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Ep 78 - The Essays of Montaigne
01:39:42
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Narrator
The year is 1570 and we're in a forest on the outskirts of Bordeaux, in a France torn apart by violent and ceaseless religious civil war. Michel de Montaigne, a high ranking legal counsellor of the Parlement and advisor to the Royal court, a man who is rightly known today as the father of the personal essay. Though indeed I would go one further, and I would call this great Renaissance writer the father of modern thought and the close friend of all who read him. Montaigne, at the age of 37, has just been violently thrown 12ft from his horse. One of his servants had been showing off behind him and his powerful steed got away from him and he collided full pelt like a colossus into the back of Montaigne, who is now torn and cut and bleeding profusely. And judging from all outward appearances, he is dead. Not the best end to a life that up to this point had already been filled with so much death, so much pain and trauma. Montaigne's 30s were quite the tragic pageant. He had already suffered through the death of five of his six children. He had suffered through the death of his brother. He had lost his best friend, who was very much like a brother. And more recently, in the year before the horse riding accident, Montaigne had suffered the death of his father. And that great loss had ushered in a new cluster of stressful responsibilities as he was now tasked with managing the family estate. Each death had compounded Montaigne's melancholy and increased his anxiety. And he found that he himself, being so scared of death, was no longer truly living. But though it looks bad for Montaigne, sprawled out on the floor, this is not the end of his life. In fact, this is just the beginning. Montaigne had completely lost consciousness after the collision, but after about two hours, his men realized that he was still alive. As he began to make violent movements, he was clawing at his clothes and he was throwing up bucketfuls of blood. He may have been alive, but perhaps it would have been better that he had died, given the extraordinary pain he was clearly in. Except he wasn't in pain. It would take several days for Montaigne to return to consciousness and to remember what had happened. But he would recall later that his soul had gone elsewhere and his body had taken over. But whilst all of this was happening, he had actually been experiencing a peaceful, happy floating sensation. And this made him realize that what often looks like intense pain and suffering to others may well be incredibly peaceful to the person undergoing it. He said that returning to Life over the next couple of days felt like returning from the other world. And having been so near to dying, his relationship with death changed. He ceased to fear his own demise and he came to the profound realisation that his business and his art was to live his life to the full. Montaigne would progress through three distinct attitudinal phases in regards to death that would ultimately help him and now help us to live. One year after the near fatal but life changing accident, Montaigne retired from his career in the Bordeaux parlement, which he had long grown tired of. He'd spent his adult life working his way up through provincial town magistrates courts, becoming an expert in the court system and developing a rigorous knowledge of the law. And what might sound like an exciting life was actually a dire combination of mundanity and danger. On the day to day level. Montaigne was trapped in the world of petty, pedantic and incompetent bureaucrats. This gave him a privileged but exasperating glimpse into the flaws of the justice system. And how could it not be that the justice system is flawed when the system was made by man and man is fallible? Montaigne saw that many laws were flawed and misapplied and lawyers were error prone and judges frequently made mistakes when they allowed their personal lives to intrude into their work. A judge being tired, hungry or hungover would often have tangible effects on the lives of real people. Not only were many laws ill thought out, but many new ones coming in were repressive. The France of Montaigne's day was not a safe place to be and being flung from one's horse would not have been the primary concern on anyone's mind. When riding through the countryside, one would have been much more worried about being accosted by armed men. Indeed, many wouldn't have felt safe if their homes and worries about violent break ins and kidnappings were incredibly valid. A decade and a half before Montaigne was born, Martin Luther nailed his famous treatise to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, which ignited the flame of the Reformation. The rebellion against the Holy Roman Church, which would then see most of Europe fall into one of two camps. Those who were loyal to the church or those who backed Luther's dissent. The ideolog division that tore through many Western nations was that of Protestant versus Catholic and France was absolutely no exception. Now the very first court that Montaigne knew was that of Henri d'Eu Henry II, whose wife Catherine de Medici was actually wielding a lot of the power Henry reigned over an incredibly tumultuous France. And for much of Montaigne's adult life, from the age of 29 until his death at the age of 59, all he knew of his nation was ceaseless, bloody civil war. Henry II would introduce tough heresy laws and a new chamber in the Parlement dedicated to religious crimes, which led to the violent persecution of the Protestants, mainly the Calvinist group of the Huguenots. This was a time of economic crisis from massive inflation and the aftermath of war with Italy that was compounded with discontent and religious fervour and ideological schism. After Henry II died, three young sons in quick succession succeeded to the throne. With Catherine de Medici really running things, the landscape was one of constant fighting, uprising and massacres, which were referred to as the Troubles. In just four decades, between 2 and 4 million people died from violence, famine or disease directly caused by conflict. At the height of his career in the Bordeaux Parlement, Montaigne was sick of it all. He was weary of public service, weary of the country and weary of his fellow men. Though of a Catholic upbringing, Montaigne saw both sides as being as bad as each other. All are alike in using religion for their violent and ambitious schemes, he would say, so like each other in managing their affairs with excess and injustice, that they make you doub. Whether they really do hold different opinions, could you find behaviour more like, more closely identical? Even coming from the same teaching in the same school, it's evident to me that we only willingly carry out those religious duties which flatter our passions. Christians, Montaigne wrote, excel at hating enemies. Montaigne personally had great religious conviction, but statements like this would lead to many branding him as an anti Christian writer. Montaigne would argue that the hateful ones killing each other over differences in dogma in his country were hardly being Christian, however. Zeal never makes anyone go flying towards goodness, kindness or temperance, he writes. Our religion was made to root out vices. Now it cloaks them, nurses them, stimulates them. Montaigne wanted nothing to do with all of that, but being in Bordeaux placed him at the center of a complex community. The city itself was Catholic, but Protestant territories surrounded it and there was a significant and disaffected Protestant minority within it. After his close brush with death, one can understand why he would take the decision to call it a day for his public life. Not that he ever could fully leave it, as he would have the duties of mayor thrust upon him, whether he liked it or not. For two whole terms in his 40s, Montaigne quit his job at 37, and at the age of 38, he made the conscious decision to start his life over. And he followed the advice of the ancient philosophers who believed that after our affairs of state, after our service has been done, we should strive after wisdom with leisure, and we should strive after tranquility of mind. So you've got the part of your life that is business negotium, and then you have the leisured, idle part, the otium, the period of enjoyable reflection, reflection for its own sake, learning for its own sake. And this was a period of time that was supposed to reward your hard work. We have lived quite enough for others, Montaigne would say, let us live at least this tail end of life for ourselves. Montaigne withdrew to one of the towers of his family chateau. His family were winemakers, and the same chateau still produces wine to this day. He withdrew to his. There were two towers. His wife had one and then he kitted out another just the way he liked it. He turned it into a chamber of marvels and decorated it with all sorts of treasures and items from abroad designed to stimulate the imagination and the intellect. And there was ambulatory room so he could walk around whilst thinking. And most importantly of all, there was his library of a thousand volumes. Montaigne, meditating in his essay on Solitude, would say that we should all set up for ourselves a room at the back of the shop. That's how he phrased it, which perhaps puts us in mind of Virginia Woolf's assertion that a woman needs two things to write money and a room of one's own. We should all have a place where we can detach and spend time in company with ourselves. And solitude should not be a lonely condition. It's restorative because we are in company. We're in company with our soul. And when we are reading, when we read the great writings who have gone before us, we are in their company too. So we're never truly alone. Montaigne would say that it's not enough to withdraw from the mob, but we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession. He said we shouldn't become so attached to anything or anyone, be it one's property, one's partner, one's children. We shouldn't become so attached that our happiness depends depends on them. And so having a place to call our own is very important, because we can practice talking and laughing as though everything we are attached to did not exist. And so should the occasion arise when we do lose them, it won't be a new experience to do without them. This retreat into leisured life sounds great, but as many who have faced retirement discovery, in actuality, it turned into a nightmare for Montaigne, who, like Dante, like Don Quixote, found himself in the grips of a midlife existential crisis. The idleness tortured him and led to significant melancholy. The meaning of the word melancholy today is that of one being a bit blue, we're a little bit glum, I'm feeling melancholy. But melancholy back then in