I find this essay on liars to be one of Montaigne’s least convincing. To begin, I find it a bit hard to believe that someone who served for years as a diplomat, government official and well-known political moderate wouldn’t have become skilled at shading the truth. While Montaigne did have a reputation for speaking bluntly at times, he didn’t write that way. Sure, he could pass off much of his posturing as irony, but given his unusually harsh judgment of lies and liars, it would seem that he would also have a problem with the ironic.
Feast your eyes on his way-over-the-top judgment of lying, which reads far more like postmodern polemics than Montaigne’s typical questioning manner:
If we realized the horror and weight of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes. I find that people normally waste time quite inappropriately punishing children for innocent misdemeanours, tormenting them for thoughtless actions which lead nowhere and leave no trace. It seems to me that the only faults which we should vigorously attack as soon as they arise and start to develop are lying and, a little below that, stubbornness.
It’s unfortunate that the essay leads to such an unoriginal conclusion, because it begins with a far more interesting — and confessional — discussion of memory. Building on Quintilian’s thought that successful lying requires a good memory, Montaigne sketches in great detail his absentmindedness.
in my part of the world they actually say a man ‘has no memory’ to mean that he is stupid. When I complain that my memory is defective they either correct me or disbelieve me, as though I were accusing myself of being daft. They see no difference between memory and intelligence. That makes my case worse than it is.
I certainly do forget things easily but I simply do not treat with indifference any charge laid on me by my friends. Let them be satisfied with my misfortune, without turning it into precisely the kind of malice which is the enemy of my natural humour.
Defensive, isn’t it? At another point, Montaigne notes that he tends to forget birthdays and other important dates. But don’t take that to mean he doesn’t care — it just means that he’s honest! Which means what — that none of us really care enough to remember such things, we just fake it?
But maybe it’s all a function of age, that Montaigne landed later in life on this position, because he’d made his made ashamed of its earlier self. This is something I can related to. I’ve perhaps become too old for the workplace, I have no patience for fools or desire to be diplomatic when I see obvious stupidity in front of me. There reaches a point in everyone’s life when dishonesty just feels like a massive waste of energy, and that part of Montaigne’s message I can embrace fully.
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