A feeling of deep happiness suffuses the moments of studious leisure ...

 13 

THE LIBRARY

Montaigne’s tower is one of the most affecting visits to a writer’s home you can make in France; it is at Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, in Dordogne, near Bergerac. The large round tower dating from the 16th century is all that remains of the chateau built by his father, Pierre Montaigne, which burned down at the end of the 19th century. Montaigne spent as much of his time in this tower as he could, retreating there to read, think, and write; the library was his refuge from domestic and civil life, from worldly strife and the century’s violence. 

“When at home, I a little more frequent my library, whence I overlook at once all the concerns of my family. ‘Tis situated at the entrance into my house, and I thence see under me my garden, court, and base-court, and almost all parts of the building. There I turn over now one book, and then another, on various subjects, without method or design. One while I meditate, another I record and dictate, as I walk to and fro, such whimsies as these I present to you here. ‘Tis in the third storey of a tower, of which the ground-room is my chapel, the second storey a chamber with a withdrawing-room and closet, where I often lie, to be more retired; and above is a great wardrobe. This formerly was the most useless part of the house. I there pass away both most of the days of my life and most of the hours of those days. In the night I am never there.” (III, 3)

From this corner tower Montaigne could survey his property, overseeing from afar the activities of his household—but above all he went there to find himself, to “be more retired,” as he phrases it, in the “comfort” of his books. The library is famous for the many Greek and Latin phrases he had inscribed on its beams after his retirement in 1571; these bear witness to the extent of his readings, both religious and secular, and to his disillusionment. A phrase on one joist, from Ecclesiastes, Per omnia vanitas, “All is vanity,” combining the Biblical lesson with the wisdom of Greek philosophy as it does, perhaps best summarizes his view of life. 

Even more touching is his manner of presenting his activities as if they counted for nothing: leafing through a book rather than reading; dictating his daydreams rather than writing; none of it with any real aim or cohesion among the ideas. We are told, these days, that linear, prolonged, continuous reading—the kind we first learned to do—is disappearing with the advent of the digital world, but Montaigne, even then, was already—or still—championing versatile, fragmented, distracted reading, capricious and impulsive, jumping haphazardly from one book to another, taking the nuggets of wisdom wherever he found them, without worrying too much about the specific sources from which he gleaned the material for his own book. This, Montaigne insists, was the product of reverie rather than calculation.

A feeling of deep happiness suffuses the moments of studious leisure Montaigne spent in his library. Only one thing could have made it more perfect: a terrace where he could have walked while he thought—but he recoiled at the expense of building one.

“[ . . . ] and were I not more afraid of the trouble than the expense—the trouble that frights me from all business—I could very easily adjoin on either side, and on the same floor, a gallery of a hundred paces long and twelve broad, having found walls already raised for some other design to the requisite height. Every place of retirement requires a walk: my thoughts sleep if I sit still: my fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it: and all those who study without a book are in the same condition.” 

Here again, Montaigne returns to the idea that we do our best thinking when in motion.

14 

TO HIS FEMALE READERS

Montaigne chose to write the Essays in French, a decision that was anything but straightforward in the 1570s. It was only later, in 1588, that he provided an explanation for this, in the chapter “Of vanity”:

“I write my book for few men and for few years. Had it been a matter of duration, I should have put it into firmer language. According to the continual variation that ours has been subject to, up to this day, who can expect that its present form should be in use fifty years hence? It slips every day through our fingers, and since I was born, it is altered above one-half. We say that it is now perfect; and every age says the same of its own.” (III, 9)

Montaigne rejected Latin, the language of scholars, of philosophy and theology, in favor of the vernacular, the language of everyday life. However, renouncing the monumental language of Antiquity meant publishing his reflections in a tongue that was unstable, changeable, and perishable—and that might soon become unreadable.

This act does not seem to be rooted in false modesty; I have no pretensions, Montaigne is saying. I am not writing for the centuries to come, but for the people around me now. The excuse is not a conventional one, for Montaigne has watched his own language change during the course of his own lifetime; he has experienced its mutability himself. He warns us that the words he has used to express himself may soon become unrecognizable. Stendhal, who bet in 1830 that his work would still be read in 1880 and 1930, a half-century and even a full century after publication, placed his hopes for posterity on the permanence of the French language. Montaigne does no such thing in the Essays; he is speaking seriously when he concludes that the extent to which French has changed during his own life suggests the improbability of its being read much longer. Happily, he was wrong on that point.

Yet, it would have been all the easier for him to write in Latin, since he had learned that language from earliest childhood, and it was, for all intents and purposes, his mother tongue. His father had wanted him to speak Latin with perfect fluency: 

“[ . . . ] the expedient my father found out for this was, that in my infancy, and before I began to speak, he committed me to the care of a German, who since died a famous physician in France, totally ignorant of our language, and very fluent and a great critic in Latin. [ . . . ] As to the rest of his household, it was an inviolable rule, that neither himself, nor my mother, nor valet, nor chambermaid, should speak anything in my company, but such Latin words as each one had learned to gabble with me.” (I, 25)

If Montaigne, who spoke Latin before he spoke French, writes in French here, it is because that is the language of the readers he desires to reach. The language in which he writes is the language of the reader for whom he is writing.

