I feel tinges of sadness throughout Montaigne’s work, and I can’t help but feel that Michel lived a somewhat lonely existence. Everyone who reads Montaigne has a tendency to project themselves onto him, and so maybe I feel a bit of my childhood in his. But when I read about the young Michel, singled out in his household, sent to live with a peasant family at a young age so he would understand the simple life, required to speak Latin, a language no one else in the household knew in full, the sadness of that existence felt oppressive to me.
I had the same sense of being an outsider in my own home and throughout my childhood. Neither of my parents went to college. I have a special needs younger brother and an older sister who struggled through school, likely with undiagnosed dyslexia. I was treated differently as a result, as if I were some kind of accidental genius just for being a fairly normal boy who liked to read.
How could Michel not feel different and set apart? As he began writing his essays, even though he had no idea what form they might take or if anyone would eventually read them, he was dealing with the loss of his close friend Etienne de La Boetie, someone who had not been his friend for long, only about three years, but who he probably became closer than anyone before or after.
Montaigne feels drawn to the subject of sadness, but he’s focused here on a specific, fashionable form of sadness in his day that was oddly equated with genius, as in the poseur artiste who wallows in self pity all day to attract attention to his otherwise forgettable paintings. And in the first paragraph, Montaigne again lumps all the Stoics together without naming one:
The Stoics forbid this emotion to their sages as being base and cowardly.
This makes me wonder, at least in his early essays, is who Montaigne meant when he said Stoics. Is he referring purely to the original Greek school? Because if Montaigne meant Stoic in the way we commonly refer to them now – also including a number of Roman thinkers such as Marcus Aurelius and Seneca – then it gets a little more complicated.
But I sense Montaigne knows this – that the tristezza he wants to attack in this essay wasn’t a direct subject of most Stoic writers, they were more focused on questions like death and grieving. Seneca might have come closest with this interesting thought:
Why need we weep over parts of our life? The whole of it calls for tears. New miseries assail us before we free ourselves from the old ones. You, therefore, who allow them to trouble you to an unreasonable extent ought especially to restrain yourselves, and to muster all the powers of the human breast to combat your tears and your pains.
And then he closes this thought with the typical Stoic bravado:
Those whom you love and those whom you despise will both be made equal in the same ashes.
But that’s a terribly sad thought and I come away from this essay disbelieving Montaigne’s distance. This description of sadness hits hard, considering the grief he was feeling. But I also sense that his sadness was deeper and more solitary:
The force of extreme sadness inevitably stuns the whole of our soul, impeding her freedom of action. It happens to us when we are suddenly struck with alarm by some really bad news; we are enraptured, seized, paralyzed in all our movements in such a way that, afterwards, when the soul lets herself go with tears and lamentations; she seems to have struggled loose, disentangled herself and become free to range about as she wishes.
It is not surprising, considering just how strongly sadness gripped him, that Montaigne spent many of his early essays trying to deny and escape it.
Leave a Reply