on at work has taken on that kind of meaning to me, so much so that I actually referred to it as a baby in conversations. So I’ll create a second ending to this story on a more positive note, agreeing with Montaigne that life gives us many forms of creation at different points in our lives and we should feel no less pride for the positive and lasting contributions we make to humanity through our thoughts as we do through our offspring:
Now once we consider the fact that we love our children simply because we begot them, calling them our second selves, we can see that we also produce something else from ourselves, no less worthy of commendation: for the things we engender in our soul, the offspring of our mind, of our wisdom and talents, are the products of a part more noble than the body and are more purely our own.
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