In “Upon Some Verses of Virgil,” addressing the daring subject of his waning sex drive, Montaigne evokes his readers—more specifically, the female ones, who will read him in secret:

“I am vexed that my Essays only serve the ladies for a common piece of furniture, and a piece for the hall; this chapter will make me part of the water-closet. I love to traffic with them a little in private; public conversation is without favour and without savour.” (III, 5)

If Montaigne has decided to write in French, it is because his desired readers are women, who are less familiar with ancient languages than men.

You might argue that he scatters his book plentifully with quotes from the Latin poets, especially in “Upon Some Verses of Virgil,” when conveying the most private information about himself, and this is true. Montaigne is no stranger to contradiction.

Antoine Compagnon

A SUMMER WITH MONTAIGNE

Books You Have Forgotten

 [Chapter]

(in which, along with Montaigne, we raise the question of whether a book you have read and completely forgotten, and which you have even forgotten you have read, is still a book you have read) 

AS WE HAVE NOW SEEN, there is not much between a book that has been “read”—if that category still has a meaning— and one that has been skimmed. But Valéry has even better grounds than this for merely flipping through the works he discusses, and Baskerville, likewise, for commenting on books without opening them, which is that the most serious and thorough reading quickly metamorphoses after the fact into summary. To appreciate this, we must take into account a dimension of reading neglected by many theorists: that of time. Reading is not just acquainting ourselves with a text or acquiring knowledge; it is also, from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting.

Even as I read, I start to forget what I have read, and this process is unavoidable. It extends to the point where it’s as though I haven’t read the book at all, so that in effect I find myself rejoining the ranks of non-readers, where I should no doubt have remained in the first place. At this point, saying we have read a book becomes essentially a form of metonymy. When it comes to books, we never read more than a portion of greater or lesser length, and that portion is, in the longer or shorter term, condemned to disappear. When we talk about books, then, to ourselves and to others, it would be more accurate to say that we are talking about our approximate recollections of books, rearranged as a function of current circumstances.

No reader is safe from this process of forgetting, not even the most voracious. Such was the case for Montaigne, who is fundamentally associated with ancient culture and libraries and who nevertheless presents himself, with a frankness that anticipates Valéry, as an eminently forgetful reader.

The flaws of memory are, in fact, a persistent theme in the Essais,1 if not the best known. Montaigne complains endlessly about his memory trouble and the unpleasantness it causes him. He tells us, for example, that he is incapable of going to look for a piece of information in his library without forgetting on the way what he is looking for. When speaking, he finds it necessary to maintain a tightly ordered discourse so as not to lose his train of thought. And he is so unable to remember names that he resolves to refer to his servants according to their jobs or countries of origin.

The problem grows so serious that Montaigne, always on the brink of an identity crisis, occasionally fears that he will forget his own name. He even goes so far as to ponder how he will navigate daily life on the inevitable day that such a misadventure occurs.

This general faultiness of memory plainly affects the books he has read. Toward the beginning of his essay on his reading, Montaigne unhesitatingly acknowledges his difficulty in keeping track of what he has read: “And if I am a man of some reading,” he declares, “I am a man of no retentiveness.”2

Montaigne experiences a progressive and systematic erasure that attacks every component of the book from the author to the text itself, each vanishing one after the other from his memory as quickly as it entered:

I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.3This effacement, in other words, is the flip side of an enrichment. Having made the text his own, Montaigne rushes to forget it, as though a book were no more than a temporary delivery system for some general form of wisdom and, its mission accomplished, might as well disappear. But the fact that the implications of forgetting are not altogether negative does not solve all its associated problems, especially the psychological ones. Nor does it dispel the anguish, intensified by the daily obligation of speaking to others, of not being able to fix anything in one’s memory.

It is true that we all experience mishaps of this sort, and that all literature ends up providing us only a fragile and temporary kind of knowledge. What seems particular to the case of Montaigne, however, and indicates the breadth of his problems with memory, is his inability to recall whether he has read a specific book:

To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it.4

The memory deficit is revealed as even more acute in this case, since it is no longer just the book but the experience of reading that is forgotten. Here, the forgetting erases not just the contents of the object—whose general shape, at least, can still be called to mind—but the act of reading itself, as though the radical nature of the erasure had ended up affecting everything related to the object. We would be justified in such circumstances in wondering whether reading that we cannot even remember performing still deserves to be called reading.

Curiously, Montaigne displays a relatively precise memory of certain books he dislikes; he is, for instance, capable of distinguishing different kinds of texts by Cicero or even the different books of the Aeneid.5 One gets the impression that these texts in particular—conceivably because they made a deeper impression than the others—have escaped oblivion. Here, too, the affective factor proves decisive in the substitution of a screen book for the hypothetical real book.

