The overwhelming feeling I take away from this essay, after walking through the careful process of translation, is that human beings are constantly in states of mixed feelings. But these are not mitigating emotions about subjects, things that push us towards a less emotional, more moderate response. Rather, they are accentuating emotions. We feel so strongly about something that it can seem to us both horrifying and funny at the same time, for example.
What Montaigne seems to be arguing here is that we need to fight the temptation in these moment to shut down from the strong, hard to explain emotions and instead lean into the complexity. If there is more than one affect, there is likely more than one reason. Do your best to fully explain what is going on for you in those moments, pulling out your feelings honestly in a way that you can own them and, perhaps, find a way to reach an emotional conclusion that best puts them in context.
Montaigne does this through examples. Because he can identify people who told stories about these moments of high emotional conflict, he is able to identify this interesting phenomenon and make it seem completely human and normal. We should all strive to reach that level of clarity and complexity, so we can experience a multitude of moods at once and share our own complexity with others.
There is one other aspect to this essay worth pointing out: in many ways this is a description and defense of Montaigne’s method. Unlike what the essay has become today — something with a singular point of view and details to support it — Montaigne wrote about subjects in a way that defied easy answers. All of his essays are, in essence, mini debates featuring his own mixed feelings and thoughts, populated by voices and anecdotes that challenge each other — and sometimes contradict Montaigne directly.
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