Montaigne

LISTEN. Today in Happiness we turn to Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.

First inessential question: 

How to pronounce his name? I'm just going to go ahead and anglicize it. Mon-tane. Two syllables, no lilt or continental inflection. We're not French here in middle Tennessee, though we do sometimes add gratuitous syllables. Give him a "ye" at the end if you must. But what do I know?

That was his slogan. Or one of them. Another: ‘I am a man and think nothing human is foreign to me’... Rendered in Latin on one of the beams of his tower refuge:

 

He also said:

• Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.
• Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
• No man is a hero to his own valet.
• The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. 
• 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.
• If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.
• There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.
• Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
• The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
• Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
• Saying is one thing and doing is another. 

And so much more. 

Second question: 

What makes him a Happiness philosopher?

Short answer: 

Relatively early in life he figured out how not to worry about death, how to attend to the larger significance of small things, how to write out his frustrations, confusions, and general discontents, how to read without losing his own original voice, how to survive love and loss, how to be woke, generally how to take himself less seriously but more instructively...  He learned that we can be happy without knowing everything, or possibly anything. 

“The trick [writes Bakewell] is to maintain a kind of naïve 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.”

And he makes his readers feel like his intimate friends, thus giving essayists ever-after an indispensable insight into their craft. "The illusion of confiding in the reader alone is what essayists play on," essays master essayist Adam Gopnik. "You’re my best friend, Montaigne, like every subsequent essayist of his type, implies to his readers. By dramatizing an isolation that can be cured only by an unknown reader, the confidences come to belong to all." 

Above all, Gopnik concludes, Montaigne was the pioneer humanist without whom our modern liberal pursuit of happiness could not be imagined, let alone executed.

Here was a far-reaching skepticism about authority (either the ancients’ or the actual), a compassion toward suffering, a hatred of cruelty that we now imagine as human instinct, though all experience shows us that it must be inculcated. Montaigne, having no access to the abstract concepts that were later laid on this foundation, gives us deeper access to them, because he was the one who laid it. The liberalism that came after humanism may be what keeps his memory alive and draws us to him. The humanism that has to exist before liberalism can even begin is what Montaigne is there to show us still.

So maybe I need to add Montaigne to our A&P course next semester, as we explore all those 'isms?  

What I like most about Montaigne is that he wrote his mind, up there in that tower, and in the process found his bliss. And as we learn in chapter 4, he read a lot and "forgot most of what [he] read." I can relate.