The Carthusian life has always been a vocation for the very few...

 A modern observer, accus­ tomed to privacy, needs no further persuasion of the attraction of the hermit life than a picture of a common cloister, refec­ tory and dormitory. A brief visit to the most celebrated of medieval hermitages—to the Chartreuse, to Camaldoli, the Carceri above Assisi, each set in a position of great natural beauty and quiet, surrounded by woods and streams and mountaintops—reveals some of the positive attractions of the hermit's life. Not all the hermits lived in such places; surprisingly enough, the monks of the Chartreuse and Camaldoli set up houses in the middle of towns such as Pisa and Bologna, but their natural habitat, and the country which inspired their founders, lay in the hills and woods. It was the solitude and peace that first attracted the hermits to these places. If they had thought of natural beauty as an alluring or distracting thing, no doubt they would have rejected it. In this guise it presumably appeared to Milton, when he counted the leaves of Vallombrosa:

Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th’Etrurian shades
High overarch’t imbowr—

and likened them to an army of devils. Yet if the founders of the Chartreuse, Camaldoli and Vallombrosa rejected the idea that the natural beauty of their new homes could be a tempta­tion, they were in each case positively attracted by a dramatic piece of scenery nonetheless. The Italian sites are on hilltops, by an elementary symbolism felt to be—not nearer to heaven, a concept cruder than any they entertained—but above the habitations of men, as it were on Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb. More important, they were inspired by the feats of the fathers of the desert, whose manner of life in sober fact, not without some embellishment in the Lives, was often a heroic struggle against natural forces unnaturally made as tough as man could devise.

The Carthusian life has always been a vocation for the very few. From the first, there were some who felt a superficial call, tasted the rigors and fled. From approximately 1180 to 1186  St. Hugh was prior of the first English Carthusian house, at Witham in Somerset, and his biographer records how one of his monks, called Alexander, fled from Witham after a bitter complaint.

Wretch, you have deluded us...and have brought us to this wild and lonely place, taking us away from our pleasant dwellings and a civilised way of life. You have forced us to lurk amongst beasts and thorns, as if there were not places of monastic retirement in the world.

The whole land is full of communities of monks, and the mutual support provided by the communal life pro­ vides us with a sufficiently good example of religious perfection. Here, alone and without companionship, we become torpid and dull through boredom, seeing no one for days at a time whose example can inspire us, and having only the walls which shut us in to look at.
Your apparently unanswerable arguments shall not con­ vince us, since what you have to say is always in oppo­ sition to our sound and excellent judgement. The yoke of this new law which you tell us must be borne, as if all Christians everywhere would be damned except the Carthusians [a doctrine of which Hugh was conspicu­ously innocent] and the way of salvation open to very few, is almost unendurable in this world. Since we know better, we must not and cannot endure this unprofitable and narrow way of life any longer. We are going to seek something saner, and absolutely refuse to stay for a fur­ ther period.”9

Most of the traffic described in the Life was in the other direction, though Witham, like the Carthusian Order itself, was always of modest size, reflecting its call for the few What is noticeable is that it flourished when other orders were lan­ guishing; in England especially it enjoyed an Indian summer in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when its most famous house, the London Charterhouse, brought silence to the very edge of the city, and the priory of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, the one English house whose remains can still be inspected, was also founded.10

Alexander became a Cluniae monk, and later in life begged to be allowed to return; but Hugh refused.

from the book The Age of the Cloister The Story of Monastic Life in the Middle Ages by Christopher Brooke

The existential problem

In the 1960s and 1970s, an endearing actor, Peter Falk, played a detective named “Columbo” on a television show of the same name. The drama was unique in its genre because it revealed the identity of the murderer in the opening segment. The mystery was how Columbo was going to amass enough evidence to arrest the murderers, who were uncommonly clever and calculating. Happily, Columbo always nailed his target.

If you have read the first parts of this book attentively, you already know that I conclude that human life has meaning. The mystery is how I am going to argue for that conclusion. Although I am not as imaginative a scriptwriter as those who orchestrated Peter Falk‘s television triumphs, I will begin at the logical point: a historical example of a psychological crisis that triggered the quest for meaning.

