I’ve been thinking today about how it’s possible that I could have missed that long segment about beauty from Montaigne in On Physiognomy, so I went back and re-read the essay once more. And it immediately became apparent just how—this is one of the most insanely structured pieces of writing that I’ve ever come across, and I’ve noted that in my previous takes on it. But hidden among the many long diversions, there is a point to the essay.
The second paragraph gives a clue about his intention:
We perceive no charms that are not sharpened, puffed out, and inflated by artifice. Those which glide along naturally and simply easily escape a sight so gross as ours. They have a delicate and hidden beauty; we need a clear and well-purged sight to discover their secret light. Is not naturalness, according to us, akin to stupidity and a matter for reproach?
This entire essay is about beauty, just don’t be in a hurry to get there, because he has a lot of random story telling to get to first.
Montaigne isn’t focused on the kind of beauty that most cultures readily celebrate. He wishes to promote all forms of natural, simple beauty. He strongly dislikes ostentation. And he notes very early that the person we should admire most in history, Socrates, is also one we have the most certain knowledge about. What he admires most about Socrates is the way he taught his pupils to focus not on the ideas of others, but on their own thoughts and experiences:
We are each richer than we think, but we are trained to borrow and beg; we are taught to use the resources of others more than our own…. We need hardly any learning to live at ease. And Socrates teaches us that it is in us, and the way to find it and help ourselves with it.
But from here, Montaigne starts to riff a little. He likes to make fun of the scholastics and anyone who has stuffed their heads with knowledge but never had an original thought for themselves. He notes, for example, that authors very often understand that they have only one good argument, but they toss in several others just to give some safe space to that dangerous idea at the center of the writing. He then stops himself and says that he doesn’t want to say more on the subject because he does it himself.
He then digresses to the types of writings he most enjoys. He mentions Seneca and Plutarch, of course, because he always mentions them both. Then he notes that many people in the world get along just fine never having read Aristotle and Cato. And somehow this digression turns into a long rant about the horrors of the religious wars in France.
It’s some of Montaigne’s strongest anti-war writing, so it’s extremely valuable, but it comes out of nowhere in the text and it’s hard to tell exactly where it’s going. A lot of it sounds very much like La Boetie’s treatise on involuntary servitude. This diverts into a short bit about Plato and how his philosophy should be considered an extension of the Christian faith, and somehow he’s now back to the troubles in France, detailing how he was arrested in Paris on vague charges, treated horribly in prison, but eventually let go because he kept his cool amid all of the wild accusations.
Montaigne says it was all for the good, because it simply allowed him to work on himself more and build an even more tranquil mind. He says he doesn’t want to dwell on what happened because it’s simply typical of the terrible times he lived in and:
Many a man who could never have been famous by any other means will make himself famous by his misfortune.
And he has more misfortune to come, including a plague visited upon his estate, forcing him to flee for six months in a caravan. This gives him a greater appreciation for simple people who face impending death with graciousness. He goes on to appreciate how animals reach their end of days.
After having written essay after essay on the subject of death, Montaigne finally concludes that it’s a mistake to focus so much on misfortune. He even takes on Seneca for advising people to meditate on potential troubles — even shipwrecks — so they are not novices to misfortune. He notes another Seneca quote, that the possibility of suffering makes us as unhappy as suffering, as good reason to not think of the worst. He punctuates this section on death by noting:
If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.
If at this point you are wondering what any of this has to do with beauty, just keep in mind the second part of the proposition he set up, the greater power of simple, natural beauty. Better to know yourself than all kinds of extraneous facts. Better to have common wisdom of the world than to study how others prepared for death. Better to have an attitude that will help you survive dangerous situations where zealots dwell than to align yourself with a side and take up arms. This leads to one of the most important thoughts in his project:
If we have not known how to live, it is wrong to teach us how to die, and make the end inconsistent with the whole. If we have known how to live steadfastly and tranquilly, we shall know how to die in the same way.
From here, Montaigne gives us the longest quoted section in any part of his project, letting Socrates speak of the purpose of life from his trial. It goes on for seven long paragraphs, and Montaigne defends it all this way:
If anyone thinks that among the many examples of the sayings of Socrates that I might have chosen to serve my purpose I selected this one badly, and if he judges that this speech is elevated above common ideas—I chose it deliberately. For I judge otherwise, and hold that it is a speech which in its naturalness ranks far behind and below common opinions. In an unstudied and artless boldness and a childlike assurance it represents the pure and primary impression and ignorance of Nature.
He has much more to say about the greatness of Socrates, saying it’s much easier to talk like Aristotle and live like Caesar than to talk and live like Socrates, that his life was the extreme of both perfection and difficulty.