Montaigne finds a solution to his memory problem through an ingenious system of notations at the end of each volume. Once forgetfulness has set in, he can use these notes to rediscover his opinion of the author and his work at the time of his original reading. We can assume that another function of the notes is to assure him that he has indeed read the works in which they were inscribed, like blazes on a trail that are intended to show the way during future periods of amnesia.

What follows in this essay about reading is even more astonishing. After explaining the principle behind his notational system, Montaigne unflappably presents the reader with a few excerpts. In doing so, he tells the reader about books that it is hard to say whether he has read, since he has forgotten their contents and must rely on his own notations—writing, for example, “Here is what I put some ten years ago in my Guicciardini (for whatever language my books speak, I speak to them in my own).”6The first author “discussed” is indeed the Renaissance historian Guicciardini, whom Montaigne deems to be a “diligent historiographer,” and all the more trustworthy in that he was himself an actor in the events he recounts and seems little inclined to flatter those in power. His second example is Philippe de Commines, for whom Montaigne has unstinting praise, admiring his simplicity of language, narrative purity, and absence of vanity. Third, he evokes the Memoirs7 of du Bellay, an author whose work in public office he admires, but who, he fears, is too much in the service of the king.8

In reading his notes in order to comment on these texts— which he may not remember reading, and even if he does, whose contents he may have forgotten—Montaigne finds himself in a contradictory position. The commentary he is reading is not exactly his, without its being foreign to him either. He conveys to his reader the reaction he had to these books on an earlier occasion, without taking the trouble to verify whether that reaction coincides with what he might experience today.

For Montaigne, an inveterate practitioner of the art of quotation, this is an unprecedented situation: instead of citing other writers, he cites himself. Indeed, at this extreme the distinction between quotation and self-quotation vanishes. Having forgotten what he said about these authors and even that he said anything at all, Montaigne has become other to himself. He is separated from the earlier incarnation of himself by the defects of his memory, and his readings of his notes represent so many attempts at reunification.

However surprising we may find Montaigne’s reliance on this system of notes, he is, after all, only drawing out the logical consequence of something known to anyone familiar with books, whatever the state of his memory. What we preserve of the books we read—whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully—is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion.

The reader of Montaigne has still more surprises ahead of him. The author goes on to reveal that as forgetful as he may be of other people’s books, to the point where he cannot even recall whether he has read them, he is no more capable of remembering his own:

It is no great wonder if my book follows the fate of other books, and if my memory lets go of what I write as of what I read, and of what I give as of what I receive.9Incapable of remembering what he has written, Montaigne finds himself confronted with the fear of all those losing their memory: repeating yourself without realizing it, and knowing the anguish of losing mastery over your own writing only to remain unwittingly all too faithful to yourself. His fear is all the more justified in that the Essais address not topical subjects, but timeless questions. These may be broached on any occasion, and a writer without memory is thus vulnerable to treating them again without knowing it, and in identical terms:

Now I am bringing in here nothing newly learned. These are common ideas; having perhaps thought of them a hundred times, I am afraid I have already set them down.10

These “repetitions,” which Montaigne finds regrettable in an author like Homer, seem to him even more “ruinous” in texts like his own, “which attract only superficial and passing attention,”11 and which he risks rewriting word by word, from one chapter to the next, without even perceiving it.

But fear of repeating himself is not the only embarrassing consequence of forgetting his own books. Another is that Montaigne does not even recognize his own texts when they are quoted in his presence, leaving him to speak about texts he hasn’t read even though he has written them.

For Montaigne, therefore, reading is related not only to defective memory, but also, given the contradictions that arise from it, to the anguish of madness. While reading is enriching in the moment it occurs, it is at the same time a source of depersonalization, since, in our inability to stabilize the smallest snippet of text, it leaves us incapable of coinciding with ourselves.

With his repeated sense that his self is being eclipsed, Montaigne, more than any of the other authors we have thus far encountered, seems to erase any distinction between reading and non-reading. Indeed, if after being read a book immediately begins to disappear from consciousness, to the point where it becomes impossible to remember whether we have read it, the very notion of reading loses its relevance, since any book, read or unread, will end up the equivalent of any other. 

However extreme his case may be, Montaigne’s relationship with books reveals the true nature of the relationship we all have with them. We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. In the end we are left with falsified remnants of books, analogous to the screen memories discussed by Freud, whose principal function is to conceal others.

Following Montaigne, we should perhaps use the term unreading rather than reading to characterize the unceasing sweep of our forgetfulness. This process involves both the disappearance and the blurring of references, and transforms books, often reduced to their titles or to a few approximate pages, into dim shadows gliding along the surface of our consciousness. 

In every consideration of reading, we should remain mindful that books are linked not only to knowledge, but also to loss of memory and even identity. To read is not only to inform ourselves, but also, and perhaps above all, to forget, and thus to confront our capacity for oblivion.