Enter Leo Tolstoy, the embodiment of existential crisis. The great Russian novelist, the master wordsmith of War and Peace, Anna Kareriirta, and much more, was seemingly blessed. He had a good family, uncommon intelligence, stunning professional success, material well-being, good health, and most of any reasonable catalog of meaningfulness. Yet he was, around the age of fifty, tormented by the thought and psychological experience that life was meaningless. Tolstoy was plagued by the four horsemen of self-doubt: awareness of human mortality, lack of control of the things he most valued, absence of ultimate justifications for his actions, and an acute sense that his life might in the end add up to nothing. Tolstoy was threatened by his inevitable death, the fragility of the things and people he valued, and the apparent lack of foundational justification for his actions. Finitude, contingency, and arbitrariness haunted him.

Sooner or later there would come diseases and death (they had come already) to my dear ones and to me, and there would he nothing left hut stench and worms. All my affairs . . . would sooner or later he forgotten, and I myself should not exist. . . . How could a man fail to see that and live. . . . A person could live only so long as he was drunk; but the moment he sobered up, he could not help seeing that all that was only a deception, and a stupid deception at that!‘

Tolstoy saw no way out of this human predicament. He entertained four possibilities. First, if we remain ignorant of the Facts, then the meaninglessness of human life would not affect our enjoyment of our existence. But ignorance was not an option for Tolstoy or any other educated or intelligent person.

Once we are aware of the facts we cannot retreat to the safety of ignorance no matter how hard we try. Second, we might find consolation in enhancing our power and privilege. By focusing narrowly on personal and professional successes, through immersion in material pleasure, and by reveling in our relative advantages over others, we might avoid the pain of meaninglessness. 

But the road of invidious social comparison is only a diversion from the inevitable truth. We are all born to suffer, die, and be forgotten. Power and privi- lege do not alter the facts; they only divert our gaze. Third, suicide is always an option. Although Tolstoy sometimes called this the choice of “strength and energy,” it is difficult to see this as a solution. Suicide evades the problem of a life by ending it. It does not, typically, create meaning as much as it capitulates to the felt absence of meaning. Fourth, the choice of endurance or “weakness”: continuing to push on, hoping against hope that the meaning of life would make a surprise appearance in the future.

Tolstoy solved his distress by appreciating the lives of simple, uneducated people. Peasants, wanderers, monks, and social dissenters were his models. They had dificult, beast-of-burden lives, yet their religious faith gave them a “consciousness of life” that connected them to meaning. Only religious faith, not reason, can make life meaningful. Tolstoy vowed to link his being with spiritual conviction and action. He espoused humility, vegetarianism, and the value of manual labor, while rejecting luxuries, violence, coercion, and material accumulation. He also advanced the ideal of chastity, while recognizing that the nature and circumstances of people would not permit widespread compliance. Love of fellow humaii beings was a more important value than the ambition, vanity, and lust for individual success or the insulating consolations of an honorable family life. Sentimentalizing the life of peasants and glorifying faith in God permitted Tolstoy to celebrate personal immortality and a grand design, and to reinstate foundational justification for human action.

Critics see Tolstoy as evading the tragedy of life through flight to an imaginary: transcendental afterlife. Putting that issue aside, Tolstoy’s crisis is significant. First, his life illustrates vividly that a meaningful life does not automatically result from the fulfillment of typical human desires. More is required. Second, his solution to the problem of the meaning of life demands a “consciousness of life” or a “faith” that cannot be rationally supported all the way down. Third, his life denionstrates a trinity of the deepest human aspirations: the yearning for a final culmination, a connection to enduring value, and a rational and just universe (“Tolstoy’s trinity”). Fourth, Tolstoy accepts the theistic assumption: Either God exists as the creator of meaning embedded in the universe or there is only chaos and meaninglessness.

Tolstoy concluded that the meaning of life is to discover a way to live such that the question of life’s meaning no longer arises. Find a hetter way to live and the ultimate questions wither away. Tolstoy was incorrect. He did not take his own counsel about ignorance seriously enough: Once we are conscious of the questions, we cannot suppress them, we cannot forget forever. The only solution is to find a way that permits us to ask the ultimate questions, struggle with tentative solutions, yet continue to live energetically. The path of denial through continually distracting engagement dehumanizes us.

The question, “What is the meaning of life?” is about the cosmos and about ourselves. To find out about the cosmos we must distinguish the world from ourselves. The answer to the question deeply influences how we should live. Therefore, the question itself arises from the human condition, from psychological curiosity, often from crisis. The question is riot merely an abstraction fueling intellectual reflection.

One answer, The Religious Solution, is that a Supreme Being or Nature builds a human teleology, or overriding purpose, into the cosmos. If so, the further question is whether an external purpose that supposedly applies to everyone should issue any persuasive existential imperatives for me. Is the individual submerged by universal demands?