Montaigne's day, meant serious depression. Indeed, one of the paradigms of the world during the Renaissance was that of the four humors theory. It was believed that personality was governed by humour and different kinds of bile. And if one kind of bile was in excess, it would cause disruptions and disorders to our mood and behaviour. One can see different Shakespeare characters by virtue of their humour. King Lear, for example, is of a choleric humour, and that comes from an excess of yellow bile. Hamlet is of a melancholy humour which was thought to arise from an excess of black bile. And Montaigne was suffering from that too. And that really worried him. The more melancholy he became, the more worried he became, because he felt that that was rather out of character for him. He was typically of an easygoing, jovial nature. But what I think happened is that when he had a period without distraction, a lot of the pain and trauma he had experienced over the. But not properly addressed or processed or dealt with, all of that had built up and then slammed into him, just like that horse had slammed into him. And it made him manic, disoriented and depressed. He realized that he could no longer flee from himself. And determined to overcome the mental monstrosities harassing him, he decided that he was going to write everything down, everything about him, his thoughts on everything. He was going to probe into the deepest recesses of his mind and show everything, warts and all. He said he wanted to keep a record of his thoughts, hoping in time to make his mind ashamed of itself. What he found is that his writing actually purged the melancholy. There was a great catharsis as Montaigne underwent talk or self talk therapy, hundreds of years before such a thing was even feasible. Montaigne, like the other two writers who make up the three horsemen of Renaissance literature, Shakespeare and Cervantes, learnt to talk and hear himself talk, and thus change through paying attention to himself as though the self was now another. And reading him can do the very same thing for us. Too. And in an age when distinguished men wrote discourses, Montaigne put pen to paper and wrote essays. To assay something means to try something, it means to attempt something. Essay means attempt, and that's what each and every one of his essays is. He tries different things on for size, and he readily admits that sometimes he will fail. He will overstretch himself, he will find the limits of his judgment and intellect, and he will need to fall back into ignorance, his default state. And that is absolutely okay. And this is a great mindset to have. Whenever you write an essay for yourself, it does not need to be perfect. You're just trying things out. You're picking a topic, you're exploring, you're having some fun, you're seeing where it takes you, you're seeing what you can do. You do not need to do it perfectly. You just need to try. And in an age of instruction, where literature was overly didactic and moralistic, Montaigne shunned this. He rejected this, and consequently he ended up teaching us more than anybody. In an age where men of learning praised rhetoric, memory and highfaluting language, Montaigne wrote swift, like a horse at a gallop. And he dispensed with written etiquette and gloss and niceties. He scorned words, words, words, as the Prince of Denmark would say. And we might think that Shakespeare's Hamlet took his cues from Montaigne, for the Bard was a deep reader of his essays. Montaigne favoured matter, substance over style, and whenever he heard some, someone lingering over the language of his essays, he wished that they would hold their peace, because whilst they might have thought they were extolling the words, what they were actually doing was devaluing the meaning. I may be wrong, Montaigne writes in a fantastic essay called Reflections upon Cicero. But there are not many writers who put more matter in your graphics than I do. We are not supposed to take his roughshod manner of expression, which is a rather unfair charge that he brings against himself, as his work is often as poetic as it is profound. But we're not supposed to take his style or his lack of attention to style as the substance. And in fact, we should observe that he writes like this because he trusts us. The rough style is a compliment. Montaigne said that he presents himself meager to those he loves and is most intimate with, and he only dresses his words up for those he does not respect. Montaigne was so resistant to style for style's sake that even thinking about the correct protocol of writing would trip him up and ultimately make him decide not to bother writing at all. Judge not the man by his finery, he says, but by his self. Do you like the man or the britches he wears? It wasn't just the niceties and conventions of writing that he rejected. He also rejected illogical social conventions too. In a really fantastic short essay called Ceremonial at the Meeting of Kings, he speaks of how one nobleman was told that he would soon receive a royal visit at home. Now, the hierarchy of the time meant that the person in the lower, more subservient position has to wait for the higher person. So if a king or a queen was going to visit you, you had to wait around all day, you had to stay at home. Now, this nobleman wanted to go out from his house, he didn't want to stay in all day, and he thought, I'll just go and meet them. Why not? This was a big social faux pas, but Montaigne said there was absolutely nothing wrong with this. And he said, I often neglect these vain obligations in my home. I have to cut out all formalities. Does anyone take offence? What are of it? It is better that I offend him once than myself all the time. That would amount to servitude for life. What is the use in fleeing from the slavery of the court if we then go and drag it back to our lairs? So Montaigne wrote at a gallop, in a reverie, and he was happy and eager to take absolutely anything and everything as his topic. No topic is so vain that it does not deserve a place in this confused medley of mine. He said, one the most exciting things about reading Montaigne really is just how varied the topic matter is. He would write profound art criticism. He would dissect lines from Virgil, he would review the techniques of Plutarch, his favorite historian, and the philosophy of Seneca. He would explore the classical virtues. He'd write about moderation, constancy, truthfulness, courage. He would write about kings and queens, emperors, princes, great generals. He would write about war and peace, foreign climes, customs. He would explore the deepest and most pressing theological questions. He would write about how to govern yourself, your inner life, how to keep a good inner life, how to live a good life. He would write about how to remove the fear of death, how to be a good conversationalist and how to be a good friend, how to control your temper, how to read and how to enjoy the little pleasures in life. But he would also write about ostensibly more frivolous things. He would write about different smells that he liked. He has an essence on thumbs. He would write about impotence and how to overcome it. Indeed, he would say, the genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right. What have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious, orderly conversation? Montaigne would write about bodily functions like passing gas. He would write about the parts of the body that polite society would rather pretend did not exist. But no matter what he was writing about, whether the theme was grand or small, dignified or embarrassing, mundane or profound, he was always ultimately writing about himself and therefore all of us. The universal is in the individual. And by describing the minutia of what makes him unique over the course of 107 essays, we see ourselves as though in a mirror. If you tell your story, story truly, you tell mankind's story. And if you look to the dedicatory letter at the beginning of Montaigne's essays, you will find something revolutionary and astonishingly unconventional. Now, it was usual to have dedicatory notes at the beginning of books. You would write a note to a patron, a royal patron, typically, and the note would be fawning and sycophantic. But here we see Montaigne speaks directly to us, to the reader, across time and space. And he speaks in a very intimate and self deprecating manner that really sets the tone for what's to come. And it's absolutely true that if you want to create a sense of trust and intimacy with another, what you need to do is reveal private, raw and personal details about yourself, reveal a weakness or a flaw. This doesn't make people think less of you, it actually does the opposite. People will be endeared to you if you show your flaws. We begin the essays with a direct warning to the reader that says that this book was designed to be private. It was for his friends and kinsmen, and it was designed to detail some traits of his character and his humors so that they could know him better, so that they could keep their knowledge of him more alive. But here's the revolutionary part. He's says here I want to be seen in my simple, natural, everyday fashion, without striving or artifice, for it is my own self that I am painting here. You will read of the defects as far as social custom allows. And he assures us that were we living among the people who live under the sweet liberty of nature's primal laws, I can assure you, he says, that I would most willingly have portrayed myself whole and wholly naked. Montaigne is writing Hundreds of years before Walt Whitman. And he is saying what Whitman would say in his poetry. I am stripping myself bare. I'm laying everything out, contradictions and multitudes and all. I myself am the subject of my book, he says, and it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Montaigne was incredibly well read, but he was wise enough to know how little he truly knew, except his protestations and warnings. For us not to read him, I think, only endear us to him all the more. We are in the company of one who does not take his life too seriously. Elsewhere he refers to his essays as the droppings of an old mind, sometimes hard, sometimes squat, but always ill digested. He would also, despite the tone of self deprecation, assert that as he has offered himself to himself as the theme and subject matter, it is the only book of its kind in the world. I am all on display, he says. It is not what I do that I write of, but of me, of what I am. And he frequently refers to his essays as being one with him. By portraying myself for others, I have portrayed my own self within me in clearer colours than I possessed at first. I have not made my book any more than it has made me. And this book is of one substance, with its author proper to me and a limb of my life. And why take yourself as the subject of your book? The Delphic oracle