Essays. Michel de Montaigne
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a ruler would have preserved the sense of awe around them by keeping silent.
On Vanity
Montaigne admits that the greatest vanity is writing about vanity. Yet here he is, with his self-indulgent scribblings. Each person contributes in some way to the decline of their era. Some through their vain actions foster more injustice or cruelty than there was before. Others (like he himself) simply add more silliness or laziness. He should be content with running his estate, like his father was, but he fancies himself as a man of state, travelling and meeting important people. The Delphic maxim is Know yourself, but when he has examined himself, all he has found is emptiness and foolishness.
On Experience
Montaigne's meditation on his life-long search for wisdom, paradoxically, comes down to being a point of consciousness within a body. For this reason he goes into some details on his diet, sleeping habits, illnesses, etc. Though he has done nothing of great distinction, he has had thousands of experiences – and so feels as qualified to comment on life as anyone. Using the analogy of his kidney disease, and his aversion to medicine, he argues that life is to be faced up to, not avoided. In doing so we might find some (very modest) self-knowledge or wisdom.
ABOUT PHILIPPE DESAN
Philippe Desan is the Howard L. Willett Professor Emeritus of History of Culture at the University of Chicago. He specializes in the history of ideas in the Renaissance and more particularly in Montaigne. Books include the definitive biography, Montaigne. A Life (Princeton University Press, 2018) as well as Montaigne: penser le social (Odile Jacob, 2018) and the Oxford Handbook of Montaigne (Oxford University Press, 2016). Editor-in-chief of Montaigne Studies since 1988, he received the Grand Prize from the French Academy in 2015 for his scientific work.
ABOUT TOM BUTLER-BOWDON
Tom Butler-Bowdon is the author of the bestselling 50 Classics series, which brings the ideas of important books to a wider audience. Titles include 50 Philosophy Classics, 50 Psychology Classics, 50 Politics Classics, 50 Self-Help Classics and 50 Economics Classics.
As series editor for the Capstone Classics series, Tom has written Introductions to Plato's The Republic, Machiavelli's The Prince, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Lao Tzu's Tao TeChing, and Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.
Tom is a graduate of the London School of Economics and the University of Sydney.
TO THE READER
THIS, reader, is a book without guile. It tells you, at the very outset, that I had no other end in putting it together but what was domestic and private. I had no regard therein either to your service or my glory; my powers are equal to no such design. It was intended for the particular use of my relations and friends, in order that, when they have lost me, which they must soon do, they may here find some traces of my quality and humour, and may thereby nourish a more entire and lively recollection of me. Had I proposed to court the favour of the world, I had set myself out in borrowed beauties; but it was my wish to be seen in my simple, natural, and ordinary garb, without study or artifice, for it was myself I had to paint. My defects will appear to the life, in all their native form, as far as consists with respect to the public. Had I been born among those nations who, it is said, still live in the pleasant liberty of the Jaw of nature, I assure you I should readily have depicted myself at full length and quite naked. Thus, reader, I am myself the subject of my book; it is not worth your while to take up your time longer with such a frivolous matter; so fare thee well.
MONTAIGNE, 1st March, 1580
8 ON IDLENESS
As we see some grounds that have long lain idle and untilled, when grown rich and fertile by rest, to abound with and spend their virtue in the product of innumerable sorts of weeds and wild herbs that are unprofitable, and that to make them perform their true office, we are to cultivate and prepare them for such seeds as are proper for our service; and as we see women that, without knowledge of man, do sometimes of themselves bring forth inanimate and formless lumps of flesh, but that to cause a natural and perfect generation they are to be husbanded with another kind of seed: even so it is with minds, which if not applied to some certain study that may fix and restrain them, run into a thousand extravagances, eternally roving here and there in the vague expanse of the imagination:
Sicut aqua tremulum labris ubi lumen ahenis,
Sole repercussum, aut radiantis imagine lunae,
Omnia pervolitat late loca; jamque sub auras
Erigitur, summique ferit laquearia tecti.
[As when in brazen vats of water the trembling beams of light, reflected from the sun, or from the image of the radiant moon, swiftly float over every place around, and now are darted up on high, and strike the ceilings of the upmost roof.
—Aeneid, viii. 22.]
in which wild agitation there is no folly, nor idle fancy they do not light upon:
Velut aegri somnia, vanae
Finguntur species.
[As a sick man's dreams, creating vain phantasms.
—Horace, Ars Poetica, 7.]
The soul that has no established aim loses itself, for, as it is said:
Quisquis ubique habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat.
[He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere.
—Martial, vii. 73.]
When I lately retired to my own house, with a resolution, as much as possibly I could, to avoid all manner of concern in affairs, and to spend in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live, I fancied I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth do, as being by time become more settled and mature; but I find –
Variam semper dant otia mentem.
[Leisure ever creates varied thought.
—Lucan, Pharsalia, iv. 704]
that, quite contrary, it is like a horse that has broke from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to, and creates me so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself.
9 ON LIARS
There is not a man living whom it would so little become to speak from memory as myself, for I have scarcely any at all, and do not think that the world has another so marvellously treacherous as mine. My other faculties are all sufficiently ordinary and mean; but in this I think myself very rare and singular, and deserving to be thought famous. Besides the natural inconvenience I suffer by it (for, certes, the necessary use of memory considered, Plato had reason when he called it a great and powerful goddess), in my country, when they would say a man has no sense, they say, such an one has no memory; and when I complain of the defect of mine, they do not believe me, and reprove me, as though I accused myself for a fool: not discerning the