Another answer somberly resigns us to Cosmic Meaninglessness: The cos- mos is inherently meaningless and, thus, human life is meaningless regardless of our best efforts to delude ourselves with frantic activity arid joyful amusements.

A third answer advises The Creation of Contingent Meaning: The cosmos is inherently meaningless, but the meaning of human life is the search for and construction of meaning itself. If so, the further question is whether all meaning is equal or, if riot equal, how does meaning relate to value.

From: Belliotti, Raymond A., Happiness is overrated

The News: Mind Control Through “Cognitive Dissonance”

When professionals broadcast one absurdity after another, they begin to see the effects are actually strengthening their own position of authority. It’s a revelation. It’s also a continuation of the tradition of the Trickster archetype. For example, with just a few minor adjustments, Brian Williams can be seen as the sly Reynard the Fox

(The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

From the viewpoint of elite television news, controlling the minds of its audience depends on what’s politely called “cognitive dissonance”:

As the anchor recites a news story, the viewer sees an obvious hole through which he could drive a truck.

The story makes no sense, yet it’s being presented as bland fact. The trusted anchor clearly has no problem with it.

What’s the viewer to do? He experiences a contradiction, a “dissonance.”

For example, this year’s flu vaccine. The US government has admitted the vaccine is geared to a flu virus that isn’t circulating in the population. Therefore, even by conventional standards, the vaccine is useless. But the kicker is, the CDC says people should take the vaccine anyway.

The anchor relays all this information—and never seriously questions the situation, never torpedoes the government for recommending the vaccine.

The average viewer feels a tug, a pulse of discomfort, a push-pull. The vaccine story is idiocy (side one), but the trusted anchor accepts it (side two).

Dissonance.

The top chiefs of news—and top propaganda operatives—anticipate cognitive dissonance. In a real sense, they want it to happen. They make it happen. Over and over.

Why?

Because it throws the viewer into a tailspin. And in that mental state, in his effort to resolve the contradiction, he will normally choose to…give in. Surrender. Believe in the anchor. It’s the easier path.

The viewer will even doubt his own perception. “I see no good reason for Building 7 to collapse, but the news doesn’t bring that up, so…it must be me.”

This is the power of the news. It presents absurdities and then moves right along, as if nothing has happened.

For the viewer, it’s the equivalent of: “Don’t you see that pile-up of smashed cars on the freeway, and the smoke? No? Oh well, it must be me. I guess I was wrong. There isn’t any pile-up.”

The introduction of contradiction, dissonance, and absurdity parading as ordinary reality is an intentional feature of brainwashing.

On the nightly news, the anchor reports that US government debt has risen by another three trillion dollars. He then cuts to a statement from a Federal Reserve spokesman: the new debt level isn’t a problem; in fact, it’s sound monetary policy; it strengthens the economy.

The viewer, caught up in this absurdity, tries to make sense of it, then gives up and passively accepts it. Brainwashing.

Smoothly transitioning from this story, the anchor relays information from the CDC: vaccination rates must achieve 90% in the population, in order to protect people from dangerous viruses. The viewer thinks, “Well, my daughter is already vaccinated, so if she comes into contact with a child who isn’t vaccinated, why would that be a problem for her? Why does 90% of the population have to be vaccinated to keep her safe? She’s already vaccinated.”

The viewer wrestles with this absurdity for a moment, then gives in and accepts what the CDC and the anchor are saying. More passivity. More brainwashing.

The anchor moves right along to the next story: “The US is experiencing one of the coldest winters in history, further evidence of the effects of global warming, according to scientists at the United Nations.”

The viewer shakes his head, tries to deal with this dissonance, surrenders, and accepts what he is hearing. Deeper passivity is the result. Deeper brainwashing.

On and on it goes, day after day, month after month, year after year, on the news.

Contradiction, absurdity, dissonance; acceptance, surrender, passivity.

The same general formula is used in interrogations and formal mind control. It adds up to disorientation of the target.

Most disoriented people opt for the lowest – common-denominator solution: give in; accept the power of the person of authority.

When it comes to the news, that person is the anchor, the narrator, the presenter of reality.

He sows the ground with seeds of dissonance. That is how he gains compliance from the viewer.

If the news anchor experiences moments of conscience and self-doubt, he can tell himself he is doing the work of a journalist: he’s presenting information obtained from reliable sources. If these sources are spouting contradictions and absurdities, so be it. “Nothing better is available.”

