This is an essay about finding happiness in life. Montaigne focuses on his three major diversions: friendships, romantic relationships and books. But I think some of his most important thoughts on the matter come right at the start in his introduction, where he makes a broad case for living a life of varied interests.
Note that in this paragraph, Montaigne uses the word custom. It’s maybe the most important word in his vocabulary and it puts an interesting spin on this paragraph, as is his use of the word slave, which evokes Etienne de La Boetie’s thoughts on involuntary servitude:
Our main talent lies in knowing how to adapt ourselves to a variety of customs. To keep ourselves bound by the bonds of necessity to one single way of life is to be, but not to live. Souls are most beautiful when they show most variety and flexibility …. Life is a rough, irregular progress with a multitude of forms. It is to be no friend of yourself – and even less master of yourself – to be a slave endlessly following yourself, so beholden to your predispositions that you cannot stray from them nor bend them.
Montaigne is enamored of odd cultures where people act differently from the norm of Renaissance Europe. So he’s making something of an analogy here—the way you have to adapt when traveling in strange new lands is the way you should take up every part of your life, open to trying completely different approaches. And this is the way to avoid becoming a pure slave to the life you’re currently living, following the same routines that you’ve adopted for reasons you no longer remember.
Montaigne believes that our greatest vices are the ruts we create for ourselves, the day-to-day habits that force us into a style of life that masks our true nature. But this rut can also manifest itself in becoming too wrapped up in things:
I cannot easily escape from the state of my own Soul, which is distressing in so far as she does not usually know how to spend her time without getting bogged down nor how to apply herself to anything except fully and intensely …. Most minds have need of extraneous matter to make them limber up and do their exercises: mine needs rather to sojourn and to settle down.
This sounds quite a bit like me, and accounts for my many deep-dive projects in life. Montaigne is not going to argue against my kind of reflection, but he finds it both valuable and difficult:
For anyone who knows how to probe himself and to do so vigorously, reflection is a mighty endeavor and a full one: I would rather forge my soul than stock it up. No occupation is more powerful, or more feeble, than entertaining one’s own thoughts – depending on what kind of soul it is.
From here, Montaigne shifts his focus to the importance of friendship — noting that friendship is difficult for him because he takes it too seriously:
I am able to make and keep exceptional and considered friendships, especially since I seize hungrily upon any acquaintanceship which corresponds to my tastes. I put myself forward and throw myself into them so eagerly that I can hardly fail to make attachments and to leave my mark wherever I go …. The fact that as a young man I was brought to appreciate the delicious savor of one single perfect friendship has genuinely made the others insipid to me and impressed on my faculty of perception that (as one ancient writer said) friendship is a companionable, not a gregarious, beast.
I’m also like Montaigne in that I often find small-talk easier with people who I do not know than those that I do. For friends and acquaintances, small talk seems like a waste of time, while with total strangers, it seems like a way to share a connection and turn an economic transaction (such as cash register operator to customer) into two people relating:
I can clearly see that anyone like me whose aim is the good things of life (I mean those things which are of its essence) must flee like the plague from such moroseness and niceness of humor. What I would praise would be a soul with many stories, one of which knew how to strain and relax; a soul at ease wherever fortune led it; which could chat with a neighbor about whatever he is building, his hunting or his legal action, and take pleasure in conversing with a carpenter or a gardener …. I have never liked Plato’s advice to talk always like a master to our domestics, without jests or intimacy, whether addressing menservants or maidservants. For, apart from what my own reason tells me, it is ill-bred and unjust to give such value to a trivial privilege of Fortune: the most equitable polities seem to me to be those which allow the least inequality between servants and masters.
I share another odd characteristic with Montaigne — I often feel most pleasantly alone when I’m in a crowd. Montaigne would have made a great coffee-shop blogger:
I throw myself into matters of State and into the whole universe more willingly when I am alone. In a crowd at the Louvre I hold back and withdraw into my skin; crowds drive me back into myself and my thoughts are never more full of folly, more licentious and private than in places dedicated to circumspection and formal prudence. It is not our folly which makes me laugh: it is our wisdom.