The reading subject that emerges in this essay of Montaigne’s is not a unified and self-assured figure but an uncertain one, lost among fragments of texts he can barely identify. For this figure, no longer able to distinguish his own texts from those of others, each encounter with a book becomes terrifying, for it threatens to bring him face-to-face with his own madness.

As agonizing as it may be, Montaigne’s experience may nonetheless have the salutary effect of reassuring those to whom cultural literacy seems unattainable. It is vital to keep in mind that the most conscientious readers we might speak to are also, just like Montaigne, involuntary non-readers, and that their forgetfulness extends even to books that in all good faith they believe themselves to have mastered.

To conceive of reading as loss—whether it occurs after we skim a book, in absorbing a book by hearsay, or through the gradual process of forgetting—rather than as gain is a psychological resource essential to anyone seeking effective strategies for surviving awkward literary confrontations. Having defined the different kinds of non-reading, it is to these social situations that we now turn our attention.

How to Talk About 

Books You Haven’t Read 

PIERRE BAYARD

The indictment

The surrounding world is all lies and treachery. Dissimulation is among the most notable qualities of this century.. . .1 [Deceit] maintains and feeds most of men’s occupations.”’2 People massacre one another under cover of noble pretexts which, in reality, merely mask base interests.

By accumulating such scattered observations, Montaigne develops an ancient theme, older than Plato, who first cast it in mythical form. Exploited by Stoics and Skeptics; developed by Boethius; given wide currency by various medieval authors, most notably John of Salisbury, and repeatedly invoked by moralists and preachers, this is the theme of the world as theater, in which men do no more than play out their roles, speaking their lines and gesticulating like actors on a stage—until death decrees their final exit. This theme was at times employed to exalt the omnipotence of God, simultaneously author, director, and spectator of this vast production; on other occasions it was used to denounce the idle fictions in which gullible mer allow themselves to believe. Montaigne does not fail to cite the words at- tributed to Petronius, ‘Mundus universus exercet histrioniam,’’4 later echoed within the walls of the Globe Theatre by melancholy Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: ‘’All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’’.

What Montaigne, in common with many of his contemporaries, uses this image to emphasize is the idea that the world, like a theater, creates illusions. It is a play of shadows that holds us in its grip. The grandeur of princes is pure theater: clever imitators are able to mimic majesty and win the respect of the populace. No less illusory are the wisdom extolled by the champions of prudence and the doctrines propounded by learned scholars. Everywhere there is trumpery, knavery, affectation, and artifice. ‘Yes, even the mask of greatness put on in our plays affects us and deludes us somewhat.’’ Everything is borrowed “for mask and show” in a cruel and futile display.” More from weakness than from malevolence, ordinary men are susceptible to this sort of deception. Prisoners of their imaginations, forgetful of themselves, they let themselves be gulled. They mistake the appearance for the essence. Both monarchs, for their bellicose purposes, and religious factions, through their propaganda, are perfectly capable of taking advantage of this human blindness. Both need credulous men, men easily swayed by opinion and ready to shed their own blood and the blood of others for the sake of the cause. “Any opinion is strong enough to make people espouse it at the price of life.’’8 Wherever one looks, triumphant impostors and satisfied dupes are to be found. “I have in my time seen wonders in the undiscerning and prodigious ease with which people let their belief and hope be led and manipulated in whatever way has pleased and served their leaders, passing over a hundred mistakes one on top of the other, passing over phantasms and dreams.’’?

In denouncing the viciousness of false appearance, Montaigne is at one with the spirit of his age. Flattering the prevailing taste, he exploits a commonplace idea, which he varies and amplifies and embellishes with abundant citations and conceits. Yet through this commonplace he is in fact aiming at an aspect of contemporary reality on which the traditional antithesis of being and appearance bears more directly than at any other time in history. The wars through which the princes of Europe are seeking to augment their power (with the formation of the major European states still in the offing); the religious conflicts that threaten to undermine the very principle of authority (with the elevation of man’s “inner conscience” to the position of supreme authority still looming on the horizon); and the ubiquitous violence, the constant danger that besets all men—all of these circumstances provide pressing reasons for dissimulation and deception; as a result, these have become generally accepted forms of behavior and are frequently taken as themes of literature. In this age of excess, the teachings associated with the ethical and religious tradition of contemptus mundi have been exaggerated: the temptations of this world are traps, the true goods lie elsewhere. Before long, the baroque theater would depict disillusionment (desengaño) as a moment of bitter grace, in which characters too long sunken in blindness would suddenly regain their sight.10

The world against which Montaigne levels a finger of accusation is a labyrinth in which the counterfeit passes for legal tender. Hypocrisy, far from being regarded as a mask that one must penetrate, is everywhere praised as “this new-fangled virtue of hypocrisy and dissimulation, which is so highly honored at present." !11 The juggling of offices and ranks is a scandal for all to behold. Anybody involved in public affairs is aware of what goes on and must, since everybody is doing it, take steps at once to protect himself and remain on his guard. “Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of.”’12 Duplicity and cunning are not discoveries that men make in time, but handles to the world available to anyone bold enough to grasp them. Men learn to dissimulate as they learn to talk, by listening to what is going on all around and mimicking what succeeds. Education is quickly acquired. Politics is defined, in principle, as ostentation, trickery, and ruse—wholly legitimate defenses against an enemy’s ambush and the hazards of fortune. “Innocence itself could neither negotiate among us without dissimulation nor bargain without lying.”13 So little trouble is taken to hide a lie that lying has become the universally accepted convention. Concealment and duplicity are the common “form,” the normal way of doing business—lying, at first tacitly tolerated, is now the general rule.

