"How to Live or A Life of Montaigne" by Sarah Bakewell

[Mal7]

I have just about finished reading How to Live or A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell (London: Chatto & Windus, 2010).

I found this biography/history of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) a good introduction to Montaigne, his life and times, and his Essays. Montaigne's father Pierre adopted an unusual form of educating his son Michel. No one in the household was allowed to speak French or another local dialect to him, but had to learn a few Latin phrases if they wanted to communicate with him. Montaigne's father employed a Latin tutor, and Latin was the first language Michel learned. By the time he entered the public school system at the age of 6, he knew Latin better than the school teacher.

Bakewell writes about how Montaigne was influenced by the three Hellenistic philosophies of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Pyrrhic Skepticism, and became a kind of modern day (in his day) Stoic and Skeptic. Montaigne had a small medal cast for himself with the Pyrrhonic maxim "epekho" and his coat of arms on it. "Epekho" is a Greek word meaning something like "I suspend judgment".

On the limits of human knowledge of history:

"Even if all that has come down to us by report from the past should be true and known by someone, it would be less than nothing compared with what is unknown." [- Montaigne] How puny is the knowledge of even the most curious person, he reflected, and how astounding the world by comparison. To quote Hugo Friedrich again, Montaigne had a 'deep need to be surprised by what is unique, what cannot be categorized, what is mysterious.'

And of all that was mysterious, nothing amazed him more than himself, the most unfathomable phenomenon of all. Countless times, he noticed himself changing an opinion from one extreme to the other, or shifting from emotion to emotion within seconds.

My footing is so unsteady and so insecure, I find it so vacillating and ready to slip, and my sight is so unreliable, that on an empty stomach I feel myself another man than after a meal. If my health smiles upon me, and the brightness of a beautiful day, I am a fine fellow; if I have a corn bothering my toe, I am surly, unpleasant and unapproachable.

- Bakewell, pages 128-129.

Bakewell writes about how Pascal and Descartes both reacted, in different ways, against Montaigne's cheeful non-dogmatic skepticism. Descartes by thinking he could methodically obtain certain knowledge, and Pascal through religious faith.

Montaigne lived through the death of a very close friend (La Boetie, the author of Voluntary Servitude, discussed on another forum thread) at a young age, the deaths at young ages of all of his daughters bar one, civil wars in France, plague, witch hunts, and Protestant versus Catholic political troubles. He was one of the few people to speak out against the persecution of witches, saying it was "'putting a very high price on one's conjectures' to have someone roasted alive on their account." (page 209).

Writing on La Boetie's Voluntary Servitude, Bakewell says:

Tyranny creates a drama of submission and domination, rather like the tense battle confrontation scenes often described by Montaigne. The populace willingly gives itself up, and this only encourages the tyrant to take away everything they have - even their lives, if he sends them to war to fight for him. Something in human beings drives them to a 'deep forgetfulness of freedom.' Everyone, from top to bottom of the system, is mesmerized by their voluntary servitude and by the power of habit, since often they have known nothing else. Yet all they need to do is to wake up and withdraw their cooperation.

Whenever a few individuals do break free, adds La Boetie, it is often because their eyes have been opened by the study of history. Learning of similar past tyrannies, they recognize the pattern in their own society.

Montaigne's introspective essays combine self-observation, along with diverse facts such as new information about peoples in the new world, or curious anecdotes about animals from Plutarch, suc as whether the remora can hold back a ship in the water by latching on to it..

[. . .] he thought that the solution to a world out of joint was for each person to get themselves back in joint: to learn 'how to live,' beginning with the art of keeping your feet on the ground. You can indeed find a message of inactivity, laziness, and disengagement in Montaigne, and probably also a justification for doing nothing when tyranny takes over, rather than resisting it. But many passages in the Essays seem rather to suggest that you should engage with the future; specifically, you should not turn your back on the real historical world in order to dream of paradise and religious transcendence. Montaigne provides all the encouragement anyone could need to respect others, to refrain from murder on the pretense of pleasing God, and to resist the urge that periodically makes humans destroy everything around them and 'set back life to its beginníngs.' As Flaubert told his friends, 'Read Montaigne . . . He will calm you.' But, as he also added: 'Read him in order to live.'

- Bakewell, pages 220-221.

 

[mcb]

Thank you for your thoughtful review. I see that the title is also available as an audiobook, and it is in now my reading queue.

 

[Anthony]

Yes he was an amazing person. I didn't read the book you mentioned but I did read another
one: When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?: Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life,
along with his essays (book 2 and 3 mostly).
He is definetly worth reading, not just because he was a practicing Stoic, but also for his sense of humour.
It appears to me that Stoics seem to come very close to figuring out the 4th way teaching.

For instance self-observation

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.

To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.

This sounds something like self-remembering

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.

 

[Mal7]

I was also amused to read in Bakewell's book about some of the liberties the first English translator made in translating Montaigne's Essays into English. This was the translation made by John Florio, published in 1603. For example:

1. Montaigne's phrase "nos Allemans, noyez dan le vin" (our Germans, drowned in wine) is translated by Florio as:
"our carowsing tospot German souldiers, when they are most plunged in their cups, and as drunke as Rats."

2. A phrase that became "werewolves, goblins, and chimeras" in Donald Frame's 20th century translation, in Florio was translated as: "Larves, Hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellowes, and other such Bug-beares and Chimeraes".