The next simple pleasure on Montaigne’s list is romantic love … which actually is far from simple. As I’ve noted in numerous essays, Montaigne avoids discussions of romantic love. He has much to say about friendships, marriages and sexual relationships, but he avoids thoughts of romantic passions as much as possible. He doesn’t quite evade the subject here, but he quickly changes the focus from a blanket statement against romantic fixations and onto a critique of doing the opposite: seducing without genuine attachment:
It is madness to fix all our thoughts on it and to engage in it with a frenzied single-minded passion. On the other hand to get involved in it without love or willing to be bound, like actors, so as to play the usual part expected from youth, contributing nothing of your own but your words, is indeed to provide for your safety; but it is very cowardly, like a man who would jettison his honor, goods and pleasure from fear of danger. For one thing is certain: those who set such a snare can expect to gain nothing by it which can affect or satisfy a soul of any beauty. We must truly have desired any woman we wish truly to enjoy possessing; I mean that, even though fortune should unjustly favor play-acting – as often happens, since there is not one woman, no matter how ugly she may be, who does not think herself worth loving and who does not think herself attractive for her laugh, her gestures or for being the right age, since none of them is universally ugly any more than universally beautiful.
But then Montaigne says something curious, something that many other spots in his essays would seem to contradict: that he’s not capable of forming purely sexual relationships with women:
I no more know Venus without Cupid than motherhood without children: they are things whose essences are interdependent and necessary to each other. So such cheating splashes back on the man who does it. The affaire costs him hardly anything, but he gets nothing worthwhile out of it either.
So, once again, Montaigne is an unreliable narrator about his love life. This shouldn’t surprise anyone—we all are to some extent. I, for one, frequently make the case that I’m uninterested in sex without love. But it would be more accurate to state that I’m uninterested in pursuing sex without love.
Keep that in mind as Montaigne scolds men who are after the purely sexual relationship, noting that even in the animal world there are non-conscious biological factors in play that don’t have a direct analogy in human beings … so to act purely sexually, contrary to the contemporary belief that we are following our animal nature, isn’t actually bestial:
The ‘beauty’ such men are after is not simply not human, it is not even bestial. The very beasts do not desire it so gross and so earth-bound: we can see that imagination and desire often set beasts on heat and arouse them before their body does; we can see that beasts of both sexes choose and select the object of their desires from among the herd and that they maintain long affectionate relationships. Even beasts which are denied physical powers by old age still quiver, whinny and tremble with love.
The positive side of Montaigne’s equation—that pursuit that includes difficulty is more pleasurable—is a timeless psychological insight that he expanded on in a full essay:
I wanted to sharpen the pleasure by difficulties, by yearning and by a kind of glory; I liked the style of the Emperor Tiberius (who in his love-affairs was attracted more by modesty and rank than by any other quality) and the humor of Flora the courtesan (who was also attracted by a dictator, a consul or censor, delighting in the official rank of her lovers). Pearls and brocade certainly add to the pleasure; so do titles and retainers.
Volume 3 highlights Montaigne’s waning years. Therefore, his thoughts on romantic love are wistful and surprisingly touching. Perhaps this is the only place where he was completely honest about his yearning side. His third great pastime—books—is one that he could keep up throughout his life. I find his description of books as companions … and perhaps even reasons to wish for a longer life … especially powerful:
It is impossible to describe what comfort and peace I derive from the thought that they are there beside me, to give me pleasure whenever I want it, or from recognizing how much succor they bring to my life. It is the best protection which I have found for our human journey and I deeply pity men of intelligence who lack it. I on the other hand can accept any sort of pastime, no matter how trifling, because I have this one which will never fail me.
One of the great pleasures of reading for Montaigne is simply the opportunity to be alone … which is a reason he finds the monastic life so unappealing:
I have never considered any of the austerities of life which our monks delight in to be harsher than the rule that I have noted in some of their foundations: to be perpetually with somebody else and to be surrounded by a crowd of people no matter what they are doing. And I find that it is somewhat more tolerable to be always alone than never able to be so.
Montaigne’s final thought on books is a reminder that we should never over do intellectual pursuits — we need time for physical activity to keep the body and mind in tune:
Books have plenty of pleasant qualities for those who know how to select them. But there is no good without ill. The pleasure we take in them is no purer or untarnished than any other. Reading has its disadvantages – and they are weighty ones: it exercises the soul, but during that time the body (my care for which I have not forgotten) remains inactive and grows earth-bound and sad. I know of no excess more harmful to me in my declining years, nor more to be avoided.
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