His next digression is about authors and how so many bad books are formed out of quotations from famous people who the authors themselves have never read. He also has this brutally funny takedown of people who don’t write their own works:
I have known books to be made out of things never either studied or understood, the author entrusting to various of his learned friends the search for this and that material to build it, contenting himself for his part with having planned the project and piled up by his industry this stack of unfamiliar provisions; at least the ink and the paper are his. That, in all conscience, is buying or borrowing a book, not making one. It is teaching men, not that you can make a book, but, what they might have been in doubt about, that you cannot make one.
As someone who’s made a living ghostwriting, I shouldn’t be permitted to laugh at that … and yet …
From here he gets back to Socrates again and digresses once more to his surprise that the man was so ugly considering the beauty of his soul. This brings me to yesterday’s essay, with the similar thoughts about La Boetie, and then his long, lovely section about the power of beauty.
Finally, then, he arrives at physiognomy. It starts with this thought:
The face is a weak guarantee; yet it deserves some consideration. And if I had to whip the wicked, I would do so more severely to those who belied and betrayed the promises that nature had implanted on their brows; I would punish malice more harshly when it was hidden under a kindly appearance. It seems as if some faces are lucky, others unlucky. And I think there is some art to distinguishing the kindly faces from the simple, the severe from the rough, the malicious from the gloomy, the disdainful from the melancholy, and other such adjacent qualities. There are beauties not only proud but bitter; others are sweet, and even beyond that, insipid. As for prognosticating future events from them, those are matters that I leave undecided.
This means that Montaigne is returning to his earlier thoughts on prognostication. He’s not buying into a mass theory about how future events are determining by a person’s face, but he is admitting that the embodied part of our consciousness that makes determinations at a glance is worth honoring. Some people have honest looks about them, and if we find them to have wronged us, often we feel doubly insulted. We feel drawn to certain people and make judgments based on looks. We shouldn’t chide ourselves for doing so:
As I have said elsewhere, I have very simply and crudely adopted for my own sake this ancient precept: that we cannot go wrong by following Nature, that the sovereign precept is to conform to her.
But if you think the essay has now reached its terminus, how naive you are. Montaigne has another long digression for us, one about how he was duped by soldiers into surrendering his estate because he trusted the first soldier who arrives and the cover story he provided about being under attack by an enemy. So he’s giving an example here of his instincts not being so great, that perhaps he’s too trusting of strangers. He admits this.
The story turns out well for Montaigne, however, because of his face:
He has often said since, for he was not afraid to tell this story, that my face and my frankness had disarmed him of his treachery. He remounted his horse, his men constantly keeping their eyes on him to see what signal he would give them, very astonished to see him go away and abandon his advantage.
And then he tells another story of a group of marauders hunting him down while he was on horseback, taking him captive, threatening him with a ransom, but then suddenly changing their minds and letting him go:
The true cause of so unusual an about-face and change of mind, without any apparent motivation, and of such a miraculous repentance, at such a time, in a premeditated and deliberate enterprise which had been made lawful by custom (for from the outset I openly confessed to them what party I belonged to and what road I was taking), I truly do not even now well know. The most conspicuous among them, who took off his mask and let me know his name, repeated to me then several times that I owed my deliverance to my face and the freedom and firmness of my speech, which made me undeserving of such a misadventure; and he asked me to assure him of similar treatment should the occasion arise.
This reminds me of an incident from my younger days. I was driving home from college from Columbia, Missouri to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and reached Lake of the Ozarks, a dreadful tourist trap that included an awful two lane bridge with some extremely frustrating slow traffic. Knowing that I had a very long drive ahead of me, I became impatient and passed a car on the bridge. I must have exceeded the speed limit while doing so, because a police car pulled me over.
I brashly got out of my car as soon as the police officer arrived and told him that I realize that I was speeding, but he was going to have to take me to jail, because I had no money to pay a fine. He seemed impressed by my blunt sincerity, checked my license to see that I had no outstanding warrants or traffic violations, and let me go with a warning not to speed the rest of my trip. I do not know if my face had anything to do with the outcome, but I feel pretty confident that the firmness of my speech rivaled that of Montaigne.
Montaigne closes out this essay by noting that he doesn’t hate anyone, and that likely shines through whenever he is in greatest danger. By not casting blame on anyone, he wins their trust and empathy.
So, does this incredible ramble hold together? Somehow it does. It’s a beautiful mess in many ways. But in a strange sense, it’s also deeply philosophical. Montaigne here lets go of the idea that you can teach someone how to die, but gives a clue about how to live … or perhaps even more importantly, how to survive your greatest risk and peril.
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