Montaigne seems like the cool kind of guy that you'd like to sit down and bullshit with over a few beers. At least, that's the portrait of him that comes through Sarah Blakewell's biography of him in How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers. He liked good conversation, he liked to discuss what it means to live well, and he didn't take himself or his opinions too seriously. What more could you hope for in a good friend?
Blakewell says that Montaigne adopted this attitude in response to two major events in his life. First, after obsessing about death for a number of years--"He became so afraid of losing his life that he could no longer enjoy it while he had it"--his own near death experience gave him the attitude that it wasn't really a big deal: "'Don't worry about death' became his most fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live." The other event was the death of his great friend Etienne La Boetie. Montaigne felt compelled to continue their dialog, internalizing La Boetie's voice as a counterpoint to his own, "He is still lodged in me so entire and so alive that I cannot believe that he is so irrevocably buried or so totally removed from our communication." La Boetie became an ever-present audience for Montaigne, holding him to exalted standards of thought and conduct.
But there was another event that Blakewell says really started Montaigne's wheels turning, the famous moment when he looked his cat in the eyes and wondered just who is playing with whom. "When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?" That moment becomes the central emblem of his essays--taking notice of the particular and small moments in his life and looking at them from a slightly different point of view. "The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience--but as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm."
Blakewell takes great pains to put Montaigne in the middle of his times--not only 16th century France, torn by Reformation strife between the Catholic League of Henri Guise and the Huguenots of Henri Navarre, but also as a writer coming soon after the recovery of the three great Hellenistic traditions of Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism, which are "held together above all by their shared pursuit of eudaimonia or human flourishing, and by their belief that the best way of attaining it is through equanimity or balance." While his contemporaries were destroying each other in savage and brutal ways--think Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre--Montaigne was seeking meaning and joy in reflecting on the "familiar, uncertain, and ordinary" events of his own life. How could he do it?
First off, he learned not to take himself or his opinions seriously. His famous motto, of course, was "What do I know?" and he extended that to all human knowledge. "In the end, the oddity of the human mind is all we can be sure of." Our knowledge of the world and even our ourselves is empty compared to what is unknown, and it is subject to all the foibles and mistakes in such an incomplete creature as man. Without a need to find a definite answer to everything, Montaigne could relax and enjoy life as it came to him. "Montaigne places everything in doubt, but then he deliberately reaffirms everything that is familiar, uncertain, and ordinary—for that is all we have."
And that includes pain, suffering, and what most of us would call evil. In addition to the sectarian violence that raged around him, Montaigne experienced the death of a number of close friends and family, including all but one of the children born to him. He also suffered debilitating attacks of kidney stones frequently as he aged (the picture of a stone in the book is positively gruesome—it looks like the jacks I used to play with as a kid), one of which eventually became infected and led to his death by suffocation. But "'bad spots' were everywhere, he wrote in a late essay. We do better to 'slide over this world a bit lightly and on the surface.'" Shit happens. As Don Henley says, "Get Over It," and get on with your life as the best you can. What else you gonna do?
In the end, Blakewell's Montaingne sounds rather like a Buddhist. Life is suffering—dukkha—but learning to pay attention to the moment and learning to look at things with different points of view gives us back out ability to live fully. Montaigne even seems to echo the doctrine of anicca—the impermanence of things: "If we could see the world at a different speed, he reflected, we would see everything like this, as a perpetual multiplication and vicissitude of forms.' Matter existed in an endless branloire: a …sixteenth century peasant dance, which meant something like 'the shake.' The world was a cosmic wobble: a 'shimmy.'" How much of this Buddhist Montaigne is Montaigne and how much is Sarah Blakewell is another matter, for as she points out, every generation has its own reading of Montaigne, critics remixing and remaking a Montaigne who resembles themselves, "not only individually but as a species." Readers take from Montaigne what they want to take, which, Montaigne and his heirs, feels is as it should be. Virginia Woolf felt this way: Montaigne's readers were "a series of self-interested individuals puzzling over their own lives, yet doing it cooperatively. All share a quality that can simply thought of as 'humanity'… minds threaded together—how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's and Euripides…it is this common mind that binds the whole world together." It ought to be worth a beer or two to find out.
Author: Blakewell, Sarah
Date Published: 2011
Length: 387 pp
electronic print
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