There is nobody less suited that I am to talk about memory. I can hardly find a trace of it in myself; I doubt if there is any other memory in the world as grotesquely faulty as mine is!
From “On Liars”
I concern myself in this piece with Montaigne’s final essay, On Experience, but my point about memory requires more context. Very early in his project, as noted in the quote above, Michel de Montaigne declared himself to have the world’s most faulty memory and bad as it was at the start of his project, he makes clear in his final essays it was worsening as he aged:
In these ravings of mine, what I fear is that my treacherous memory should make me inadvertently record the same thing twice. I hate going over my writings and only unwillingly probe a topic again once it has got away. I have no freshly learned doctrines: these are my normal ideas. Having doubtless conceived them a hundred times I am afraid that I may have mentioned them already. Repetition is always a bore, even if if were in Homer, but is disastrous in works which only make a superficial and passing impression. I hate persistent admonition even when it serves a purpose as in Seneca, and I dislike the practice of the Stoic School of repeating copiously and at length, for each individual subject, the principles and postulates which apply over all, ever citing afresh their general arguments and universal reasons. My memory is growing cruelly worse every day.
On Vanity
That’s a very sad passage that, taken out of time, could easily apply to someone in the early stages of Alzheimers or other forms of dementia. Montaigne was not terribly old by contemporary standards when he found his memory slipping away — he was in his mid-50s. Perhaps some research is in order about the progression of these types of afflictions relative to life spans. There’s no question that Montaigne was growing old for his time when he was nearing the end of his project, but I also believe I’ve read that what we consider being an explosion of Alzheimer’s cases today is partly because of longer life spans.
The sadness and frustration that Montaigne feels about his memory as his project is drawing to its conclusion stands in sharp contrast to how he discussed his affliction in his earlier essays, where he takes a more playful and forgiving approach. In this passage, he even gives himself a peculiar pat on the back for how memory problems have made him a better person:
I find ways of consoling myself. First, by arguing that a poor memory is an evil which has enabled me to correct a worse one which might easily have arisen in me: ambition. A bad memory is an intolerable defect for anyone concerned with world affairs. Moreover, Nature (as is shown by several similar examples of her ways of compensating) has strengthened other faculties of mine as this one has grown weaker. If, thanks to memory, other people’s discoveries and opinions had been kept ever before me, I would readily have reached a settled mind and judgment by following other men’s footsteps, failing as most people do to exercise my own powers.
From On Liars
Montaigne then makes his more famous point, that it takes an excellent memory to be a skilled liar, so he’s been remarkably candid and honest in life, knowing he can’t get away with holding the accurate fictions in his head for future recall. But I don’t want to pass over what he said in that above quote, that having an incomplete or faulty knowledge of past wisdom has freed himself from it. He can intellectually roam free, untethered to classical learning or, I presume, also the dictates of the church and state.
This will become a common theme in his essays, how forgetting is Montaigne’s super power, something that frees him from the clutches of past wisdom. Here’s his take on how philosophy is not a strong enough force to override the vagaries of memory:
Philosophy ought to arm me with weapons to fight against Fortune; she should stiffen my resolve to trample human adversities underfoot; how has she grown so weak as to have me bolting into burrows with such cowardly and stupid evasions? Memory reproduces what she wants, not what we choose. Indeed there is nothing which stamps anything so vividly on our memory as the desire not to remember it: the best way to impress anything on our souls and to make them stand guard over it, is to beg them to forget it.
From An Apology for Raymond Sebond
In the early essays, Montaigne is fairly vague about what it means for him to have a poor memory, but in Book III, he gets quite specific about how bad it is and how it affects his project:
It takes me three hours to learn three lines of verse; and then, in a composition of my own, an author’s freedom to switch the order and to change a word, forever varying the matter, makes the work harder to learn. Now the more I mistrust my memory, the more confused it gets; it serves me best when I take it by surprise, I have to address requests to it somewhat indifferently, for it becomes paralyzed if I try to force it, and once it has started to wobble the more I dig into it the more it gets tied up and perplexed; it serves me in its own time and not mine.
From On Presumption
This is important information to have about Montaigne, because he is not shy about quoting a verse in his essays. It’s not unusual for him to include dozens of different passages, from odes to exempla anecdotes, in a single essay. So how is he pulling this off?