On the other hand, it is not uncommon in this verbose age to find false appearances being denounced. There were accepted formulas for decrying the universality of lying and for protesting one’s own sincerity, one’s willingness to engage in flattery, one’s eagerness to tell the truth, however imprudent it might be. ‘“Parrhesia’” and protestations of sincerity or candor were devices commonly used by smooth talkers.14 The rhetorical contrast between being and appearance, the topos according to which this world is the world of fraud and deception, were among the common tricks of the duplicitous. Hypocrites could deliver admirable speeches condemning hypocrisy. Anyone who saw profit in so doing could rail against deception, buttressed by innumerable citations, yet remain a character wearing a false mask, an actor in the ultimate role of disillusioned sage. The rules of dissimulation would have been incomplete had they not included among their recommended strategems the refusal to dissimulate. The enemy of concealment is often just an other stage device: the play becomes (or appears to become) believable because it includes a character who ostensibly refuses to believe in the appearances he encounters. In the baroque era this ultimate illusion was expressed symbolically by the play within a play. The actor defending himself against illusion takes on the status of a real being, thanks to the interplay of relative oppositions. The spectator believes that the actor is not on the stage because he denounces yet another stage. (And so it goes today with ideology, one of whose most effective diversionary tactics is the denunciation of ideology.’ Montaigne is obviously making use of this kind of rhetoric.

Indeed, he goes it one better, drawing from the humanist tradition methapors of disloyalty and indictments of lying. But he does what he does with a new seriousness and irony. 

He is to be believed when he insists on his veracity, when he declares that it “is painful for me to dissemble,’”16 or that "I have ordered myself to dare to say all that I dare to do,"17 or when he tells how his “face” and “frankness’’18 have on several occasions saved his life. The traditional precepts find in him a ready welcome: for him, to live with an open heart is no mere turn of phrase but an injunction that he has no difficulty putting into practice. By the same token, the gate of his castle remains open to all comers.

Montaigne casts the net of his skepticism quite widely. Looking at the history of mankind, he determines that the consequences of sincerity and deception are quite unpredictable. “By diverse means we arrive at the same end,” says the title of the very first essay in book. Unpredictability means that deception can never be certain of achieving its goals even in the world of facts; hence Montaigne decides in favor of that which the moral tradition has established, in law, as being of higher moral value: sincerity. Whatever the outcome of our actions (which outcome depends on God alone), Montaigne is in no doubt as to the correct moral choice: insistence on veracity remains his unvarying standard of judgment, his permanent criterion for criticizing morals and for governing his own behavior. This standard is, admittedly, a commonplace, but Montaigne’s desire for originality is not so great that he rejects it. Such is his concern for honesty that it is untouched even by his recognition of the mutability of all things.

Montaigne shaped his response to the world-theater by drawing on the humanist tradition. If it is true that “most of our occupations are low comedy," 19 should we laugh or cry? To the sorrowful compassion of Heraclitus Montaigne preferred its fabled opposite, the laughter of Democritus. This comparison heightens the contrast between the two positions and renders compromise less likely. Once again, we have every reason to believe that Montaigne wholeheartedly subscribes to the lesson that he draws from the traditional cultural stereotype:

(A) Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears. . . . I prefer the first humor, not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. . . . We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are worthless.20

Here, Montaigne is temporarily adapting to his own purposes an attitude that dates from the beginnings of philosophy: Democritus laughs at the world’s folly, but it grieves him just the same, and in fact he exacerbates his melancholy by his relentless efforts to get at the causes of the folly he mocks.21 (Later, in 1621, Robert Burton would publish his Anatomy of Melancholy under the pseudonym Democritus Minor, invoking the name of Montaigne among his precursors.) Hamlet repeats a line remarkably similar to one in the passage of Montaigne cited above: ‘Use every man after his desert, and who should escape whipping?’’22 And Freud mentions this verse from Hamlet more than once, most notably in “Mourning and Melancholia,”” where it is adduced as evidence for the clear-sightedness of self-accusation on the part of the melancholic.23 By what special privilege do such judgments of melancholy, more than other words, pass down through the ages, linking the author who pronounces with the reader who reads and pronounces in his turn? Should we conclude that the propensity to quote (about which we shall have more to say later on) is a consequence of the self-denigration of the melancholic? Montaigne’s excuse for the borrowings that serve him as embellishment is that he prefers to speak through the stronger voice of a Seneca or a Plutarch. Citation, an avowal of weakness, shows a marked predilection for the discourse of melancholy.