Among the many supporters of conventional news is the education system. Most teachers never learn logic, and they don’t teach it. The result? Their students never gain the ability or the courage to reject the news and its dissonances.

What little these students gain from 12 or 16 years of schooling they eventually sacrifice on the altar of consensus reality—as broadcast every night on the screen before them.

In the face of absurdities that never add up or make sense, they surrender their minds.

If you gain enough distance from the news and watch it every night and pick it apart and see every dissonance, you realize the news is utterly Surreal. However, it is sold as utterly Normal. That is its trump card—the ability to sell itself as the ultimate in Normalcy.

That is its greatest achievement: overcoming its deepest contradiction.

Vexman

Original article can be read here

Could I, I thought, be the last coward on earth? How terrifying!

 Maybe our colonel knew why they were shooting, maybe the Germans knew, but I, so help me, hadn't the vaguest idea. As far back as I could search my memory, I hadn't done a thing to the Germans, I'd always treated them friendly and polite. I knew the Germans pretty well, I'd even gone to school in their country when I was little, near Hanover. I'd spoken their language. A bunch of loudmouthed little halfwits, that's what they were, with pale, furtive eyes like wolves; we'd go out to the woods together after school to feel the girls up, or we'd fire popguns or pistols you could buy for four marks. And we drank sugary beer together. But from that to shooting at us right in the middle of the road, without so much as a word of introduction, was a long way, a very long way. If you asked me, they were going too far.

This war, in fact, made no sense at all. It couldn't go on.

Had something weird got into these people? Something I didn't feel at all? I suppose I hadn't noticed it ...

Anyway, my feelings toward them hadn't changed. In spite of everything. I'd have liked to understand their brutality, but what I wanted still more, enormously, with all my heart, was to get out of there, because suddenly the whole business looked to me like a great big mistake.

"In a mess like this," I said to myself, "there's nothing to be done, all you can do is clear out ..."

Over our heads, two millimeters, maybe one millimeter from our temples, those long tempting lines of steel, that bullets make when they're out to kill you, were whistling through the hot summer air.

I'd never felt so useless as I did amid all those bullets in the sunlight. A vast and universal mockery.

I was only twenty at the time. Deserted farms in the distance, empty wide-open churches, as if the peasants had gone out for the day to attend a fair at the other end of the county, leaving everything they owned with us for safekeeping, their countryside, their carts with the shafts pointing in the air, their fields, their barnyards, the road, the trees, even the cows, a chained dog, the works. Leaving us free to do as we pleased while they were gone. Nice of them, in a way. "Still," I said to myself, "if they hadn't gone somewhere else, if there were still somebody here, I'm sure we wouldn't be behaving so badly! So disgustingly! We wouldn't dare in front of them!" But there wasn't a soul to watch us! Nobody but us, like newlyweds that start messing around when all the people have gone home. And another thought I had (behind a tree) was that I wished Déroulède[6]? the one I'd heard so much about?had been there to describe his reactions when a ball tore open his guts. Those Germans squatting on the road, shooting so obstinately, were rotten shots, but they seemed to have ammunition to burn, whole warehouses full, it looked to me. Nobody could say this war was over! I have to hand it to the colonel, his bravery was remarkable. He roamed around in the middle of the road, up and down and back and forth in the midst of the bullets as calmly as if he'd been waiting for a friend on a station platform, except just a tiny bit impatient.

One thing I'd better tell you right away, I'd never been able to stomach the country, I'd always found it dreary, those endless fields of mud, those houses where nobody's ever home, those roads that don't go anywhere. And if to all that you add a war, it's completely unbearable. A sudden wind had come up on both sides of the road, the clattering leaves of the poplars mingled with the sharp crackling sounds aimed at us from down the road. Those unknown soldiers missed us every time, but they spun a thousand deaths around us, so close they seemed to clothe us. I was afraid to move.

That colonel, I could see, was a monster. Now I knew it for sure, he was worse than a dog, he couldn't conceive of his own death. At the same time I realized that there must be plenty of brave men like him in our army, and just as many no doubt in the army facing us. How many, I wondered. One or two million, say several millions in all? The thought turned my fear to panic. With such people this infernal lunacy could go on for ever... . Why would they stop? Never had the world seemed so implacably doomed.