Here’s something new and interesting that I came across while reading Phillipe Desan’s biography of Montaigne: for the first two volumes of his work, Montaigne used secretaries. Desan writes about the early essays:
During these years, when he was at home and intermittently, Montaigne dictated his reflections to a secretary. The shaping of the Essais leading to the first edition of 1580 occupied him from 1571 to 1579. Eight years might suggest meticulous preparation, but it was not a full-time activity, because writing was not Montaigne’s chief occupation during these years; it was a secondary labor that he conceived as a complement to his main political activity.
But for volume three, Montaigne stopped dictating the work and wrote them on his own, relying on the assistance of Marie de Gournay to compile them. Desan wrote:
After 1588, Montaigne no longer trusted his house servants and preferred to do his own writing directly on copies of his Essais printed in Paris, but his relation to his text had evolved. His work on the text—thanks to the generous margins in the 1588 edition, and also to the simple fact that he henceforth did without the services of a secretary—was changed forever. He took a greater interest in the process of writing and rewriting and went so far as to correct, often in a meticulous way, the punctuation and capital letters in his earlier texts.
In a volume 2 essay, On Presumption, Montaigne concedes that what he is doing in this project is far beyond his capacity to remember where these sources are coming from — or even the words that he’s written himself:
I am so outstanding a forgetter that, along with the rest, I forget even my own works and writings. People are constantly quoting me to me without my realizing it. If anyone wanted to know the sources of the verse and exempla that I have accumulated here, I would be at a loss to tell him, and yet I have only gone begging them at the doors of well-known and famous authors, not being satisfied with splendid material if it did not come from splendid honored hands. In them, authority and reason coincide. No wonder that my own book incurs the same fate as the others and that my memory lets go of what I write as of what I read; of what I give as of what I receive.
From On Presumption
So it’s clear that Montaigne was relying heavily on that “house staff” to help compile much of the quotations and exempla in his first two volumes of essays. He even alludes to talking “to somebody else” if he needs a quote:
My library, which is a fine one as village libraries go, is sited at one of the corners of my house. If an idea occurs to me which I want to go and look up or write down, I have to tell somebody else about it in case it slips out of my mind as I merely cross my courtyard. If I am rash enough to interrupt the thread of what I am saying, I never fail to lose it: which means that in talking I become constrained, dry and brief.
From On Presumption
From an essay in volume 3, Montaigne states that he does not consult texts as he writes:
When I am writing I can well do without the company and memory of my books lest they interfere with my style. Also (to tell the truth) because great authors are too good at beating down my pretensions: they dishearten me … and I am tempted to adopt the ruse of that painter who, having wretchedly painted a portrait of some cocks, forbade his apprentices to let any natural cock enter his workshop.
From On Some Lines of Virgil
So, we read Montaigne’s final essay—one written with the heavy support of Gournay—with this knowledge in mind. We know he dislikes repeating himself, but doesn’t remember much of what he wrote. We know he cannot remember any quotes at all and it takes hours of work on passages for him to have them in his head, but he also doesn’t enjoy having books with him as he writes, because they intimidate and stifle him. He begins it with a paraphrase of Aristotle: no desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge, which he folds into another quote of Manilius, about how experience constructs an art.
This is the first that I have ever heard of Manilius, so I had to do a bit of my research. He is a classical poet, most famous for the work The Astronomica. A. E. Housman in the early 20th century made a career of annotating that poem and remarked to a colleague about it “I do not send you a copy, as it would shock you very much; it is so dull that few professed scholars can read it, probably not one in the whole United States.” What a strange piece for Montaigne to find inspiration in, given his professed memory issues. I have to wonder if this was a suggestion of Gournay’s.
He introduces his subject by saying experience is a weaker, less dignified form of wisdom, but given the need for truth, one that we should not disdain. He builds to a point that so much of our experience is unique that need to be careful to not draw analogies continuously based on our limited experiences — which is pretty much akin to a contemporary science-minded analysts advising us to pay closer heed to data than anecdotes, to find the signal and filter out the noise.
