This morning I’m feeling a bit shy about writing anything, because I discovered that a blog post I wrote late last week purely to micro target an audience actually auto posted to my more mainstream blog and I hadn’t gone to that blog in several days, so I didn’t realize it. I’m just hoping no one actually read it. There was nothing harsh about this particular blog post (there was another edgier one I had up very briefly that I vaporized before Authory’s robots had time to repost it, thank God) it just felt a little too specific for my comfort. Sigh … so much of my life would be simpler if I had conversations with people instead of sending smoke signals.
Which returns me to an issue I wrote about several years ago, which is a less prominent part of Montaigne’s message in his final essay “On Experience.”
Once you have dedicated yourself to Montaigne’s approach, you have embraced his solitude and are playfully alive in his examination of personal folly, you inevitably reach a fork in the road. Do you express yourself in moderation or do you take an edgier approach? For modern writers, that’s not even a serious question. There is no audience for moderation. There aren’t votes for it either, a related but tangential matter.
It is unsurprising where Montaigne lands on this matter, in On Experience:
Popular opinion is wrong: it is much easier to go along the sides, where the outer edge serves as a limit and a guide, than by the middle way, wide and open, and to go by art than by nature; but it is also much less noble and less commendable. Greatness of soul is not so much pressing upward and forward as knowing how to set oneself in order and circumscribe oneself. It regards as great whatever is adequate, and shows its elevation by liking moderate things better than eminent ones. There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; Band the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.
Moderation certainly feels better in retrospect, that’s for sure. I’ve never erased a story that stuck to the middle path. Sometimes I have a tug to rediscover some of my edgier material and I will search out past versions. When I finally come across them, I become so embarrassed most of the time that I take whatever means are necessary to permanently destroy the text. This inevitably bothers me when I’ve forgotten exactly what I wrote and I seek it out again.
This piece, for example, is an adaptation of an essay from 2020 that went into some very personal detail about a range of subjects. I imagine I have a mood where I feel it’s necessary to express material like that, but if I ever visualize anyone I know reading it, I question why I’d ever let that mood have it’s way.
But as I alluded to at the top, part of the impulse is borne by frustration — that I dwell too much in silence, that the things I say fall on deaf ears. The kind of solitude I inhabit is not a condition of actual isolation, I have many social connections. So all of this probably makes sense to no one.
Which is why I feel compelled to start the reveal-embarrassment-shame-isolation-reveal cycle anew. That’s where my edges come from, not from a desire to follow public opinion.
As an audio accompaniment, I offer this song, which feels very Montaigne inspired. It matches my mood, even if the lyrics have nothing to do with the topic.