My family holds an annual “Christmas draw,” so rather than buying cheap gifts for a dozen people we can buy a nice gift for one. On Christmas 2011 my brother-in-law, a retired college professor and skilled chef, gave two gifts to which I often turn: an excellent kitchen knife, and a volume of Michel de Montaigne’s complete works. Well, “often” is twice misplaced: I appreciate the kitchen knife every day, Montaigne maybe once a year.
“Of all the ‘Great Books,’” my brother-in-law wrote, “Montaigne’s is the one which tell us not how the universe works, nor how the metaphysical accounts for the way things are, but how to be in the world. He shuffles along making sense of his experience as best he can.”
Shuffling through CoronaWorld, I decide to dip in.
Born in 1533 Montaigne was, a Scottish doctor later summarized, “a man of the Renaissance; a Gascon and a Jew. His grandfather was a seller of dried fish and of wine; his father a wine-merchant, and his mother a Protestant of Jewish blood from Spain.” At 38 he “retired” from a minor political career to his estate near Bordeaux, where he began to write what became three volumes of essays.
It is not enough to have gotten away from the crowd, it is not enough to move; we must get away from the gregarious instincts that are inside us, we must sequester ourselves and repossess ourselves.” Solitude seekers cannot escape the past; “we take our chains along with us.” Still, he insists, “We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. -- Of Solitude (1572)
Each essay covers a single topic often a launchpad for ideas of all sorts, spiced by quotations from Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Ovid, Lucretius, Petrarch, Seneca, Juvenal. His thoughts swerve, double back, reconsider, contradict; for a pedant, his humility is refreshing.
These are my humors and my opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed. I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me. I have no authority to be believed, nor do I want it, feeling myself too ill-instructed to instruct others. -- Of The Education of Children (1579)
Montaigne did not in fact retire; while continuing to write, he grew more entangled in political life. Himself a Catholic royalist (Judaism having been barred in France since the 1300s), he befriended Protestant convert Henri de Navarre (first in line to the French throne), served as Navarre’s emissary to the Catholic court of Henri III. As twice-elected mayor of Bordeaux, France’s third-largest town, his negotiating skills helped keep the city at peace and relative prosperity in an era of eight Catholic-Protestant French wars.
His complicated ties opened him to other ways of living and thinking. In an intolerant era he embodied gentleness, compromise, tolerance.
Because I feel myself tied down to one form, I do not oblige everybody else to espouse it, as all others do. I believe in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life; and in contrast with the common run of men, I more easily admit difference than resemblance between us. -- Of Cato The Younger (1574)
Not because Socrates said it, but because it is really my feeling, and perhaps excessively so, I consider all men my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as I do a Frenchman, setting this national bond after the universal and common one. -- Of Vanity (1588)
Such inclinations led him to adore the cosmopolitan spirit of Paris: “She has had my heart since childhood. … I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am a Frenchman only this great city: great in population, great in the felicity of her situation, but above all great and incomparable in variety and diversity of the good things of life; the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world.”
In the last month of his second mayoral term, Bordeaux was struck by plague; when a worker on his estate contracted the disease, Montaigne and his family fled. More than 15,000 people, about a third of the city’s population, died. When invited to preside over the election of his successor, he declined to return.
See these people: because they are dying in the same month, children, young people, old people, they are no longer stunned, they no longer bewail one another. I saw some who feared to remain behind, as in a horrible solitude; and found them generally to be concerned only about their burial. It pained them to see the bodies scattered amid the fields, at the mercy of the animals that promptly appeared in swarms. -- Of Physiognomy (1588)
In crisis, Montaigne seeks comfort by focusing on the immediate. He quotes Seneca: “What good does it do you to welcome and anticipate your bad fortune, to lose the present through fear of the future, and to be miserable now because you are to be so in time?”
A second journalistic instinct toward mental health: Pay attention. Walking east on Gates Avenue, I take notes:
A woman on a stoop yells into a videophone, ignoring two kids playing on the sidewalk. The woman, who’s not Chinese, points her phone at her T-shirt’s Chinese characters: “You see this? That means ‘Get rich lucky’ in Mandarin. I designed this. It has the number 88 on the back. Eight is a lucky number in China. Very auspicious. I’m still trying to sell these. I’ll send you one.”
A man, mask around his neck, sits on a stoop, puffs a thick stogie, listens to Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness.”
Six maskless people in their 20s and 30s array themselves on a stoop festooned with Carolina-blue balloons; they pose, the camera clicks, they cheer. A woman hops up, says, “Let’s do one more!”
“You’re not listening to me,” says a woman who’s brought her skillsaw to the sidewalk, orange extension cord snaking to the basement. Her goggles are around her neck, mask in place. An older man is shaking his head. “You can’t turn off the gas. You can’t mess with the landlord that way. He’ll kick you out. Listen to me!”
Turning north on Franklin Avenue I see a huge bubble floating in a small front yard. I scan, detect no bubble source. The bubble floats, nonchalant; I watch til it pops.
As I turn west on Greene Avenue a teenager skateboards down the middle of the street, left foot occasionally kicking on the downhill run, afro blown back, mask in hand, face creased by a smile.
It takes management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it. Especially at this moment, when I perceive that mine is so brief in time, I try to increase it in weight; I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it, and to compensate for the haste of its ebb by my vigor in using it. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it. -- Of Experience (1588)
(New York state numbers as of Wednesday: 213,779 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 5.7 percent; 752 dead, to a total of 11,586, up 6.9 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 28,214, up 9.5 percent.)
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