If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m exhausted of discussing Montaigne’s view of death. He’s just as obsessed with it as Alvy Singer was in “Annie Hall.” I wonder if Montaigne shared with his mistresses lots of depressing books about death as well.
I’m going to jump directly to his conclusion in this essay, because maybe it will offer me an offramp to a related subject:
The ultimate degree of treating death courageously, and the most natural one, is to face it not only without amazement but without worry, extending the ordinary course of your life right into death. As Cato did, who spent his time in sleep and study while keeping present in his head and heart that violent bloody death and holding it in his palm.
Maybe instead of making this thought about dying, we can apply it to living—in particular, my recent focus on positively using emotions and experiencing them as fully as possible. I see this pro-emotion course as the ultimate attack on nihilism, that you infuse meaning into life by allowing yourself to fully feel it, even at the most difficult moments.
And I need to say quickly that I know I did not invent this approach and am borrowing from dozens of philosophic and psychological influences, literary and human, who I’ve had the good fortune to come across in life. I just don’t recall anyone taking an approach as extreme as the one I’m advocating.
Let me give you a sense of what this approach feels like, because it requires making a very subtle distinction between thought-and-experience-based feelings and our more mysterious moods. I woke up this morning in an incredible mood—I’m skin was tingling; I was euphoric. I did not know what caused this positive outlook. Maybe I had a really pleasant dream that I immediately. My unconsciousness became enlivened. For whatever reason, that state wore off as the morning went on and now a similar feeling of depression has replaced it, to where I’m wondering if I’m coming down with an illness.
I can try to assign thoughts to this feeling, but that seems like a futile act. Nothing has really happened today. I’m in a fairly empty office. There have been no major work related events for me. I have had no outside-of-work conversations that might have thrown me off. Rather, it feels like the emotion I woke with was really a state of agitation and while it began with positive expectations, it later shifted to more negative ones within the same somewhat jittery state.
Let me bring in that Montaigne quote (which stands in very well for the full essay—I’m just sparing you lots of tales of military heroism … you’re welcome.) Montaigne is saying here that we should face our emotions with no sense of amazement—good mood or bad, it is simply a mood and nothing more — but also a lack of worry. The euphoric feeling arises from an expected triumph, while a depressed mood prepares for an imminent defeat. But in both cases, these are the expected difficulties mentioned in yesterday’s essay. We cannot experience the high moods without the low ones as well. Euphoria has a cost.
The more important factor, however, is to de-medicalize that mood state. A passing moment of depression isn’t necessarily something that needs to be addressed. It won’t automatically have negative consequences, only attaching thoughts to the mood and letting those thoughts further deepen the feeling can do that.
But who knows what’s actually going on in the body? Perhaps there were certain chemicals at high levels when I woke that have eased off since. As mentioned before, a virus might be affecting me. Maybe there have been too many hours since I last exercised. Maybe the one beer I drank yesterday threw off my chemistry a bit. Who knows? The body could take me places for reasons I will never understand, so why complicate the situation by bringing thoughts into it?
If there is no obvious event causing a physiological change, don’t create one. Montaigne tells us to do what we can to be present at the moment. Recognize the moods, but don’t become enslaved by them. Save those self examinations for the times when identifiable events created emotional shifts.
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