But Montaigne does not merely take seriously the lessons of the masters of antiquity and try to live in accordance with precepts consecrated by tradition. He goes even further. When he casts his eyes about him, he thinks he sees the end of the world: ‘“Now let us turn our eyes in all directions: everything is crumbling about us... . It seems as if the very stars have ordained that we have lasted long enough beyond the ordinary term. And this also weighs me down, that the evil that most nearly threatens us is not an alteration in the entire and solid mass, but its dissipation and disintegration, the worst of our fears.’’24 When everything seems to be in collapse, is it not time time to remedy our dissatisfaction, to press our questioning with ever-greater urgency, to arm ourselves with higher standards, to shun every vanity (including even learned discourse on vanity), and to bring to our defense every available resource of sophistication and irony? Desire for independence becomes the main source of energy, though this need not interfere with listening to the past or reading the exemplary texts it provides.

Votive space

To have discerned so clearly the “banishment of truth,’’25 Montaigne must have formulated within himself a standard of candor and veracity which the world constantly disappointed. Would he have spoken so often of inconstancy and fraud had he not imagined a possibility of constancy and honesty, however vague his hope of living up to this standard may have been? To charge that the world is false presupposes belief in an opposite value: a truth situated elsewhere (whether in this world or out of it) which would authorize us to intervene in its name, to act as the prosecutors of falsehood. In denouncing the “prestige of appearance” Montaigne implicitly declares himself in favor of the unequivocal plenitude of true being.26 But he knows this plenitude only through the force of his refusal to accept falsehood and deceit. At the moment he declares his opposition to the world, Montaigne cannot claim to possess any truth: he merely proclaims his hatred of “sham.” The truth is the still-undiscovered positive implicit in the negation of proliferating evil; the truth has no fixed visage but is merely the unappeased energy that animates and arms the act of refusal.

The opposition between truth and falsehood initially has no way of manifesting itself other than through spatial figures. Skeptical refusal is expressed metaphorically in the act of standing aloof, abstaining.

Montaigne feels the need to create a private place for himself at a distance from the world—a place where he can make himself a spectator of human life and feel protected from all its pitfalls. If the world is a deceptive theater, one must not remain on the stage; instead, one must find a way to establish oneself elsewhere. To exile oneself from a world where truth has been banished is not really to go into exile.

(And Montaigne expresses his astonishment that Socrates, who saw the “horribly corrupt laws” of Athens for what they were, did not choose to accept a “sentence of exile.’’27) The secession from the world thus figures as an inaugural act. It determines the site where Montaigne withdraws from the trade in deception; it establishes a frontier, consecrates a boundary line. The site in question is no abstract height: in Montaigne everything has substance. His separate place will be his tower library—a belvedere in the family manor which offers a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. It is no secret that Montaigne did not make this his permanent residence: he continued to devote much of his time to public affairs, to conciliatory negotiations. He did not shirk what he saw as his duty to the common weal. 

What mattered in his eyes was to have secured the possibility of occupying his own private territory, the possibility of withdrawing at any moment into absolute solitude, of quitting the game: the important thing was to establish a concrete as well as symbolic embodiment of the imagined distance between himself and the world, a place always ready to receive him whenever he felt the need; but he felt under no obligation to reside there permanently. Thus a hiatus was opened up between the gaze of the spectator and the agitation of mankind, a pure interval, which enabled Montaigne to perceive how the mass of men voluntarily choose bondage while he, each time he withdrew to his library, assured himself of a new liberty. He saw the shackles in which other men remained bound but felt his own fall away. For the first conquest is not knowledge but self-presence (présence à soi).

Now, this occupation of a place, this creation of a space inaccessible to the world’s falsehood, also marks a caesura in time. To see this we have only to pay attention to the wording of the inscriptions that Montaigne had painted in 1571. A precise date is attached to the break in his life. A new era had begun, and it was important to situate it precisely in relation to both the collective time of Christendom (Anno Christi 1571 . . . pridie cal. mart.28) and his own biographical time (aet. 38 . . . die suo natali). Mention of his birthdate reinforces the idea of a voluntary birth. Time takes on a new origin and at the same moment acquires a new meaning: it is the limited lifespan that remains (quantillum in tandem superabit decursi multa jam plus parte spatii), the few days that will be added to the life already elapsed.

A new law or rule comes into effect. Renewed attachments compensate for the detachment that is at once voluntary and involuntary. The new order is no longer that of servitium but that of libertas. Liberation goes hand in hand with constriction. A strict opposition emerges between the expressions of disgust and of desire to make a break (servitii aulici et munerum publicorum pertaesus) and the votive act which both consecrates and narrowly circumscribes the place of retreat (libertati suae, tranquillitatique, et otio consecravit). This place is metaphorically the “bosom of the learned Muses” (doctarum virginum sinus): the allusion, of course, is to the round shape of the library, to the walls that “in curving round”29 hold the collection of works of poetry, philosophy, and history with which Montaigne wishes to surround himself.

