Carried away is a very interesting term. Montaigne is most stoic in his beliefs about strong emotions and the way they can hijack our lives. But I have a very hard time with the idea that emotions are somehow not part of us. My heart is with Marcel Proust when it comes to matters of emotions and memory. I like the way Proust believes that our deepest feelings are hidden away in lost objects of our lives and are released, genii like, when we happen upon them again.
When those memories are released, a flood of emotions follow. So how can emotions be something foreign to us? How we think, especially about people, depends so much on how we feel. In matters of connection, safety, affection and concern, emotions are the core of our being.
This essay features the first of many quotes from Seneca:
Wretched is a mind anxious about the future.
What’s interesting about Seneca’s line is that it punctuates one of Montaigne’s strongest Stoic thoughts, which I also find more interesting :
We are never ’at home’: we are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be — even when we ourselves shall be no more.
For those familiar with Montaigne’s full body of work, the use of the first person plural in that quote is irritating. At this point in the project, he hadn’t developed his interior reflective style and is still trying to define a singular human. In addition, that part about people being no more was highly scandalous in its time. Montaigne consistently expressed the view that humans only exist when body and soul are conjoined.
And there’s also the surprising, anachronistically contemporary element of mindfulness here, that we fail to fully appreciate and experience the present and feel ourselves pushed forward in time towards a destination that is actually nothing more than death. That’s probably a thought more akin to Heidegger than the Stoics, but it’s genuine Montaigne.
I also find the concept of never being at home more comfortable than Montaigne implied, and it is something Montaigne embraced more fully as he aged and traveled more freely. I like the idea of taking up new spaces and making them my own. In fact, I feel less driven forward in time out in the world, enjoying a more experiential life. What Montaigne probably had in mind was the constant bother of having to go to Bordeaux to take up business affairs when he preferred to just be left alone on his estate.
But the question of emotion, and how it fits into this home that we call ourselves—in the Montaigne vernacular, the soul—this cuts to something deeper for Montaigne’s project and my purpose in following it. As we will discover across the essays, Montaigne’s text has a way of brining out emotions and memories in me, and over the years I have used the essays as a framing device for addressing issues in my life.
The challenge I face, one that affects this project regularly, is not only being open to experience and feeling, but also to expressing it. I am fine with letting my emotions get carried away and I am not ashamed of my feelings. But soon after expressing, I often feel the need to pull back because I feel exposed. Everyone needs a certain safety and security to continue moving down a chosen path. There’s no more vulnerable position in the world than to reveal yourself and be greeted with silence. And to me, it’s so much easier living life with character and emotional simplicity than to constantly calibrate actions and moods to others.
But even when the expressions do not get the kind of empathetic reaction I’d like most, they do achieve something. I’ve tried it both ways in life. I’ve lived as a person who kept his feelings to himself and overrode what his unconscious wanted most. And then I shifted course and acted as my unconscious preferred. Neither path led to me getting some important things I wanted. But I like the person following his heart so much more. I’ve become a person that I can love, even if no one else does.
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