said, know thyself. And Montaigne said that this was the most important thing for us to learn. But why? Well, because what else, or who else is there? Montaigne would say, I only exist at home chez moy. I only exist at home in myself and that other life. The other me, the public me, is only the vanity of imagined opinion. In another tremendous essay called On Presumption, which pairs beautifully with the one preceding it on Glory, he writes, all men gaze ahead at what is confronting them. I turn my gaze inward, planting it there and keeping it there. Everybody looks before himself. I look inside myself. I am concerned with no one but me. Without ceasing, I reflect on myself. I watch myself savor myself. I turn round and round in myself. For Montaigne, being himself meant being at home, and that meant attaining presence. We are never at home, he writes. We are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope impel us towards the future. They rob us of feelings and concern for what now is in order to spend time over what will be, even when we ourselves shall be no more. In choosing himself as subject, he wished to unshackle himself from the burden of living only in the future and never in the now. Getting to know yourself means going unapologetically into the core of your being. This means you own your flaws because they are yours, you own your contradictions and you own your mistakes. And Montaigne certainly had no intention of hiding his personal futilities or hiding where he might have been wrong. Even if he changes his own opinion in time, and he does, he readily accepts it. And he says that he welcomes anybody to call him ignorant, to call him wrong. My goodness, I say it myself. He says it's very, very hard to get one over on Montaigne because he's always out ahead of us, he's always got there before we have. And anything we can say about him he has already said himself. These are my humours, he writes my opinions. I give them as things which I believe, not as things to be believed. My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me. Part of the process of knowing yourself involves the great gift of trusting yourself, what Emerson would call self reliance. In his essay on Prognostications, Montaigne mused on the concept of the diamond, the demon, the genius, the guardian spirit, the muse. And he saw this as actually the gut instinct of one who had committed to excellence and moral virtue, one who had committed himself to wisdom. And so that's why Socrates in an instant could offer a profound thought without long rational arguments. Montaigne believed that everyone can sense in themselves some ghost of such agitations, of a prompt, vehement, fortuitous opinion, bold and undigested opinions that over the course of our day to day life we clamp down on. We suppress these opinions to our detriment. We fail to trust ourselves. But Montaigne believed that divine inspiration was actually the gut response of someone who was well read, who practiced living virtuously and knew themselves. You can trust your gut instinct if you dedicate yourself to living well. Now, self trust aside, which is a great thing to flex and develop and train, this constant preoccupation with oneself might sound rather onanistic, navel gazing and even narcissistic. But knowing oneself is actually one of the greatest ways to know other people. Do we not always see through our eyes? There aren't any other eyes we can see through. This great world of ours, Montaigne writes, is the looking glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves. From the right slant we are all cramped and confined inside ourselves. We can See no further than the end of our nose. Interpersonal communication is intrapersonal communication and vice versa. And Montaigne was great with people, and you can tell why when you read through his works. He's charming, but not in a contrived way. He's humorous and witty. He's profound and thought provoking. And yes, he takes the matter of living seriously, but ultimately he doesn't take much that seriously. Knowing himself intimately meant that Montaigne could make so many allowances for other people. In a great essay on the art of conversation, he writes that stupidity is a bad quality, but to be unable to put up up with it, to be vexed and ground down by it, as happens to me, is another hardly worse in its unmannerliness than stupidity. And he says, I wish to condemn that in myself. He said, he welcomed truth. He welcomed contradictions. He welcomed others to oppose his thoughts. Why? Because my thought so often contradicts and condemns itself that it is all one to me if someone else does so. And he would say, I feel far prouder of the victory I win over myself when I make myself give way beneath my adversary's powers of reason in the heat of battle than I ever feel gratified by the victory I win over him through his weakness in talking to other people. Do not seek to win the argument, to win the debate. It's a shallow, hollow victory. Doesn't feel that good. He says, basically, I feel much better when I can accept another person's point of view. I can see another person's point of view. I feel really proud when I say, do you know what? I think you're right there. I can see where you're coming from. I concede it to you. That is something to be more proud of. Why? Because it's more difficult. The easy course of action is to nail ourselves to one opinion and stay stubborn in our beliefs. But the world is different according to who sees it, who contemplates it. So let us share in the experience. Let us give way to one another. Let us accept one another. The reason why Montaigne was so good with others was because he was so good with himself. He accepted himself. His essays exude kindness in intimacy and friendliness, and many consider him to be almost a philosopher. Nietzsche certainly thought that everything one needed to know about the human condition could be found in his essays. But Montaigne himself says that he was only an accidental philosopher. I love that because he records everything. He's bound to stumble into some profound truths here and there. But this is not Rigorous logical deduction. Now, I think he is a philosopher, it doesn't matter if it's accidental or not. But I also see him as a psychologist, a fantastic proto psychologist in the midst of bloody civil war. To give an example of how Montaigne knew others so well, Montaigne judged that it was actually safest to keep his home free of barricades. He didn't want armed guards all over the place, he didn't want really strong and overt defences and he left his door open, always open. He believed that defence provokes offence, it's asking for an attack. It's like saying, hey, there's something behind this door that's worth your trouble. And he also thought that in a civil war one's own manservant can turn against you, so what's the point anyway? Now this probably doesn't sound like the best advice, but it did work for Montaigne. For 30 whole years he left his door open to everybody. The reverse psychology worked. Now of course, that's not to say he never came up against trouble because he does relate some rather harrowing encounters in his essays. But Montaigne's way of interacting with people, how he dealt with people, would prove to be life saving on a number of occasions. He relates one experience in which an armed man came up to his house fresh from the heat of nearby battle. He was terrified and exhausted and he said that his enemy was hot on his heels. Montaigne actually knew this man. He was a neighbour of his and he also knew the man he said he was quarrelling with. He let him into his house but then five more armed men turned up wanting to be let in too, let in for refreshment and respite. Then more men and more men turned up until he had more than 30 armed men in his home and he thought, oh great, now I see what's happening. But it was too late. He couldn't very well usher them out now and get them to leave because they outnumbered him and they were now going to do what they were going to do. And such behaviour also would not accord with the Montaigne who trustingly let these men in in the first place. That would be like telling them, oh no, I have a reason to fear you now. And so if instead he treated them sincerely, frankly, kindly, and he held himself with great composure and great innocence and he could tell that the men were waiting for the signal from the leader to take the house and rob Montaigne and possibly hurt him too. But the leader never gave the signal and they ultimately decided to just go peacefully on their way. Instead. That man later would tell Montaigne that his counter countenance and his frank behavior wrenched the treachery from them. They couldn't bring themselves to do it. On another occasion, Montaigne was travelling during the heights of religious conflict across difficult terrain and four groups of Huguenot horsemen had set out to trap him. He was charged by masked gentlemen and a wave of bowmen. He was captured and dragged off into a thicket and he had all his possessions ran, ransacked and seized. And they wanted to ransom him for an absurdly high price. And Montaigne says that they clearly didn't know who he was. They didn't know much about him because whilst it's true that he had once stored up money, whilst that was once true, he had realised that his relationship with money was causing him anxiety and prohibiting him from living. And so he decided to have a much more laissez faire approach to it. And that meant he didn't have much. An argument started among the men about whether or not they should let him live. So his life was on the line. Montaigne held to the initial terms of his surrender, meaning that they could have what they had just grabbed off of him, but he would not be meeting their ransom. After several hours a change came over the men and the leader returned all of Montaigne's belongings and gently bid him on his his way. Montaigne was told that he owed his liberation to his countenance again and his firmness of speech which made the men realize that he was unworthy of such misfortune. They could read his innocence, his sincerity, his frankness and admirable self possession in his eyes. He looked them in the eyes and they saw his humanity. And that made them ashamed of themselves. They, they realized they were dealing with a real person, a human, a kinsman. And that saved him again. Montaigne was great with people because he knew himself. And knowing your own eccentricities and unique traits gives you a great appreciation for the differences of other people. We share some core key commonalities, but there are thousands of different ways of living and Montaigne celebrates that in his work. So his, his essays are pieces of him. They're an organic extension of the man himself. And piece by piece, essay by essay, we get to know Montaigne the man in all his glorious and self admitted contradictions. What