67. On Books

I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.

I feel much the same about Montaigne. Going through these essays feels extremely familiar to me, but I barely remember the details Montaigne wrote, never mind what I did. Last time I touched on this subject, I went on a long digression about David Foster Wallace. I do not know why I’d do that—he hardly seems worth the effort anymore.

Montaigne admits for the first time here that there’s something impressive in the style of the essays that exceeds the value of the content:

Do not linger over the matter but over my fashioning of it. Where my borrowings are concerned, see whether I have been able to select something which improves my theme: I get others to say what I cannot put so well myself, sometimes because of the weakness of my language and sometimes because of the weakness of my intellect.

He also admits that he hides behind his quotes sometime, making it harder for a reader to take issue with thoughts that come from a famous sage:

I want them to flick Plutarch’s nose in mistake for mine and to scald themselves by insulting the Seneca in me. I have to hide my weakness beneath those great reputations. I will love the man who can pluck out my feathers—I mean by the perspicacity of his judgement and by his sheer ability to distinguish the force and beauty of the topics. Myself, who am constantly unable to sort out my borrowings by my knowledge of where they came from, am quite able to measure my reach and to know that my own soil is in no wise capable of bringing forth some of the richer flowers that I find rooted there and which all the produce of my own growing could never match.

And then he admits to something that I do all the time—writing not to pass on knowledge or understanding to others, but simply to get a grasp of an idea and to see how well I’ve captured it:

I freely say what I think about all things—even about those which doubtless exceed my competence and which I in no wise claim to be within my jurisdiction. When I express my opinions, it is to reveal the measure of my sight, not the measure of the thing.

Although Montaigne says that he enjoys histories (and what we call biography) the stories he likes best are psychological—in that I agree with his tastes:

Now the most appropriate historians for me are those who write men’s lives, since they linger more over motives than events, over what comes from inside more than what happens outside. That is why, of historians of every kind, Plutarch is the man for me.

Montaigne began noting his poor memory and wraps up by pointing out a device he uses to remind himself of what he’s already read. I should apply this method to the movies I see. I swear there are some films—“Chungking Express” comes to mind—that seem completely new to me every time I watch them, and I return to them at least once a year:

To help my defective and treacherous memory a little—and it is so extremely bad that I have more than once happened to pick up again, thinking it new and unknown to me, a book which I had carefully read several years earlier and scribbled all over with my notes—I have for some time now adopted the practice of adding at the end of each book (I mean of each book which I intend to read only once) the date when I finished reading it and the general judgement I drew from it, in order to show me again at least the general idea and impression I had conceived of its author when reading it.

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