In the last of his very short essays, I disagree with most of what Montaigne has to say in it. I don’t believe people should begin a glide path towards death when they reach a certain age. Actually, one of my summer activities has been leaning into my workout routines to become stronger than I’ve ever been. I’ve even dabbled in some jiu-jitsu. I may not be as wealthy as some men my age, but at least I feel no embarrassment at the beach.
Montaigne didn’t discuss workout routines in this essay, but he does knock a different kind of exercise. In discussing Cato the Censor’s famous decision to learn the Greek language in his waning years, Montaigne wrote:
Cato the Censor was learning to talk just when he ought to be learning to shut up forever. We can always continue our studies but not our school-work: what a stupid thing is an old man learning his alphabet!
I always appreciate funny. But why shouldn’t an old man learn Greek if he wants? Does Montaigne have a better, specific purpose for the elderly? Here’s what he has in mind. First, he thinks elderly people need to stop pursuing passions:
And the greatest flaw which they find in our nature is that our desires are for ever renewing their youth. We are constantly beginning our lives all over again. Our zeal and our desire should sometimes smell of old age. We already have one foot in the grave yet our tastes and our pursuits are always just being born.
Why ever have one foot in the grave? We don’t have to let minds or bodies decay, at least not at the standard rate. Montaigne lived when people died in their late 50s, so I can forgive him for expecting shorter lives. But I’m still not on board with advice like this:
The longest of my projects are for less than a year; I think only of bringing things to a close; I free myself from all fresh hopes and achievements; I say my last farewell to all the places I am leaving and daily rid myself of my belongings.
Big projects make me happy, so it would be ridiculous for me to give them up at any age. Staying busy in old age is in my family blood. My grandmother was still painting and writing poetry up until the day she died. My grandfather kept busy buying and repairing clocks—and even learned how to repair televisions at a community college a couple years before he died.
But I will grant Montaigne a possible adjustment: I think as I age, I should work on recovering some of my old joys and not casting aside my passions as quickly and frivolously as I did in my younger days. It might be nice if I kept some attachment to all the people and hobbies that were part of my life up to now—it might provide more diversity of support and keep me from focusing so intensely on the here and now, which in turn might keep me from burning out of these passions.
By his third volume of essays, Montaigne had fully turned away from the public sphere (although he did serve two terms as Mayor of Bordeaux between volumes two and three.) At this point, he’d seen his political ambitions come to an end (he wanted most to be appointed ambassador to Italy … don’t we all?) So he was left to write, and this essay is yet another explanation why:
In short all the comfort I find in my old age is that it deadens within me many of the desires and worries which trouble our lives: worry about the way the world is going; worry about money, honors, erudition, health… and me.
Montaigne doesn’t add sex to that list and he’s never shy about bringing it up (as we’ll see in the upcoming essay about Virgil) so you can’t chalk that up to modesty. We seem to be in an age where people have become extremely judgmental about age gaps between romantic partners. Consequently, I tell almost no one about my personal life. The things I like to do just naturally puts me in contact most with women significantly younger than me (they also comprise a majority of the single women in the city) and over the last couple of years, nearly everyone I’ve dated has been about half my age. There simply aren’t many available women my age in the city—and the ones I’ve come in contact with seem obsessed with real estate and golf. No thank you.
I have no idea if Montaigne would approve of this and I don’t care. But I do know that he’s a bit of a hypocrite about where aging people should focus their minds. He may say that he wants them to stick to practical things close to home, but his essays towards the end became broader and more philosophical, making advice like this seem oddly out of place:
If study we must, let us study something suitable to our circumstances, so that we can make the same reply as that man who was asked what use were his studies in decrepit old age: ‘That I may better and more happily leave it behind,’ he said.
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