is beautiful about reading his essays is that you can see the evolution of Montaigne, the man, the thinker and the writer. Not only in real time as the book progresses. But you can see at least, least three distinct selves from very different times in his life, post near death experience simultaneously. Now, when you begin the essays, you'll see that they start off like little vignettes. They are short, a couple of pages max, maybe a page here and there. These are little attempts, little tries. And he had designed his book to be divided initially into two books. And the first book was like his apprenticeship and indeed the very last word of the final essay in book one, apprenticeship. But he saw the work evolve over the years and it turned into three books. And when you graduate to that third book, you will see that you're graduating to a Montaigne, who is a higher version of himself. It's a very, very wise portion of the book. But when you start reading his essays, you can see that he originally designed it to be something of a commonplace book, a quarry to preserve his favourite quotations and ideas, ideas from the writers who, though long dead, had become his dear friends. And it's very interesting to think about Montaigne's attitude to quotations. He quotes so many great writers. He really makes us want to go back to Plutarch and explore him, to explore Seneca, to explore all of these great writers. He would say, I only quote others, the better to quote myself. That's a good mindset. When you quote another person, do not take their words wholesale. Do not lean on their wisdom and borrow another man's clothing. Use them because you've lived those words yourself and they are the most appropriate. Now, what's interesting, because he used the work initially as a commonplace book, what he started to do was he would mix the words of ancient philosophers among his own with many quotations. He wouldn't directly attribute who said them, who wrote them. He would mix them in with the paragraphs that he was writing. He would paraphrase. Why was he doing this? Because Montaigne was something of a troll, a Renaissance European troll. He wanted his critics to attack him without realizing they were actually taking the words of Seneca or Plutarch apart, which they otherwise wouldn't have done if they knew that a certain line was from Seneca, they wouldn't attack it. But when they think it's Montaigne, well, maybe it's fair game. So that was kind of like an intelligence test for his critics. But he used quotations as well to make him better. He said that in using these strong maxims and ideas from great writers, he was undertaking to march shoulder to shoulder with giants and such marching would develop A strong backbone. So the work, which was originally designed to be split into just two books, developed in 23. And you can see that as you read through his essays, they become richer, they become more robust, they start offering lots of different angles on the different topics. And the essays also become longer. And we can see that what he is ultimately doing is teaching us how to live. Flaubert would say, don't read Montaigne for amusement. Don't read him to be instructed. Read him in order to live. By the time you get midway through the work, you'll see that not only are many of his essays quite long, but they're very, very deep too. He wrote his essays over the course of 20 years. And the really fascinating is he would go back to older essays and he would add things in. Insights from his older self meld with the voice of his younger, middle aged self. He didn't really remove things, he didn't want to do that. He thought that if he started pulling things out, then he has missed the point of what he's doing. He can't just go scraping out words with his eraser that would efface the whole of his essays. The point was to show the bumps, to show the flaws. But not only that, but he found that many of the ideas that he chanced upon the heart half digested thoughts that were maybe not perfectly articulated, they were often the ones that were clearer than the noonday sun. And he found that it was his former hesitations that astonished him. He would come to a passage and think, oh, I remember deliberating about taking that out. But my goodness, this is one of the wisest things I wrote. So you've got to trust yourself. If you're a writer. You have to trust what seems ill thought out. Because insights come from the rich, fertile soil of frivolity. And because we have a 59 year old Montaigne adding thoughts to the writings and musings and essays of a 39 year old Montaigne. The essays as a whole have a very textured, layered quality to them. Indeed, one of the very last things that Montaigne wrote basically on the verge of dying, was added to one of the very first more frivolous things he wrote. He added wise lines to his earlier, more juvenile essays. Now you can mark the evolution of the man by paying close attention to the ABC system. In most versions of the essays you will see A capital A, B or C at the start of a paragraph, or even in the middle of a paragraph, mixed among sentences. What this is, is it's basically telling you whether what you're reading comes from the younger, slightly older or even older Montaigne. And thus you can see how his thoughts on the same topic have matured over time in one place. The essays are iterative. They contain the character of a. Or indeed several Montaignes. They contain the character of a Montaigne that is forever in flux. And so how do you read Montaigne logistically, pragmatically, how do you do it? Are there a curation of his best essays, his top 10? That one should start with? Now, you may find such lists, and I will provide you at the end of this talk, not with a definitive list, but with my personal curation, my favourites at this moment in time, because every reader will have their own particular favourites. And in my list there will be overlap there with what I believe to be objective greatness, but that will be mixed in with the aesthetic and cognitive elements that are doing it for me right now. But is that a way to read Montaigne, reading his top 10? That's one way to do it. You can also, like with the great writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Wilde, Woolf, Pascal, you can read in a disjointed fashion, dropping in and out of essays. You can roam about, you can skim, you can speed up, then slow down. You can begin your journey by tracing your finger down the contents page and allow it to stop at the title and topic that arrests your attention. That's a really great method of entry and one that comes highly recommended. Just go to the topics that leap out at you. Just flick through, just go back and forth, zoom in and out. Have fun with it. But for the ambitious seekers of wisdom, I would like to issue you a challenge. I would like to urge you and implore you to give yourself the gift of meeting Montaigne fully between now and the end of the year. And that means reading all of the essays from start to finish. The book is long, but that's because. Because it is the soul of a deep thinker and feeler. It's the physicalization of the man over the course of 20 years. Now, I will tell you that just because the work is long doesn't mean it necessarily takes a long time to read. On my first significant meeting with Montaigne, I read every single essay, or inhaled would be the better word. I inhaled every single essay in just under a week. And I'm not a fast reader. Yes, that meant gliding over some things, focusing disproportionately on others, but this is a very inhalable book. I find I do not want to ask you to do that. However. Instead, your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to have read the entire essays by the end of the year.
- [46:31]
Listener
Or if you're listening to this talk a little later in the year, let's say within the next five or six months.
- [46:38]
Narrator
Yeah, start to finish, finish A to B to C. Read the work in a linear fashion. Start at the dedication to the reader and go all the way through to the climactic, sublime mountain peak that is the final essay on experience. And as you do, I want you to go through the process of finding your own favourites. Annotate, underline, circle, write in the margins, reread as you go, read slowly and and be on the lookout for your top 10. When you finish reading a truly outstanding essay, underline the number of it so you can come back to it again and then order them by merit and impact as you go. You will chart a course that runs right through your soul at a moment in time. And this is a two part assignment. The first part is to sustain a steady and consistent reading of his essays all the way through. But the second part of the assignment.
- [47:35]
Listener
Which is designed to keep your reading active, is to bring Montaigne into the other books you are reading. Montaigne is one of the foundational thinkers of the Western world and he will serve and inform anything else you are reading. If you're following a deep reading program like the one on offer at the Hardcore Literature Book Club, which is@patreon.com hardcore literature, then put Montaigne into a position to converse with all of the other writers we're reading together. I've been so happy to see book club members doing this. For our Shakespeare discussions, we're working through the complete works of Shakespeare in chronological order, which means a lecture on every single one of his plays. And it's been really fantastic to have Montaigne conversing with Shakespeare. I've seen readers at the club bringing Montaigne into our discussions for the Tale of Genji, for the Short Stories of Franz Kafka, indeed for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. These are the books we're reading together at the moment at time of recording, and if you're not a member already, then we would really love to have you joining the journey with us. Navigate over to patreon patreon.com hardcore literature and choosing the Proust tier for your membership will give you instant access to almost 600 bookish discussions, lectures and deep read throughs for the greatest books ever written.
- [49:10]
Narrator
We've got lecture series for books like.
- [49:12]
Listener
Tolstoy's War and Peace, Dostoevsky's the Brothers Karamazov, John Milton's Paradise Lost, James Joyce's Ulysses, the poetry of Walt Whitman, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Herman Melville's Moby Dick and many, many more. At time of recording later this year, we will be reading Dante's Inferno, we'll be reading Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, we'll be reading Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and we will have our secret Charles Dickens revealed. Every year we make our way through a new Dickens novel and we have so much more. So tyranny Montaigne into your other books, Cross pollinate your writers and get them talking to each other.