The images of withdrawal (recessit) and the hidden place (dulces latebras) coupled with the feminine figure of the Muses (Montaigne will later declare that he might well have preferred to have produced a child “by intercourse with the Muses [rather] than by intercourse with [his] wife’’30) evoke for the modern reader the psychoanalytic concept of “regression” and all the ideas associated with it. When Montaigne refers to tranquillity (quietus and later tranquillitas), security (securus), and repose (otium), it may seem that he is merely confirming the regressive nature of his desire. The house containing his library is, to be sure, the ancestral seat (avitas sedes) handed down through the male line, but this masculinity (associated with domanial property since 1477) is counterbalanced (so far as the psychoanalytic argument is concerned) by the feminine gender of the word sedes and by the predominance of feminine nouns in the list of terms consecrated by the inscription (libertas and tranquillitas; only otium is not feminine, but neuter!). But in all of this it is important to recognize, as Hugo Friedrich has shown, the traditional formulas of otium cum litteris, a “contemplative” variant of the humanist life, which was recommended after the more active path of civic humanism turned out to be impracticable or fraught with peril! (Montaigne, who diligently discharged his political duties, is proof that the two attitudes could alternate.) The inaugural inscription of 1571 should not be read primarily as a psychological document: it conforms to a cultural paradigm— impersonal and generalizable. One might, however, argue that in the present case the humanist tradition, by its exaltation of antiquity as a wellspring and source of nourishment and its justification of withdrawal into solitude (sibi vivere), placed at the disposal of Montaigne’s desire ready-made formulas in which to pour his dissatisfaction, nostalgia, sublimations, and need for security: a full “instinctual” use of a coded language can be guessed at...

The inscription with which Montaigne dedicated his “library” to his liberty and personal tranquillity stood alongside another inscription (which for some time has been harder to decipher) dedicating the premises also to the memory of Montaigne’s lost friend, Etienne de La Boétie.32 The dedication to his departed ‘brother’ is coupled with the dedication to himself: the library that Montaigne hoped to enjoy also held the books bequeathed to him by La Boétie. The tranquillity he hoped to relish in the second half of his life (that which links up with death) was to prolong and perpetuate his dialogue with his best friend. The time spent in the library is thus framed on either side by death: the death that awaits Montaigne himself, and the death that he survives. The role of identity is important in both perspectives. On behalf of La Boétie, Montaigne felt responsible for an image, a resemblance: he took care in editing his friend’s works (1570-71) and took it upon himself to preserve, to transmit, whole and intact, his admired companion’s likeness as he was in life.33 The rule of identity is this: to lose nothing, to alter nothing, to wrest from death and time images that would otherwise be lost in oblivion and obscurity. (We shall have to consider this point several more times in what follows.) On his own behalf, Montaigne hoped above all that by securing for himself repose, freedom, leisure, tranquillity, and security, he might escape the “mutation” and vain ceremony to which public life condemns those whom it subjugates: his purpose will be to live in dialogue with himself, faithful to his nature and to Nature in the larger sense, and thus to cease to go astray.

From Jean Starobinski
Montaigne in Motion

The theoretical life and the function of the example

 

The relation to the world that Montaigne initiated from his refuge of reading and repose was what the ancients called theoria, or the theoretical life, i.e., comprehension of the world as it offers itself to the contemplative gaze. In a passage added to the manuscript by Montaigne’s own hand (subsequent to 1588) we find one of many classical topoi justifying theoria: ‘Our life, Pythagoras used to say, is like the great and populous assembly at the Olympic games. Some exercise their bodies to win glory in the games, others bring merchandise to sell for gain. There are some, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to see how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the life of other men in order to judge and regulate their own.’’48 This is not merely a “chrie,” or rehearsal of an authorized opinion, an opinion worthy of approval, but even more a statement of the attitude that Montaigne himself intends to adopt in the face of contemporary reality: ‘’As I seldom read in histories of such commotions in other states without regretting that I could not be present to consider them better, so my curiosity makes me feel some satisfaction at seeing with my own eyes this notable spectacle of our public death, its symptoms and its form. And since I cannot retard it, I am glad to be destined to watch it and learn from it. Thus do we eagerly seek to recognize, even in shadow and in the fiction of the theaters, the representation of the tragic play of human fortune.’”49

Gazing upon the agitation of men absorbed by battles and interests of their own, the stationary spectator looks to the causes of things: his concern is to discover the how and the why, in order to satisfy his curiosity. This does not mean that he is disinterested, however; he can, if he wishes (and Montaigne seems to have so wished, at least when he began his work), strive to ensure that the truth revealed in the spectacle of the world is applied in his inner life. To succeed in this he must enlist the aid of his judgment (i.e., the intellectual act in which an individual looks at himself and compares himself with others) and his will (i.e., the formative or transformative act by which an individual governs his life).