But then, ignoring all he has said previously about how strongly he dislikes repetition, Montaigne jumps right into one of his favorite hobby horse subjects — how there are too many laws and humanity would be far better off if we had no laws at all and just let our wise judges form opinions based on the circumstances at hand. I won’t go into any detail about this, because it’s the same damn thing repeatedly for Montaigne on this subject. He hates the law and lets this train of thought guide him into an examination of how legal parsing of language destroys all clarity and meaning, which ends up exacerbating all disputes and ends with no reason applying to the matter at hand.
He shifts the stream of discussion subtly here from interpretations of law to interpretation of text — and a surprisingly contemporary literary examination begins, that awkwardly becomes a powerful self-criticism of the project he’s in the process of wrapping up:
Men fail to recognize the natural sickness of their mind which does nothing but range and ferret about, ceaselessly twisting and contriving and, like our silkworms, becoming entangled in its own works: a mouse stuck in pitch. It thinks it can make out in the distance some appearance of light, of conceptual truth: but, while it is charging towards it, so many difficulties, so many obstacles and fresh diversions strew its path that they make it dizzy and it loses its way.
On Experience
Even if you begin reading Montaigne with this essay, you can’t help but notice the accuracy of his description here. I find the opening clause most striking — men cannot recognize the natural sickness of their mind. True, and for possible evidence, we have Montaigne failing to see the natural sickness of his mind, meandering from subject to subject, becoming entangled in the same subject he has already surveyed over and again. This is one reading, but it’s also possible that he sees this sickness clearly. His counterpoint to the above quote, maybe a devastating critique of his entire body of work, is the quote below, which is the most trenchant case possible for the value of all he has created:
No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty, as Apollo made clear enough to us by his speaking (as always) ambiguously, obscurely and obliquely, not glutting us but keeping us wondering and occupied. It is an irregular activity, never-ending and without pattern or target. It’s discoveries excite each other, follow after each other and between them produce more.
On Experience
A few paragraphs later, Montaigne admits the vanity — perhaps even the narcissism — of his approach but he gives himself a pass because his subject is himself, so of course he must have more freedom to admire his own words and thoughts. This is, again, interesting for a man who claims to never re-read his words or remember any of them. He even acknowledges that the critical words he writes about his old essays amount to little more than “pretty little rebukes of motherly love.”
Since I have written about On Experience several times before, I won’t repeat myself now, but will instead conclude with my view of these contradictions that come up in this piece. I have no doubts that Montaigne struggled with his memory and that it caused some hardship for him, especially as he wrote first drafts on his own in volume three instead of dictating them.
In earlier examinations of this essay, I concluded that Montaigne exaggerated his lack of memory. I concluded that his memory was likely not as strong as he would prefer, but it was good enough to have a decent grasp of his prodigious lifelong reading, at least strong enough for him to know where to find the quotes that sprung to mind when he wanted to illustrate his own thinking.
But now I’m no longer so sure. I will need to more closely examine the Gourney assisted essays to determine if his earlier secretaries took up much of the slack for Montaigne.
In volume 3, Montaigne was fully aware of what he had written before — but that’s likely due to his newfound desire to revisit and edit his past essays now that he had wide enough margins to make notes and an excellent editor in Gourney to assist him.
I also believe that Montaigne was genuinely concerned about his memory. He hinted at points that it was a detriment to his career prior to retiring to the parapet for the final phase of his project. I also am comfortable taking a stronger stance — that the project itself was an act of memory preservation, that the essays were more than an endeavor in expressing what was on his mind, they were an exercise in displaying his vast learning and making use of his lifetime of reading.
No matter how many times he pretended to be a writer all about personal experiences and reflections, Montaigne’s text definitively refutes him. He wrestled with the books he read and put them into the context of his thoughts, sprinkling in some biography throughout, but never letting that first hand experience completely outshine the sages that came before him. Montaigne considered himself the utmost authority on himself — but only himself. He readily admitted to having little or no clue how others should live their own lives and showed through his reading that the great sages, ultimately, don’t have as much to say as we’d like to believe.
His essays reflect his reading, and an attempt to keep his memory of the thoughts those works elicited. He has left us not so much a story of his life as a narrative of his mind as it read, thought, processed, and made it all his own.
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