- [50:00]
Narrator
So reading linearly and reading everything. Reading all of the essays is powerful and rewarding. Now, it is true that Montaigne would ask, what are these essays if not monstrosities and grotesques, botched together from a variety of limbs, having no defined shape, with an order, sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous? And yet you will know that there is an extraordinary pattern to the essays. Essays often come in pairs, complementing each other, balancing each other. And the essays will build to a crescendo, they'll build to a rise. In each book, the essays deepen as you read through. They hark back and recall prior essays and anticipate essays to come. What you realise a quarter of the way through the book and definitely halfway through, and what you become convinced of by the end is that the essays, like the works of William Shakespeare, are extraordinary in isolation. But it is the effect of unity. It is the effect of reading the entire body of work that is most valuable. If someone falls in love with Hamlet, would it not be more profound if they then experienced King Lear? Would it not be more powerful and life changing to read all the works of Shakespeare? I like to think of my own small, complex contribution to the arts in this way, because there are many single talks and lectures that I'm intensely proud of. I put my heart and soul into every discussion, but there are some that catch me at a very important moment of my life. There are some that tower above others. I have my favourites. You will have your personal favorites. It depends on the topic. It depends on the philosophy and the theme explored. But what I would hope is that the value in what I do doesn't come across in any solitary single talk, but rather the value comes across in the effect of you and I talking across time consistently and Having everything build on each other. It's the effect of the whole, the unity. And that's because I am at one with my vocation in the same way that Montaigne the man is his essays. And that's why I find him to be so inspirational. When you read Montaigne, read the essays like you're engaging in a conversation with a close friend and bring your life experience to the work. Indeed, Montaigne is the writer who most feels like a friend to me. Of course there is Shakespeare, but the image I make of Shakespeare is largely what I put there and see of myself. We do not know Shakespeare the way we. We know every nook, inch and cranny of Michel de Montaigne. And on the question of who is better, Montaigne or Shakespeare, I would say it comes down to preference. And in fact they are of the same eminence, they are of the same lustre, they're just different in their approach, but they're of the same quality. The most rewarding thing about reading Montaigne is as you are reading him, you are undergoing the process of accepting and embracing death. And why would you want to do that? As the ancient philosophers would say, memento mori. Remember you will die. Why do you want to remember you will die? Because that will help you to live. Remembering we will die will help us live a good and happy life. And Montaigne believed that anyone who would teach men how to die would teach them how to live. And as we know from the account of Monte Cristo, we need to know death in order to truly live. We know that a little bit of poison strengthens the immunity. We know that whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger. And I said that there were three stages of Montaigne's relationship with death and ultimately therefore with life. And I think we can measure where we are on the timeline of our own development. We can use these three stages as a good course to chart. We can see in regards to our own attitude with dying, we can try to work through the three three stages. So let's start at the very first stage of Montaigne's evolution, post near death experience. Montaigne starts by seeing life as a preparation for death. The end of our course is death, he says. It is the objective necessarily within our sights. If death frightens us, how can we go one step forward without anguish? And quoting Lucretius, he says that most ordinary people walk forwards with their heads turned backwards. We must start providing for death earlier. If death were an enemy which could be avoided, I would counsel borrowing the arms of cowardice. But it cannot be done. Death can catch you just as easily as a coward on the run, or as an honourable man. Montaigne would say that one must judge a man life by his death. And also whether a man was happy shouldn't be attributed until we have seen him act out the last scene in his play, which is indubitably the hardest. And in that last scene played between death and ourselves, there is no more feigning. All the actions in our life must be tried against the touchstone of the final deed of dying. When we die, he says, the mask will be ripped off and only reality remains. Most of our occupations are farcical. Everybody in the entire world is acting a part. We should play our role properly, but as the role of a character which we have adopted. We must not turn masks and semblances into essential realities, nor adopted qualities into attributes of ourselves. And indeed, one wonders whether Jacques speech in as you like it, all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players, and one man in his time plays many parts. One wonders if Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne influenced that speech. Now, that play was being performed at the Globe a few years earlier than when the first English translation of Montaigne's essays by John Florio came out. That came out in 1603, and there is absolutely no doubt that Shakespeare read it avidly. But it is thought that Florio perhaps showed Shakespeare the essays earlier than the publication date in manuscript form. Many will say as well that the Bard knew a bit of French, enough French to have worked with the original, which would have came out when he was 16 years old. In addition to that, it's worth bearing in mind that the literary and theatrical circles that he was was running in meant that anything popular across the Channel and the European continent would have been very much in discussion. His fellow playwright and actor friends would have been talking about Montaigne's essays, and I think it's clear that Shakespeare saw a kindred spirit in Montaigne and found his way of viewing the world to be in accordance with his own way of seeing the world. In an impactful early essay called To Philosophize is to Learn how to Die, Montaigne says that without a contempt for death, every pleasure is snuffed out along with tranquility. Overcoming fear of death will make life more joyous. If we're afraid of death, it will be a continual torment because there is no place that it will not find us. Montaigne said that he didn't want to die peacefully in his bed at home. That was seen as the gold standard, that was seen as the norm. We speak of dying of old age as dying of natural causes, but Montaigne pulls that apart and he marvels that he was actually able to reach even his mid-30s. When he thinks of all who had died by his age. What is natural exactly about dying in old age, in one's sleep, peacefully? Is that natural? In the 16th century, that was the rare exception. Shakespeare died at 52, quite young. It is thought that he was out drinking with his friends one night and then he lapsed into a fever the next day, and he just died. Montaigne wouldn't be much older than the Bard. When he died at 59 of renal disease, Montaigne said that he had wanted to die far away from home, on his horse. Why? Because that would show he wasn't afraid of death. Those who are afraid, afraid of dying, will never leave their house, and they will never take any of the chances that make life worth living. We are surrounded by death constantly, and yet we spend our whole lives trying to avoid it. We never look the inevitable reality of our own demise right in the face. And awareness of the inevitability of death prompted Socrates to say, once he was told that the 30 tyrants had condemned him to death, he said, and nature them is coming for us all. That's what he means, Part of the problem with the self delusion of not looking death in the face. We see it everywhere, we fictionalize it, we blow it up, we distort it, we make it unreal, we see it as entertainment. And yet we do not take in the reality of our own death. And the problem with that self delusion is it gives us a false sense of confidence. And our life just slips us by. Not only that, but what we flee from grows in size. And Montaigne knew that whenever we backed away in retreat from something, we beckoned it on. Montaigne would say, all leave life in the same circumstances, young and old alike. Everybody goes out as though he had just come in. However decrepit a man may be, he still thinks he has another 20 years to go. Silly fool you where your life is concerned, who has decided the term? Look at facts and experience. You have been living for some time now by favor of the extraordinary. I wager that we shall find more who died before 35 than after. And he cites a few different examples, but I really love the example he cites of Aeschylus, the tragic Greek playwright who was always on the lookout for danger and death. He was terrified of it. But who would have predicted that an eagle dropping a tortoise shell on his head from a great height would have been what finished him off? Death can come at any time. It's not just a matter of illness, it's not just a matter of old age. It can happen through accident, at any moment. So let us prepare for it, Montaigne would say, and the best way to prepare for death is to deprive it of its greatest advantage. And that is its strangeness. Let us frequent it. Let us get used to it. Let us have nothing more often in mind than death at every instant. Let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects. Whenever a horse stumbles, a tile falls, or a pin pricks, however slightly, let us at once chew over this thought, supposing that was death itself. With that let us brace ourselves and make an effort. In the midst of joy and feasting, let our refrain be one which recalls our human condition. Montaigne drew this wisdom on how to live and how to die from the ancient Hellenistic philosophies of Stoicism, Epicureanism and skepticism. And he found the greatest affinity with the Stoics. The idea of eudaimonia was central to ancient thought. That's good spirit, commonly translated as happiness or welfare. And many said that the key to thriving in life was ridding oneself of the anxiety of death, which tinges and influences everything. Montaigne learned how to contemplate death continuously, continuously, from Lucretius. To practice death is to practice freedom, he writes. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Life has no evil for him who has thoroughly understood that loss of life is not an evil. So momento mori and carpe diem are intricately linked. One facilitates the other. Montaigne's ceaseless self chant, his mantra, his refrain with be this anything you can do, another day can be done. Now one can understand why he believed that the Lord's Prayer was the most important one. That was the prayer most appropriate to all situations to Montaigne, and the only one he said he remembered. He writes about this in a fantastic essay called On Prayer. We have that concept in the Lord's Prayer of asking today for our daily bread, what can we handle and what must we do now? And perhaps we wonder, what have we been putting off for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? Do we not realize that tomorrow never comes? Can you do any part of what you're putting off for Tomorrow, today. Live every day like it's your last is common wisdom. But that doesn't mean you dive headfirst into hedonism. It it means, if you were to die in this moment right now, would you be happy with your state of being? Would you be happy with your state of being in this moment? You ask yourself, what if every interaction were your last? When you argue with your partner, contemplating the idea that this could be your last interaction will halt the argument, or revert it, or change it. Contemplating this will stop you getting heated over nothing. Would you get heated over the things you're getting heated over if you knew it was your last moment? Probably not. When this becomes your reality, you realize what truly matters. It's also worth thinking about what you would regret on your deathbed. And then you can take those deathbed regrets and epiphanies and you can fix your life now. You can probably think of 10 stupid or regretful things right now, immediately, without much thought. If you're being honest, you can probably think of at least 10 probably more things that you will regret on your deathbed, things that you would stop doing if you could. And here's the magical thing you can. When we think about what we would do differently if we wanted to live truly, we wanted to live a good life, we wanted to live a life that we wouldn't regret, we likely immediately think of our relationships with other people as far as we possibly can. We must always have our boots on, ready to go, Montaigne said. And above all, that meant we should take care to have no outstanding business with anyone else. And that's why Jesus said that if you're praying at the temple, but you have unresolved business with your brother, if you had an argument with someone close to you and you haven't brought it to a resolution, a peaceful, loving resolution, then leave the temple immediately, go home, and make it up with them. I have already half said my farewells to everyone but myself. Montaigne says, no man has ever prepared to leave the world more simply, nor more fully than I have. No one has more completely let go of everything than I try to do. It's very interesting language there. Let go. Alan Watts pointed out that the word nirvana comes from nirviti, and that means the letting go. We find freedom at the bottom of our breath. When you exhale, when you let go of everything, what remains? George Lakoff said that there are many metaphors we live by. The words we use every day are instructive and contain wisdom. Let go implies we're holding on to something when someone's stressed, we say, let go of it. Ah, let it go. We're holding on to something, we're carrying a burden. And spiritual and emotional and mental concerns manifest psychosomatically in the body. So if you're holding on to something mentally, you're going to have a bad background, things are going to hurt, things are going to ache, you're going to feel it in your body. What are you holding onto right now? Are you holding a grudge? Think of the language. Holding a grudge, bearing a grudge with anyone, can you let that go? Forgiveness isn't just about the other person. It's not a kindness extended to another, it's first and foremost for you, it's a kindness to you, it's a letting go for you. Now the second stage in Montaigne's attitude towards, towards death is that he goes from obsessing about it and keeping it always in his mind, which is better than fleeing from it and ignoring it. But one might think it still then controls you. If you're always thinking about it, still exerts a control over you. He goes from that to conceding, ah well, death will actually just take care of itself and living well will encompass dying well. We already know from Montaigne's accident that what often looks violent and painful when one is departing this world is frequently peaceful. So he says that nature has prepared us for death. And one way it does that is through sleep. Sleep is the training ground. And not only that, but nature has endowed us with meeting death in our very being. We are a beautiful interwoven structure, he says. Death is one of the attributes we were created with. Death is a part of you. This being which you enjoy is equally divided between death and life. And in one of the most powerful essays in the collection, it's called On Physiognomy, which comes in the astonishing third book. Montaigne tells us, contemplate yourself. You will find within you nature's arguments concerning death, true arguments most fit to serve you in your need. They it is which make a farm labourer as well as entire nations die with as much constancy as a philosopher. Like Tolstoy after him, Montaigne realized that applied wisdom, nobility in death and knowing how to live was seen at its fullest in the common class rather than the intellectual class. Thinking, thinking, thinking gives us the illusion, illusion of control. But existential crisis is an upper class luxury. Montaigne says powerfully, if you do not know how to die, never mind nature will tell you how to do it on the spot, plainly and adequately. She will do this job for you most punctiliously. Do not worry about it. We confuse life with worries about death and death with worries about life. And this soothing mindset would lapse into his grand final response, his final attitude to death, his mature response to death. Because Montaigne would realize that dying is just a footnote in the book of living. It's an endnote. So let us live life to the full. Death may be the end of life, he says, but it is not the objective. You can see the evolution. At first, he says, death is the objective. We should prepare for it. But over the course of his life, he realized, no, no, life is the objective. Life must be its own objective, its own purpose. Its right concern is to rule itself, govern itself, put up with itself, numbered. Among its other duties included under the general and principal heading how to live, there is the subsection how to die. So how to die is a subsection under how to live. I love that if our fears did not lend it weight, dying would be one of our lighter duties. Montaigne says what's fascinating is you can read one of the early essays in the book, one of the essays, which he began in his late 30s, an essay called that our deeds be judged by our intentions. And you can see the final line of that essay shows that an older, wiser Montaigne has returned to the start, creating a really intricate tapestry in the essays. He wrote this line just before he died, and he added it to one of his earlier writings. He writes, if I can, I will prevent my death from saying anything not first said by my life. Perhaps we think forwards to Thoreau, who said he did not want to come to the end of his life only to discover he had not lived. Montaigne pulls an example from Seneca writing about Julius Caesar. Montaigne was fascinated with Julius Caesar. He was also fascinated with Alexander the Great. Those were two of his favorites. One of Caesar's guards, broken down and worn out, came to him and begged leave to kill himself, to which Caesar responded with a sad smile. So you think you are still alive then? So how do we make life worth living? The cost of life, the price of admission is death. So how do we make sure the pageant, the show, the exception experience was worth it? Well, first you have to accept your contradictions. Those trying to knit the inconstant actions of another into one understandable whole will be frustrated. For example, the Mark Antony of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is the same Anthony as that of the tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra. We lament how he has fallen. Oh, he used to be so. So noble. Look what he's become. But he's the same man. And when we allow that, we allow ourselves to be three dimensional. We allow others to be imperfect. We allow ourselves to be imperfect. What a blessing that would be. We all contain multitudes. Do I contradict myself? Whitman asked. Very well, then, I contradict myself. Or indeed, we might contemplate the words of Emerson. And Emerson found himself in Montana. He said that Emerson would say that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Now, Montaigne read Ovid's Metamorphoses deeply. It was one of his favourite books. He read it in the original Latin because that was his native language. Can you believe that? Until the age of six, his father made it so. Montaigne only spoke in Latin. French was his second language. And he loved Ovid. And in Ovid's book, you can see that the figures, the gods and demigods are depicted. All change. The gods change into parts of the natural world. They become trees and pools of water. They also merge into one another. All is in flux. Shakespeare was deeply influenced by Ovid too. And so we can see that the bards combined REM Of Ovid and Montaigne resulted in the infinite variety of his inexhaustible protagonists. We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, Montaigne says in the opening essay of book two, woven together so diversely. And indeed the word diversity is the final word in the second book. So diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own, own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people. That man you saw yesterday, so ready to take risks, do not think it odd if you find him craven tomorrow. What had put heart in his belly was anger or need, or his fellows or wine, or the sound of the trumpet. Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute. Timid, insolent, chaste, lecherous, talkative, taciturn, tough, sickly, clever, dull, brooding, affable, lying, truthful, learned, ignorant, generous, miserly, Accepting the contradictions in himself allowed him to accept the contradictions in other people. There's a really great passage in the 30 28th essay of the first book called How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Things, in which he says, when I rail at my manservant, my curses are not feigned, but once I cease to fume, if he needs help from me, I am glad to help him. I turn over the page when I call him a dolt or a calf. I have no intention of stitching such labels onto him forever. Nor do I believe I am contradicting myself when I lay later call him an honest fellow. So contradictions are actually no contradiction. No one characteristic clasps us purely and universally in its embrace. If only talking to oneself did not look mad, no day would go by without my being heard growling to myself, against myself, you silly shit. Yet I do not intend that to be a definition of me. If anyone, anyone should think when he sees me sometimes look bleakly at my wife and sometimes lovingly, that either emotion is put on, then he is daft. Montaigne was comfortable with contradictions and accepted that two seemingly contradictory things could both be true simultaneously. This is one of the most difficult things that I think anyone has to learn. And it's a huge leveraged move once you accept this. Montaigne taught us that we weep and laugh at the same things. Is life a tragedy or a comedy? We see that he contrasts the ancient philosophers of Heraclitus, who wept over the tragic situation of mankind, and Democritus, who laughed at man's comic predicament. And Montaigne decided that he ultimately preferred to see life as a comedy, not because it is more agreeable to laugh than weep, but because it is more disdainful and condemns us men more than the other. It seems, according to our desires, we can never be despised. Enough. Lamentation and compassion are mingled with some respect for the things we are lamenting. The things which we mock at are judged to be worthless. I do not think there is so much wretchedness in us as vanity. We are not so much wicked as daft. I love that we are not so much all of evil as all of inanity. So we're not evil, we're just inane, we're not wicked, we're just daft. We are not so much pitiful as despicable. This is a fantastic mindset to have. Remember, he says, what we hate we take to heart. And if we can laugh at ourselves and think us incapable of good and evil, that spares us from contempt. Another mindset we can take from Montaigne, that he learned from Epictetus and the ancient philosophers, is that the taste of good and evil depends on our opinions of them. What did Milton's Satan say? The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of a hell, A hell of a heaven. What did Hamlet say, there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. This mindset is everywhere in the essays. Wealth, fame and health all have no more beauty and pleasure than he who has them lends them. For each man, good or ill, is as he finds. The man who is happy is not he who is believed to be so, but he who believes he is so. And in that way alone does belief endow itself with true reality. My goodness. There are some single lines that you don't want to glide over in Montaigne's essays. You could meditate on a line like that for a very long time that could change your life. Belief endows itself with true reality. The world is what we believe it to be. Control your beliefs, make the world into what you want it to be. Montaigne says no one suffers long, save by his own fault, and that's difficult medicine to swallow. But what Montaigne is exploring is what the psychologists would call locus of control. Internal locus of control means you are the pilot of your life, you are the captain of your soul. If you have an external locus of control, however, that means the world and fortune works upon you and you are not responsible for how you feel and how you behave. The former state, the internal locus of control, is the more difficult reality to live, but the more rewarding. And Montaigne reminds us for all his love of pleasure and tranquility, he reminds us that virtues are considered so because they are hard won. And so often we attach our egos to events. We know more about our ego than the event, the objective event in question. But if we want to live a good life, we must get control of our emotions. Montaigne knew that our imaginations so frequently trip us up and we are often railing at things that do not even exist. A powerful imagination generates the event, he writes. What causes do we not discover for the ills which befall us? What will we not attack, rightly or wrongly, rather than go without something to skirmish against? One of my personal favourite essays from Montaigne is his essay on anger. It's a great tonic for those who have a fire temper and he says that when it comes to anger we wouldn't want a judge to condemn a man whilst angry, would we? We don't want schoolmasters or parents punishing students or their children in anger. Why? Because it's no longer justice, it's vengeance. Let us put off the encounter when angry because things will truly look different to us once we've cooled off a bit and quietened down. Faults seen through anger are like objects seen through a mist, they appear larger. And he tells the anecdote of a captain general of antiquity who, returning home after traveling abroad, found that his house had been massively mismanaged. The head servant had really let things go at the property and he was not happy at all. And what did he say to his servant? He said, go. He dismissed him. Go. If I were not so angry, I would give you a good going over. In a sublime essay called On Restraining your Will, another favorite one, Montaigne tells us that most people are conditioned to become enraptured over anything. Small matters and big matters, but mainly matters that do not even concern them at all. And he tells a really great story. This is one of my favorites from Montaigne. This story shows how he was able to keep his sense of self possession even when the demands of public life came knocking again. Ten years into the writing of his essays, Montaigne was elected mayor of Bordeaux. He didn't want to be. He tried to get out of it. He did a lot to get out of it. But when the king tells you you have to do it, you have to do it. He was the most competent man for the job. And this is a really interesting thing to contemplate. Very often the people who want the power shouldn't have the power. The people who should have the power are the people that we go knocking for, that we go searching for. We pull them out, we drag them out of retirement, we put them there. We don't want them assuming the role. Montaigne didn't want the power, but he was the most competent man for the job. And it didn't matter that he wanted no part of it, he had to do it. So he was mayor of Bordeaux and they even extended it for another term, which he wasn't pleased about. So he had to spend several years acting as mayor. He would have turned down the second term, but they said that wasn't an option. What he did when he first became elected was he told the citizens what to expect of him as soon as he arrived. He was managing expectations. I spelled out my character faithfully and truly, he writes, just as I know myself to be. I've got no memory, no concentration, no experience, no drive, no hatred either, though. No ambition, no covetousness, no ferocity. So that they should be told and therefore know what to expect from my service. Now they were all expecting to have a man like his father and Montaigne's father, according to Montaigne, according to many people, had an extraordinary goodness of soul. No one was more devoted to the people than him. And Montaigne says that he praises this quality in others, but does not like to follow it himself. His father had heard it said that one should forget oneself on behalf of one's neighbour, and that compared to the the general, the individual is of no importance. But this led him to be sick and exhausted and always taking his work home with him. Montaigne said that he would take the citizens concerns into his heart, but not into his spleen, and he would not be taking his work home with him. And he says that any man who forgot to live a good and holy life himself, but who thought that he had fulfilled his duties by guiding and training others to do so, would be stupid. In exactly the same way, any man who gives up a sane and happy life in order to provide one for others makes a bad and unnatural decision. He said through this mindset he was able to, and I quote, give myself to others without taking myself away from me. Montaigne was an empath. He was a people person. He was prone to weariness and melancholy. And there are many, many of us here who will absolutely neglect our health, physical and mental, in order to look after others. But how on earth can you look after anyone if you do not first and foremost look after yourself? In a tremendous passage, Montaigne says this. The mayor and Montaigne have always been twain, very clearly distinguished. Just because you are a lawyer or a financier, you must not ignore the trickery that there is in such vocations. A man of honor is not accountable for the crimes or stupidities of his profession. We must make our living from the world and use it as it is. Yet even an emperor's judgment should be above his imperial sway. Seeing it and thinking of it as an extraneous accessory, he should know how to enjoy himself independently of it. Monseigneur Wayne knew that everything flowed from him, and so he put his effort into making sure his inner self, his mind, was in right order. Everyone sees the outward show, but we are the ones that have to live with ourselves. Do you like yourself when you are at home? That's the question. Do you like yourself when no one's around, no one's looking? Do you like your company? And when it comes to living, living a good life, Montaigne gives us a very liberating message in his final essay on Experience, which in my opinion and the opinion of many, is his best. He tells us that every day, every moment, is an opportunity to live fully. One day equals all days. There's no other light and no other night. The sun, moon and stars, disposed as they are now, were enjoyed by your grandsires and will entertain your great grandchildren. And how one does one thing is how they do anything. You can judge a horse by how it walks as well as gallops. You can judge a horse and its quality by how it remains stationary in the stable. Caesar, for example, has that same greatness of soul when he's sitting down to eat as when he's on the battlefield. And Montaigne would say that he didn't want to be the man who had his head in the clouds whilst his body was at the dinner table. When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep. And when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too, I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight being alone there, and to me, what great fools we are. He has spent his life in idleness, we say. I have not done a thing thing today, I say. And to that I reply, why have you not lived? That is not only the most basic of your employments, it's the most glorious. And if you have been able to examine and manage your own life, you have achieved the greatest task of all nature. To display and show her powers needs no great destiny. She reveals herself equally at any level of life. I love this, both behind curtains or without them, he says. You do not need to be a great figure like the kind we read about in antiquity. A general, a king, a queen. You do not need any of that. You just need to live your life in the right way. Your life is your masterpiece. Our duty is to bring order to our morals, not to the materials for a book, not to win provinces in battle, but order and tranquility for the conduct of our life. Our most great and glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly. Everything else raining, building, laying up treasure are at most tiny props and small accessories. It is for petty souls overwhelmed by the weight of affairs, to be unable to disentangle themselves from them completely, not knowing