The aim of the investigation, acutely pursued through the varied spectacle of human action, is to discover regular sequences, which will possess, in addition to explanatory value, direct or indirect regulative value. The fortune or misfortune of illustrious men may serve as models or warnings: even the errors of great men disclose principles of conduct and in so doing help to unify our moral lives. A moral truth perceived externally in its universal validity should be capable of being reexperienced internally in the same way; its efficacy should be apparent in the identity of its inner and outer forms, i.e., in the consistency and cohesiveness of the soul. The hope that animates this view is that mimetic fidelity will guarantee inner fidelity. Once the truth has been grasped by the contemplative gaze (i.e., theoria), it cannot be changed in any essential way, only repeated; hence the subject who has taken possession of the truth is himself assured of maintaining a stable identity. Internal continuity comes about as a result of fidelity to the external model. In particular, this is the function that the spectator ascribes to exemplary lives: an exemplum, or figure that stands apart (ex-emplum) and yet stimulates imitation and generalization, can help strengthen the individual through its unique virtue. An individual who constantly strives to resemble an ex-emplum that is in itself a marvel of constancy is actually striving to achieve an identity of his own. To live up to such a standard, or at least to begin to do so, it ought to be enough merely to recall the exemplum or its emblem, an effigy on a medal. The impersonal literature of adages and lessons will be effective to the extent that the reader puts all his personal energy into his response. But histories will be even more effective. We have only to fix our gaze upon examples so admirable that we cannot help rehearsing them within ourselves:

Until you have made yourself such that you dare not trip up in your own presence, and until you feel both shame and respect for yourself, (C) let true ideals be kept before your mind [Cicero], (A) keep ever in your mind Cato, Phocion, and Aristides, in whose presence even fools would hide their faults; make them controllers of all your intentions; if these intentions get off the track, your reverence for those men will set them right again. They will keep you in a fair way to be content with yourself, to borrow nothing except from yourself, to arrest your mind and fix it on definite and limited thoughts in which it may take pleasure; and, after understanding the true blessings, which we enjoy in so far as we understand them, to rest content with them, without any desire to prolong life and reputation. That is the counsel of true and natural philosophy, not of an ostentatious and talky philosophy like that of Pliny and Cicero.50

We must turn our eyes toward exemplary individuals so that we can in turn imagine their eyes fixed on us: under the scrutiny of those who are set over us much as teachers and parents are, we are assigned our private truth, we learn the act of reaffirmation that constitutes our personal identity, and we do so purely in confrontation with ourselves (dans la pure présence à soi).

The efficacy of the example depends in large part on its being a completed event; the image of moral perfection that it holds out is conjugated in the past perfect tense. The sharpness of its outline is associated with its remoteness in time. But the past of the example is for those devoted to it secretly inhabited by the future of the must-be. What the exemplary man was we must be in our turn, we shall be if we apply ourselves with all the energy at our disposal. For the ex-emplum, as I hardly need point out, is a preexisting cultural form that offers itself for us to emulate: the goal is to construct our own egos, to shape ourselves by surmounting all that is amorphous and vague in everyday life. It is to surround all that is soft and fluid in our “conditions and humors” with a firm outline copied from life in order to gather our substance together and cause it to solidify. A stamp is thus always impressed upon us. (La Boétie, Montaigne says, is a ‘soul of the old stamp.’’51)

The imitation of the exemplum is a simulacrum, but a simulacrum that aims at identification. It is a role, but a role into which we must pour ourselves by allowing its law to inhabit us. We give ourselves over wholly to the formative power of the example. The latter, by giving us contour and firmness, at first seems either to rob us of our spontaneity or to oblige us to repress it. But before long the example has invaded us fully, pervaded our life. And our second spontaneity will then effortlessly carry out the acts required by the embodied model. To assimilate the exemplary lesson: such is the classical program of a pedagogy whose aim is to inculcate norms through imitation of great lives in which those norms have seen actualized. (This is a good point at which to measure the distance that separates the world of humanism from the contemporary cultural situation. In the humanist world, the example stands out against a horizon of achieved perfection—the ancient world; or else it offers itself in the form of a figure that is at once familiar and transcendent—Christ. By contrast, contemporary ideals—heroes, stars, charismatic figures, many of them ephemeral and interchangeable—are usually taken from the contemporary world itself; they are frequently subject to “manipulation,” which, since exemplary figures are a powerful means of directing our desires, allows them to be exploited for economic and political ends.) 

The ancient exemplum is a figure in a theater that has nothing to do with the theater of the world (un théâtre absolu); it is separated from our world as the “Italian stage” is separated from the hall: the ex-emplum speaks, it carries the force of an admirable maxim, it is simultaneously maxim and act. Even more: it judges us, for it determines the scale of values, the measuring rod against which our merits and demerits are gauged. Exemplary words and images are too powerful ever to vanish from memory. Their imprint is indelible: for the example, as we shall see more than once, is usually deployed in a memorable scene, in which we are offered the hero’s words inextricably intertwined with his life and death. We shall be looking more closely in what follows at two important illustrations of this point: the death of La Boétie and the suicide of Cato.

Quote from the book Montaigne in Motion (Jean Starobinski)