Could I, I thought, be the last coward on earth? How terrifying! ... All alone with two million stark raving heroic madmen, armed to the eyeballs? With and without helmets, without horses, on motorcycles, bellowing, in cars, screeching, shooting, plotting, flying, kneeling, digging, taking cover, bounding over trails, root-toot-tooting, shut up on earth as if it were a loony bin, ready to demolish everything on it, Germany, France, whole continents, everything that breathes, destroy destroy, madder than mad dogs, worshiping their madness (which dogs don't), a hundred, a thousand times madder than a thousand dogs, and a lot more vicious! A pretty mess we were in! No doubt about it, this crusade I'd let myself in for was the apocalypse!

You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex. How, when I left the Place Clichy, could I have imagined such horror? Who could have suspected, before getting really into the war, all the ingredients that go to make up the rotten, heroic, good-for-nothing soul of man? And there I was, caught up in a mass flight into collective murder, into the fiery furnace ... Something had come up from the depths, and this is what happened.

The colonel was still as cool as a cucumber, I watched him as he stood on the embankment, taking little messages sent by the general, reading them without haste as the bullets flew all around him, and tearing them into little pieces. Did none of those messages include an order to put an immediate stop to this abomination? Did no top brass tell him there had been a misunderstanding? A horrible mistake? A misdeal? That some-body'd got it all wrong, that the plan had been for maneuvers, a sham battle, not a massacre! Not at all! "Keep it up, colonel! You're doing fine!" That's what General des Entrayes,[7] the head of our division and commander over us all, must have written in those notes that were being brought every five minutes by a courier, who looked greener and more shitless each time. I could have palled up with that boy, we'd have been scared together. But we had no time to fraternize. So there was no mistake? So there was no law against people shooting at people they couldn't even see! It was one of the things you could do without anybody reading you the riot act. In fact, it was recognized and probably encouraged by upstanding citizens, like the draft, or marriage, or hunting! ... No two ways about it. I was suddenly on the most intimate terms with war. I'd lost my virginity. You've got to be pretty much alone with her as I was then to get a good look at her, the slut, full face and profile. A war had been switched on between us and the other side, and now it was burning! Like the current between the two carbons of an arc lamp! And this lamp was in no hurry to go out! It would get us all, the colonel and everyone else, he looked pretty spiffy now. but he wouldn't roast up any bigger than me when the current from the other side got him between the shoulders. There are different ways of being condemned to death. Oh! What wouldn't I have given to be in jail instead of here! What a fool I'd been! If only I had had a little foresight and stolen something or other when it would have been so easy and there was still time. I never think of anything. You come out of jail alive, out of a war you don't! The rest is blarney. If only I'd had time, but I didn't. There was nothing left to steal. How pleasant it would be in a cozy little jailhouse, I said to myself, where the bullets couldn't get in. Where they never got in! I knew of one that was ready and waiting, all sunny and warm! I saw it in my dreams, the jailhouse of Saint-Germain to be exact, right near the forest. I knew it well, I'd often passed that way. How a man changes! I was a child in those days, and that jail frightened me. Because I didn't know what men are like. Never again will I believe what they say or what they think. Men are the thing to be afraid of, always, men and nothing else.

How much longer would this madness have to go on before these monsters dropped with exhaustion? How long could a convulsion like this last? Months? Years? How many?

Maybe till everyone's dead? All these lunatics? Every last one of them? And seeing events were taking such a desperate turn, I decided to stake everything on one throw, to make one last try, to see if I couldn't stop the war, just me, all by myself! At least in this one spot where I happened to be.

The colonel was only two steps away from me, pacing. I'd talk to him. Something I'd never done. This was a time for daring. The way things stood, there was practically nothing to lose. "What is it?" he'd ask me, startled, I imagined, at my bold interruption. Then I'd explain the situation as I saw it, and we'd see what he thought. The essential is to talk things over. Two heads are better than one.

I was about to take that decisive step when, at that very moment, who should arrive on the double but a dismounted cavalryman (as we said in those days), exhausted, shaky in the joints, holding his helmet upside-down in one hand like Belisarius,[8] trembling, all covered with mud, his face even greener than the courier I mentioned before. He stammered and gulped. You'd have thought he was struggling to climb out of a tomb, and it made him sick to his stomach. Could it be that this spook didn't like bullets any more than I did? That he saw them coming like me?

"What is it?" Disturbed, the colonel stopped him short; the glance he flung at that ghost was of steel.