how to drop them and then take them up again. So, yes, maybe you throw yourself into to your work. But remember when you're eating, when you're with other people, when you're laying idle, when you're reclining, when you're relaxing, be there, be present, be fully. Do not take yourself that seriously. And Montaigne said that we ought not to plan anything on too large a scale. In fact, our lives are like the Lives of a Mayfly when we consider our lives up against eternity. And it's also rather foolish to lament that we will not live a hundred years on with when we do not do that for the hundred years that preceded our life. And it's the same condition. But he says, let's not plan things on too large a scale. If we get worked up about not finishing things, our work will always be unfinished. And Montaigne says, I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about death nor the unfinished gardening. I once saw a man die, he said, who, right to the very last, kept lamenting that destiny had cut the thread of the history he was writing when he had only got up to our 15th or 16th king. So this man was writing his history, and he was so proud of it, so invested in it, so immersed in it, that it caused him pain to contemplate the fact that he should die when it was unfinished. We must throw off such humors, Montaigne says. They are harmful and vulgar. Greatness of soul, he writes, consists not so much in striving upwards and forwards as in knowing how to find one's place and to draw the line. Whatever is adequate. Greatness of soul, regards as ample. Greatness of soul shows its sublime quality by preferring the moderate to the outstanding. Nothing is so beautiful, so right, as acting as a man should. So we all know what we should do. Montaigne would actually advise that we find heroes, we find people we can emulate, people we respect, maybe great men and women from antiquity, from the history books. We keep them in our minds and we converse with them. We share with them our inmost thoughts. And we think about what would they say? How would they guide us? We already know how to live a good life. Everything we know about living well, living truly, is already existing in us. But we make decisions at every moment to go one way or to go another. And monster continues. And he says, there is no learning so arduous as knowing how to live this life naturally and well. And the most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being. So choose to love your being, love your life. And to enjoy life, he writes, requires some husbandry. So he acknowledges that it takes some effort. I enjoy it twice as much as I others, he says, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attachment to it. Above all, now when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast. I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter mystery, least of it, the deeper and fuller I must make of it. Others know the delight of happiness and well being. I know it as they do, but not en passant as it slips by. We must also study it, savour it, muse upon it, so as to render condign thanksgivings to him who vouchsafes it to us. Other folk enjoy all pleasures as they enjoy the pleasure, pleasure of sleep, with no awareness of them. I deliberate with myself. Upon any pleasure I do not skim it off, I plummet. So Montaigne really immerses himself in every pleasure. He studies his pleasures, he studies his day to day life, he plumbs to the very depths of experience. And he says, many men want to break from their humanity, but this is madness. And instead of changing their form into an angel's, they change it into a beast. They crash down instead of winding high. It is an accomplishment absolute, as it were godlike, to know how to enjoy our being as we ought. We seek other attributes because we do not understand the use of our own. And having no knowledge of what is within, we sally forth outside ourselves. A fine thing to get up on stilts, for even on stilts we must ever walk with our legs, and upon the highest throne in the world we are seated still upon our asses. So it doesn't matter who you are, you can be the king. It doesn't matter all of these externalities. At the end of the day you are still you. And do you know who you are, and are you living appropriately and in tune with who you really are? The usefulness of living lies not in duration, Montaigne says, but in what you make of it. Some have lived long and lived little. See to it while you are still here. Whether you have lived enough depends not on account of years, but on your will. Thank you very much for listening today. I appreciate you deeply and I would like to close by reiterating and reissuing my challenge to you to read all of Montaigne. Now, there are several different options. One great option, as I said, is to run your finger down the contents page and just begin leisurely, playfully and joyfully jumping about. And just go to those topics that interest you, dip in and out. You might even find yourself beginning with the essay on books. If you want to learn how to read like Montaigne, he walks you through his reading process. It's a very good thing to try and replicate and emulate his reading reading process with his essays. It's a very liberating approach to reading that he outlines. So go through the contents, pick the essays that jump out at you and drink them in. Indeed, you might want a nudge in specific directions. In that case, I will give you my personal top 10, plus some honorable mentions right now. I must stress, however, that I feel bad in neglecting so many essays. Curating anything great downwards, whether we're talking the essays of Montaigne, the plays of Moliere, or the plays of William Shakespeare, is a very difficult thing to do because you can love so many essays. But here are the ones that do it for me. Number one, I think the greatest essay is called On Experience. It is one of the most life affirming essays you will ever read. But the difficulty is that part of the power comes from the fact that it's positioned right at the end of the book and it really is like a crowning jewel and everything you've read up until that point builds to it. But you could read that one first. After that, I think number two, though these are equal in my opinion. These are fantastic essays. My second place would go to an essay called On Physiognomy. Third place would be an essay called an apology for Raymond Seebond. An apology means a defense. Now, Montaigne translated this Writer's Natural Theology. It was a very influential work. In this essay, which is the longest, easily the longest in the entire collection, it's well over 200 pages. He goes very, very deep into the nature of God and being. And it is incredibly profound. You need to read this one over and over again, ceaselessly, because there's so much in it. Number four, I would go with the really short one in the first book, which is called To Philosophize is to learn how to die. Because this is a really important guiding principle for wrangling with Montaigne. Number five, I would go for an essay in the third book called on restraining your will. Really powerful life advice and mindset advice in there. Number six, I would say go for On Practice. Fantastic essay. Number seven, it is on books. I love it when Montaigne talks about reading how to read. I love it when he pulls apart different poets and really spends some time appreciating great art. On books is a must read for all of us bibliophiles. Number eight, I would say the essay on solitude is marvel. That's a really profound one as well. Number nine, on anger. Very, very good for anybody who wants to control their emotions. Better number 10, I would say, on the Art of Conversation. This is a really beautiful essay and I think this one will really help improve anyone's interpersonal communication skills. Now let's talk honorable mentions. There's an essay called on the Inconstancy of Our Actions, which is really, really important because it contains that celebration and honoring of the fact that we do contain multitudes, as Whitman would say. Another great essay is called On Educating Children, where he outlines how he would recommend we educate our children. Really great advice in there. Another great essay is called that the taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have of them. There's an essay called On Presumption, which is magnificent. There's an essay called on the Cannibals, one of many essays that shows Montaigne to have been an incredibly progressive writer where he's writing about the tribes people of Brazil. There was a lot of exploration to the so called New World at the time. Montaigne said that there is no such thing as a savage race. That was a popular and common talking point at the time. No such thing. There's just custom and habit and what we think is good or bad is just based on what we're used to, quite frankly. In fact, these people from a completely different world have a lot of things that we could learn from. We could learn a lot from them. This was an essay that would very much influence Shakespeare's the Tempest. There's another great essay called On Cato, the Younger, short one, but powerful one on some lines of Virgil. That's a masterful one. I also like On Democritus and Heraclitus. That's the one that sees life as a comedy or a tragedy. And Montaigne says it's a comedy. How we weep and laugh at the same thing. Great essay on glory. Great essay, but I think those are enough to be getting on with. For starters, if you want to go for some of my favourites, I have of course sadly neglected many more great essays. I want you to read all of them, but you can start with those ones. And if you do take up my imploration that I issued earlier, then you might want to just start from the beginning and just drink in the essays. Journey through it from start to finish between now and the end of the year or at whatever pace suits you.
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Listener
And we have a big discussion thread that we are building out together at the Hardcore Literature Book Club for Montaigne, which readers have been returning to in order to share their favorite passages from the essays and we are of course taking him by the hand through all of the other great books we are reading together. If you love these discussions and want many more and would also like to be in the company with like minded lovers of literature then we have a really beautiful community at the book club. It's a real literary oasis and indeed many readers have said that being people part of the club has been absolutely life changing.
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Narrator
So join us@patreon.com hardcore literature and remember to enter the essays like you're conversing with a friend. Do so with a spirit of play. Bring your life experience to bear on the work. Talk with Montaigne, go read a good handful of essays right now and then let us know what you take from him. Make his acquaintance and read him all the days of your life be because Montaigne helps us to know how to live. Thank you very much again for listening today. I appreciate you deeply and bye bye for now everybody Happy reading.