I’ve called this a Montaigne essay about melancholy, and it is in part, but there’s something else in it that feels very weird. It’s almost an ode to mediocrity, in a sense, that the things we see has the highest form of good in ourselves and in the world are actually beyond the point of being appreciated or fully used for what they are.
So happiness ends up needing those touches of bittersweet to be purely enjoyed. Montaigne even goes farther than than, saying that true joy might not be happy at all:
Profound joy has more seriousness than gaiety about it; extreme and full contentment, more soberness than sprightliness. Even felicity, unless it tempers itself, overwhelms [Seneca]. Happiness racks us. That is what an old Greek verse says, in this sense: “The gods sell us all the good things they give us.” That is to say, they give us none pure and perfect, none that we do not buy at the price of some evil.
That’s a very strong claim by Montaigne, especially at the close, It isn’t just that there’s some disappointment in all that is good, there’s outright evil in it.
Montaigne begins by noting that even in sexual pleasure, there’s something within it that’s physically painful and subject to mental lament:
Our utmost sensual pleasure has an air of groaning and lament about it. Wouldn’t you say that it is dying of anguish? Indeed, when we forge a picture of it at its highest point, we deck it with sickly and painful epithets and qualities: languor, softness, weakness, faintness, morbidezza: a great testimony to their consanguinity and consubstantiality.
Slavov Zizek has spoken about how, when we are in the midst of a creative act, we will readily accept suffering for our work. So perhaps pleasure isn’t the end of life that we assume, that we sometimes seek out difficulties and challenges that suit our passions.
Montaigne validates the Zizek argument by saying there is an odd sort of pleasure in sadness:
Metrodorus used to say that in sadness there is some alloy of pleasure. I do not know whether he meant something else, but for my part I indeed imagine that there is design, consent, and pleasure in feeding one’s melancholy; I mean beyond the ambition that can also be involved. There is some shadow of daintiness and luxury that smiles on us and flatters us in the very lap of melancholy. Are there not some natures that feed on it? A certain kind of pleasure ’tis to weep.(Ovid) And one Attalus, in Seneca, says that the memory of our lost friends is agreeable to us like the bitterness in a wine that is too old— Boy, that serve old Falernian wine, Pour me a bitterer cup for mine (Catullus) —and like apples sweetly tart.
I’ve promised myself to point out every possible reference to La Boetie whenever I come across it, and this happy lament about bitter wine seems to be one.
I can feel that kind of joyful sadness even when in contact with people who aren’t gone, who are just more distant than they once were. That to me is sometimes the greatest sadness, the sense that someone is slowly drifting away and will soon be completely out of reach, the mourning taken in small pieces over a long time.
It’s the idea expressed in the Adrian Lenker incredible song “Sadness as a Gift.” There’s one line that is altered in all three song verses, it starts out “you could write me someday and I think you will.” In the second verse it’s “I bet you will.” By the third verse it’s “I hope you will.” And there’s another beautiful lyrical trick she plays in the song. In the first verse, Lenker sings “We could see the sadness as a gift and still feel too heavy to hold.” But by the second verse and continuing into the third, she can’t even bring herself to finish the thought, she cuts it off at “and still …”
Montaigne approaches this point by shifting to the bittersweet:
Nature reveals this confusion to us; painters hold that the movements and wrinkles of the face that serve for weeping serve also for laughing. In truth, before one or the other is completely expressed, watch the progress of the painting: you are in doubt toward which one it is going. And the extremity of laughter is mingled with tears. There is no evil without its compensation [Seneca].
But while Montaigne begins with an examination of melancholia, he has other, stranger examples of impurity in life to come. He believes that our calls for justice always include a measure of injustice, something he will discuss at much greater length in On Experience.
Then he takes on intelligence, but not in the way he usually does. Montaigne in other essays goes after reason as being an incomplete form of intelligence, or book learning as being inferior to experience. But here, he is taking on wisdom itself in this very surprising passage:
It is likewise true that for the uses of life and for the service of public business there may be excess in the purity and perspicacity of our minds. That penetrating clarity has too much subtlety and curiosity in it. These must be weighted and blunted to make them more obedient to example and practice, and thickened and obscured to relate them to this shadowy and earthy life. Therefore common and less high-strung minds are found to be more fit and more successful for conducting affairs. And the lofty and exquisite ideas of philosophy are found to be inept in practice. That acute vivacity of mind, that supple and restless versatility, disturbs our negotiations. Human enterprises must be handled more roughly and superficially, and a good and great part of them left for the rights of fortune. There is no need to light up affairs so deeply and so subtly. You get lost considering so many contrasting aspects and diverse shapes: in revolving mutually contradictory things, their minds had become stupefied [Livy].
I suppose this isn’t that unusual a point—the most successful people in life often have a touch of common sense rather than pure intellectual brainpower. But it’s still rather stunning to hear someone who has devoted so much time and attention to the value of philosophy point out just how utterly useless it is for most of life’s enterprises. He elaborates on this in a way that I can more readily accept—don’t overthink things—but an air of anti-intellectualism remains:
He who seeks and embraces all the circumstances and consequences impedes his choice. An average intelligence conducts equally well, and suffices to carry out, things of great or little weight. Note that the best managers are those who least know how to tell us how they are so, and that the self-satisfied storytellers most often do nothing worth while. I know one great talker and very excellent portrayer of every sort of managing, who has very pitifully let the revenue of a hundred thousand francs slip through his hands. I know another who speaks and gives advice better than any man in his council, and there is no better show of mind and competence in the world; however, in practice, his servants find him quite different; I mean without taking bad luck into account.
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