It made our colonel very angry to see that wretched cavalryman so incorrectly clad and shitting in his pants with fright. The colonel had no use for fear, that was a sure thing. And especially that helmet held in hand like a bowler was really too much in a combat regiment like ours that was just getting into the war. It was as if this dismounted cavalryman had seen the war and taken his hat off in greeting.

Under the colonel's withering look the wobbly messenger snapped to attention, pressing his little finger to the seam of his trousers as the occasion demanded. And so he stood on the embankment, stiff as a board, swaying, the sweat running down his chin strap; his jaws were trembling so hard that little abortive cries kept coming out of him, like a puppy dreaming. You couldn't make out whether he wanted to speak to us or whether he was crying.

Our Germans squatting at the end of the road had just changed instruments. Now they were having their fun with a machine gun, sputtering like handfuls of matches, and all around us flew swarms of angry bullets, as hostile as wasps.

The man finally managed to articulate a few words:

"Colonel, sir, Sergeant Barousse has been killed."

"So what?"

"He was on his way to meet the bread wagon on the Etrapes road, sir."

"So what?"

"He was blown up by a shell!"

"So what, dammit!"

"That's what, colonel, sir."

"Is that all?"

"Yes, sir, that's all, colonel, sir."

"What about the bread?" the colonel asked.

That was the end of the dialogue, because, I remember distinctly, he barely had time to say

"What about the bread?" That was all. After that there was nothing but flame and noise. The kind of noise you wouldn't have thought possible. Our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth were so full of that noise I thought it was all over and I'd turned into noise and flame myself. After a while the flame went away, the noise stayed in my head, and my arms and legs trembled as if somebody were shaking me from behind. My limbs seemed to be leaving me, but then in the end they stayed on. The smoke stung my eyes for a long time, and the prickly smell of powder and sulfur hung on, strong enough to kill all the fleas and bedbugs in the whole world.

I thought of Sergeant Barousse, who had just gone up in smoke like the man told us. That was good news. Great, I thought to myself. That makes one less stinker in the regiment! He wanted to have me court-martialed for a can of meat. "It's an ill wind," I said to myself. In that respect, you can't deny it, the war seemed to serve a purpose now and then! I knew of three or four more in the regiment, real scum, that I'd have gladly helped to make the acquaintance of a shell, like Barousse.

As for the colonel, I didn't wish him any hard luck. But he was dead too. At first I didn't see him. The blast had carried him up the embankment and laid him down on his side, right in the arms of the dismounted cavalryman, the courier, who was finished too. They were embracing each other for the moment and for all eternity, but the cavalryman's head was gone, all he had was an opening at the top of the neck, with blood in it bubbling and glugging like jam in a kettle. The colonel's belly was wide open, and he was making a nasty face about it. It must have hurt when it happened. Tough shit for him! If he'd beat it when the shooting started, it wouldn't have happened.

All that tangled meat was bleeding profusely.

Shells were still bursting to the right and left of the scene.

I'd had enough, I was glad to have such a good pretext for making myself scarce. I even hummed a tune, and reeled like when you've been rowing a long way and your legs are wobbly. "Just one shell!" I said to myself. "Amazing how quick just one shell can clean things up. Could you believe it?" I kept saying to myself. "Could you believe it!" There was nobody left at the end of the road. The Germans were gone. But that little episode had taught me a quick lesson, to keep to the cover of the trees. I was in a hurry to get back to our command post, to see if anyone else in our regiment had been killed on reconnaissance. There must be some good dodges, I said to myself, for getting taken prisoner ... Here and there in the fields a few puffs of smoke still clung to the ground.

"Maybe they're all dead," I thought. "Seeing they refuse to understand anything whatsoever, the best solution would be for them all to get killed instantly ... The war would be over, and we'd go home ... Maybe we'd march across the Place Clichy in triumph ... Just one or two survivors ... In my dream ... Strapping good fellows marching behind the general, all the rest would be dead like the colonel ... Like Barousse ... like Vanaille (another bastard) ... etc. They'd shower us with decorations and flowers, we'd march through the Arc de Triomphe, We'd go to a restaurant, they'd serve us free of charge, we'd never pay for anything anymore, never as long as we lived! We're heroes! we'd say when they brought the bill ... Defenders of the Patrie! That would do it! ... We'd pay with little French flags! ... The lady at the cash desk would refuse to take money from heroes, she'd even give us some, with kisses thrown in, as we filed out. Life would be worth living."

As I was running, I noticed my arm was bleeding, just a little though, a far from satisfactory wound, a scratch. I'd have to start all over.

