My extended experiment in a slightly different approach -- rising at dawn, naturally, but then heading straight to the remote enclosure at the back of our property we call Dogland, sipping coffee while the pooches slowly return to life themselves, then rounding up the posse and hitting the streets -- has been instructive. It's instructed me that I'm most productive when I head to the keyboard and this very venue first.
So, starting now, it's back to that: to rising well before dawn and working while the household sleeps. The great challenge to overcome, of course, is the pleasure of sleep in warm sheets, in this increasingly wintry autumn. It's easy to say you'll sleep when you're dead. Well, it's easy to do that too. It's not so easy to fling those sheets back and greet the cold dark night, morning after morning, until the habit forms. But habit is a tremendous ally, in all good things.
(Just ask Edward Bear, aka Pooh, about his honey habit. We saw his movie yesterday, Christopher Robin-highlight of Fall Break!)
My inspiration, aside from direct personal memory, comes from all those writers who've successfully followed a similiar routine. Anthony Trollope, for one: “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Here we go.
Today's small task in CoPhi is to introduce three gallic wits of half a millennium ago whose preoccupations have barely aged: Rene Descartes, Michel Montaigne (the anti-Descartes who preceded him), and Blaise Pascal. Of the three, Montaigne the peripatetic skeptic essayist, is most to my taste. I so envy his book-lined tower, and his pluck in inventing the personal essay.
From the windows on the top floor he had a commanding view of the estate and could give orders and instructions to the estate workers. As he walked around the Tower he could see above him painted on the beams favorite quotes (mainly in Latin, but some in Greek) from his favorite Classical writers; Also as he walked, thought and dictated he would stop and consult his books to check a quote or story... Reading the world – visiting Montaigne’s Tower
The quotable essayist:
- “On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”
- “I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
- “When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
- “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.”
- “To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere."
- "To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”
- “There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.”
- “When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.”
- “He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.”
- “Not being able to govern events, I govern myself”
- “The thing I fear most is fear.”
- “Saying is one thing and doing is another”
- “There is no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally.”
- “Que sçais-je?" (What do I know?)”
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