One of Michel de Montaigne’s shortest essays, On Idleness includes some of his most striking statements. Such as:
… so too with our minds. If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject which can serve as a bridle to reign them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts; Then, there is no madness, no raving lunacy, which such agitations do not bring forth.
So Montaigne decided to just set his mind free, let it roam where it may and he would write down wherever it took him:
It seemed to me then that the greatest favour I could do for my mind was to leave it in total idleness, caring for itself, concerned only with itself, calmly thinking of itself. I hoped it could do that more easily from then on, since with the passage of time it had grown mature and put on weight. But I find – that on the contrary it bolted off like a runaway horse, taking far more trouble over itself than it ever did over anyone else; it gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities, one after another, without order or fitness, that, so as to contemplate at my ease their oddness and their strangeness, I began to keep a record of them, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.
That analogy of the runaway horse is really interesting, in large part because at 39, he had a terrifying personal experience that led to a concussion that he will discuss in a latter essay. But the ending line, the one about making the mind ashamed of itself, is even more striking.
I’ve kept at my Montaigne project for so long because he’s a great way to keep my mind tethered. I’ve tried just letting my mind wonder freely, taking on whatever subject comes to mind. I couldn’t deal with the shame as well as Montaigne could. But my constant edits and re-edits, putting in personal information, taking it out, is a constant project of making my mind ashamed and then finding a path back to self respectability.
Of course, not all edits and deletions are a matter of shame. Sometimes I remove material simply because the inserted segments work better for the limited, controlled audience of a blog and might not be appropriate for a book. So, yes, I’m still dreaming of that.
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