It was raining again, the fields of Flanders oozed with dirty water. For a long time I didn't meet a soul, only the wind and a little later the sun. From time to time, I couldn't tell from where, a bullet would come flying merrily through the air and sunshine, looking for me, intent on killing me, there in the wilderness. Why? Never again, not if I lived another hundred years, would I go walking in the country. A solemn oath.

(...)

From time to time one of us disappeared. That meant the case against him was ready and the court-martial would sentence him to a disciplinary battalion, to the front, or, if he was very lucky, to the Insane Asylum in Clamart.

More dubious warriors kept arriving, from every branch of service, some very young, some almost old, some terrified, some ranting and swaggering. Their wives and parents came to see them, and their children too, staring wide-eyed, on Thursdays. They all wept buckets in the visiting room, especially in the evening. All the helplessness of a world at war wept when the visits were over and the women and children left, dragging their feet in the bleak gas-lit corridor. A herd of sniveling riffraff, that's what they were; disgusting.

To Lola it was still an adventure, coming to see me in that prison, as you might have called it. We two didn't cry. Where would we have got our tears from?

"Is it true that you've gone mad, Ferdinand?" she asked me one Thursday.

"It's true," I admitted.

"But they'll treat you here?"

"There's no treatment for fear, Lola."

"Is it as bad as all that?"

"It's worse, Lola. My fear is so bad that if I die a natural death later on, I especially don't want to be cremated. I want them to leave me in the ground, quietly rotting in the graveyard, ready to come back to life ... Maybe ... how do we know? But if they burned me to ashes, Lola, don't you see, it would be over, really over ... A skeleton, after all, is still something like a man ... It's more likely to come back to life than ashes ... Reduced to ashes, you're finished! ... What do you think? ... Naturally the war ..."

"Oh, Ferdinand! Then you're an absolute coward! You're as loathsome as a rat ..."

"Yes, an absolute coward, Lola, I reject the war and everything in it ... I don't deplore it ... I don't resign myself to it ... I don't weep about it ... I just plain reject it and all its fighting men. I don't want anything to do with them or it. Even if there were nine hundred and ninety-five million of them and I were all alone, they'd still be wrong and I'd be right. Because I'm the one who knows what I want: I don't want to die."

"But it's not possible to reject the war, Ferdinand! Only crazy people and cowards reject the war when their country is in danger ..."

"If that's the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name, for instance, of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War? ... Did you ever try to find out who any of them were? ... No! ... You see? You never tried ... As far as you're concerned they're as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, as your morning bowel movement ... Get it into your head, Lola, that they died for nothing!

For absolutely nothing, the idiots! I say it and I'll say it again! I've proved it! The one thing that counts is life! In ten thousand years, I'll bet you, this war, remarkable as it may seem to us at present, will be utterly forgotten ... Maybe here and there in the world a handful of scholars will argue about its causes or the dates of the principal hecatombs that made it famous ... Up until now those are the only things about men that other men have thought worth remembering after a few centuries, a few years, or even a few hours ... I don't believe in the future, Lola ..."

When she heard me flaunting my shameful state like that, she lost all sympathy for me ... Once and for all she put me down as contemptible, and decided to leave me without further ado. It was too much. When I left her that evening at the hospital gate, she didn't kiss me. Evidently the thought that a condemned man might have no vocation for death was too much for her.

From: Journey to the End of the Night

by

LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE

Europe does not know what it really means to despair

 

The Trial describes what happens to a man when he starts to think: sooner or later he condemns himself as unjustified, and then despair begins (K.’s execution, the execution of hope, is the beginning of despair—henceforth he is a dead man, like Connolly and Camus and so many other intelligent Europeans, and do what he may he can never quite forget it). It is only at this point that the Buddha’s Teaching begins to be intelligible. But it must be remembered that for Connolly and the others*, death at the end of this life is the final death, and the hell of despair in which they live will come to an end in a few years’ time—why, then, should they give up their distractions, when, if things get too bad, a bullet through their brain is enough? It is only when one understands that death at the end of this life is not the final end, that to follow the Buddha’s Teaching is seen to be not a mere matter of choice but a matter of necessity . Europe does not know what it really means to despair.

