There is no author with whom I feel greater kinship than with Michel de Montaigne and there's none with whom I've passed more hours and days, except for Shakespeare. For many years, Montaigne's Essais has been my bedside companion, first in the old Everyman Library edition as translated by John Florio, a book which I early discovered among my father's small collection, and latterly in the 1958 version by Donald Frame. Of the two writers, Shakespeare is the greater, but he is unknowable and certainly not a comrade. "Negative capability" -- and all that. Shakespeare, the human being, lies hidden behind a profusion of characters and borrowed stories. Sometimes I think I can catch a glimpse of the man himself in recurring images or in a repeated motif, but how can I be sure? It's all guesswork and supposition. Shakespeare is an auctor absconditus. He can be admired, even revered, but he's too mysterious ever to be a pal. Montaigne, on the other hand, is insistently present. He talks directly to me, guy to guy, teaches me, argues with me. Even though there's a universe of differences between me and this astonishingly erudite sixteenth-century French Catholic skeptic, I feel that we are good friends.
Why the kinship? Montaigne is so various, so mutable, so inconsistent, that he's difficult to define, but nevertheless exhibits traits with which I l am in deep sympathy. Of all the important thinkers, he's the least systematic -- which is a benefit, at least for me. I can't make heads or tails of his near-contemporaries Spinoza or Descartes because both are too orderly and logical for my unsubtle head. But Montaigne works differently -- he advances an idea, modifies it, retracts it, illustrates it with a dozen anecdotes, and then announces that he can't come to a definitive conclusion -- which is the way my mind works, although obviously at a much lower order. And then Montaigne's brain is a hodgepodge, a gallimaufry of formidable learning strewn in heaps, like the last scene of Citizen Kane. So is mine, although it's a cramped attic compared to Montaigne's warehouse. And of course, Montaigne writes almost exclusively about himself, as I do in these fragmentary blague entries.
Moreover, we both seem to be at least in part writing for the same purpose. I compose these essaylets for what I conceive of, pretentiously, as dynastic reasons. Because I I so much wish that I had some artifacts or writing of my grandparents or great-grandparents, who left nothing behind, no scrap remaining, I want my descendants to have something of mine. Montaigne agrees: "What a satisfaction it would be to me to hear someone tell me of the habits, the face, the expression, the favorite remarks, and the fortunes of my ancestors. How attentive I would be. Truly it would spring from a bad nature to be scornful of even the portraits of our friends and predecessors, the form of their clothes and their armor." [Montaigne came from a family with a strong military tradition, unlike mine, which is epitomized by grandfather's desertion from the Russian army.] "I keep their handwriting, their seal, the breviary and a peculiar sword that they used, and I have not banished from my study some long sticks that my father ordinarily carried in his hand." I have no "sticks," but as I sit here pecking at the word processor, I see out of the corner of my eye my father's library ladder, used for retrieving just the right law book.
Montaigne is not done with the topic. He continues by exploring an idea about which I also have ruminated. For whom do I devote these hours, if not for myself? He is eloquent upon the subject.
"If no one reads me, have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts. In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book that my book has made me -- a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life.... Have I wasted my time by taking stock of myself so continually, so carefully. For those who go over themselves only in their minds and occasionally in speech do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does a man who makes that his study, his work, and his trade, who binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faults, with all his strengths."
I wish I could say that I'm as honest as Montaigne; I'm not. I recognize that the "me" that appears here is to some degree different from the me that is me. Although I do not lie about myself, I conceal some of my most flagrant deficiencies. Nor do I blow my own small trumpet. As a result, the portrait that has emerged is solider and also less troubled than the true-to-life person. Don't say I didn't give you notice, unwary descendants.
I once tried to outline an essay by Montaigne to make it easier for my wife, a French student, to understand, but the outline went right off the page.
Posted by: Don Z. Block | October 25, 2020 at 08:13 AM