Nanavira Thera →

* Lichtenberg: To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.
***

He stayed late on deck, after dinner, but that did not help him, for when he went below, he could not sleep. This surcease from life had failed him. It was too much. He turned on the electric light and tried to read. One of the volumes was a Swinburne. He lay in bed, glancing through its pages, until suddenly he became aware that he was reading with interest. He finished the stanza, attempted to read on, then came back to it. He rested the book face downward on his breast and fell to thinking. That was it. The very thing. Strange that it had never come to him before. That was the meaning of it all; he had been drifting that way all the time, and now Swinburne showed him that it was the happy way out. He wanted rest, and here was rest awaiting him. He glanced at the open port–hole. Yes, it was large enough. For the first time in weeks he felt happy. At last he had discovered the cure of his ill. He picked up the book and read the stanza slowly aloud:-

'From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives forever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.'

He looked again at the open port. Swinburne had furnished the key. Life was ill, or, rather, it had become ill—an unbearable thing. "That dead men rise up never!" That line stirred him with a profound feeling of gratitude. It was the one beneficent thing in the universe. When life became an aching weariness, death was ready to soothe away to everlasting sleep. But what was he waiting for? It was time to go.

He arose and thrust his head out the port–hole, looking down into the milky wash. The Mariposa was deeply loaded, and, hanging by his hands, his feet would be in the water. He could slip in noiselessly. No one would hear. A smother of spray dashed up, wetting his face. It tasted salt on his lips, and the taste was good. He wondered if he ought to write a swan–song, but laughed the thought away. There was no time. He was too impatient to be gone.

Turning off the light in his room so that it might not betray him, he went out the port–hole feet first. His shoulders stuck, and he forced himself back so as to try it with one arm down by his side. A roll of the steamer aided him, and he was through, hanging by his hands. When his feet touched the sea, he let go. He was in a milky froth of water. The side of the Mariposa rushed past him like a dark wall, broken here and there by lighted ports. She was certainly making time. Almost before he knew it, he was astern, swimming gently on the foam–crackling surface.

A bonita struck at his white body, and he laughed aloud. It had taken a piece out, and the sting of it reminded him of why he was there. In the work to do he had forgotten the purpose of it. The lights of the Mariposa were growing dim in the distance, and there he was, swimming confidently, as though it were his intention to make for the nearest land a thousand miles or so away.

It was the automatic instinct to live. He ceased swimming, but the moment he felt the water rising above his mouth the hands struck out sharply with a lifting movement. The will to live, was his thought, and the thought was accompanied by a sneer. Well, he had will,—ay, will strong enough that with one last exertion it could destroy itself and cease to be.

He changed his position to a vertical one. He glanced up at the quiet stars, at the same time emptying his lungs of air. With swift, vigorous propulsion of hands and feet, he lifted his shoulders and half his chest out of water. This was to gain impetus for the descent. Then he let himself go and sank without movement, a white statue, into the sea. He breathed in the water deeply, deliberately, after the manner of a man taking an anaesthetic. When he strangled, quite involuntarily his arms and legs clawed the water and drove him up to the surface and into the clear sight of the stars.

The will to live, he thought disdainfully, vainly endeavoring not to breathe the air into his bursting lungs. Well, he would have to try a new way. He filled his lungs with air, filled them full. This supply would take him far down. He turned over and went down head first, swimming with all his strength and all his will. Deeper and deeper he went. His eyes were open, and he watched the ghostly, phosphorescent trails of the darting bonita. As he swam, he hoped that they would not strike at him, for it might snap the tension of his will. But they did not strike, and he found time to be grateful for this last kindness of life.

Down, down, he swam till his arms and leg grew tired and hardly moved. He knew that he was deep. The pressure on his ear–drums was a pain, and there was a buzzing in his head. His endurance was faltering, but he compelled his arms and legs to drive him deeper until his will snapped and the air drove from his lungs in a great explosive rush. The bubbles rubbed and bounded like tiny balloons against his cheeks and eyes as they took their upward flight. Then came pain and strangulation. This hurt was not death, was the thought that oscillated through his reeling consciousness. Death did not hurt. It was life, the pangs of life, this awful, suffocating feeling; it was the last blow life could deal him.

His wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn about, spasmodically and feebly. But he had fooled them and the will to live that made them beat and churn. He was too deep down. They could never bring him to the surface. He seemed floating languidly in a sea of dreamy vision. Colors and radiances surrounded him and bathed him and pervaded him. What was that? It seemed a lighthouse; but it was inside his brain—a flashing, bright white light. It flashed swifter and swifter. There was a long rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast and interminable stairway. And somewhere at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.

From Jack London

Martin Eden

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)