Montaigne is Fascinating, but I am Officially Ready to be Done with Him

Wow, so Montaigne. That’s some set of essays. The collected works showed up on my doorstep from Amazon a few weeks ago and I realized I’d better get started if I didn’t want to throw my back out, carrying Sir Michel around South America.

[On a starting logistical note, I’m not sure how everyone else is going to make these entries, so I’m just kind of feeling out what will be most effective for me/us. I’m looking at the forum as a place to comment on whatever I think is particularly interesting, or odd, or relevant to my (our?) own writing. As I can already tell from this start, I think my contributions will be fairly casual, so hopefully that style works for everyone. I do think we’ll be the only four people in the world reading it, so that’s helpful.]

The first thing I want to say about Montaigne’s collected essays is this: Way to not limit yourself in subject matter, huh? I am embarrassed to admit that I knew very little about Montaigne before picking this up, and in scanning through the essay titles, I couldn’t help but laugh at the range:
            
             On the Custom of Wearing Clothing
             On War-horses
             On Judging Someone Else’s Death
             On the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers
             On Liars
             On Sleep

So great.

In terms of the actual writing, there were parts of these essays that really blew me away, though I do always find myself wondering about translations in general. The ideas in Montaigne are clearly revolutionary for his time, and insightful for ours, but when I came across specific passages or sentences that I fell in love with, I wondered, “Do I love Montaigne here, or the translator (M. A. Screech)?” Certain lines really struck me as both beautiful and succinct, though I wonder how much of this was Montaigne’s own succinctness vs. the translation. This also goes for the titles. “How we Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing”—just lovely.

In doing some background reading online about Montaigne, I read that while he was alive, there was a lot of commentary about his tendency to digress into anecdotes and personal asides, and that it was seen as a deficiency. Thank God that’s no longer true. Maybe it’s because of the kinds of readings we’re doing in the program, but I find myself tiring really quickly of most writing that has no “I” or no personal angle, even on subjects outside of the personal. Also in terms of the “personal” essay, I found Montaigne’s use of his own experiences and opinions to be incredibly varied, which I suppose makes sense considering how many works he actually wrote. In one essay he casually mentions a friend and in another he searches his own memory for meaning in experience really deeply. This seems like such a skill to strive for—the ability to not entirely rely upon oneself, but know when your experience counts for something bigger. Along these lines, I read that philosopher Eric Hoffer, who I guess was writing in the 1950s—though I am unfamiliar with his work—really worked, like many writers, to emulate Montaigne. In his memoir Truth Imagined, Hoffer wrote of him: "He was writing about me. He knew my innermost thoughts." I feel like this statement really captures what is at the heart of the personal essay. Montaigne was writing 500 years before Hoffer’s time, and yet he was able to convey feelings and emotions and opinions that individual readers are able to see as similar—or at least related—to their own. Montaigne talks about himself, but talks more about the way in which people interact and feel about those interactions. I noticed in number of essays that Montaigne’s “I” was really only direct in the beginning and the end of piece, which works incredibly well. He sets us up, draws us in with his own “conversation” with you, and then uses this as a jumping off point for what he sees as important information for the reader to have.

Montaigne’s background was also particularly interesting to me as I considered his lifestyle and what he had been exposed to. Obviously his privilege allowed him to see a good deal more than the average writer during that time, but I was also fascinated by the fact that Montaigne (or this translation?) does not come off as—for lack of a better phrase—“hoity-toity.” I don’t feel like I’m reading the work of someone with every advantage, which is surely a tricky skill, this writing for a general audience, either of your own time or of 500 years beyond you. And his childhood! Forgive me for copying straight from the internet (and Wikipedia, at that), but I thought this early childhood summary of Montaigne was fascinating (feel free to skip if you already have this background—I didn’t):

Montaigne was born in the Aquitaine region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne, in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, not far from Bordeaux. The family was very rich; his grandfather, Ramon Eyquem, had made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the estate in 1477. His father, Pierre Eyquem, was a French Roman Catholic soldier in Italy for a time, and developed some very progressive views on education there; he had also been the mayor of Bordeaux. His mother, Antoinette de Louppes, was, apparently, the daughter of a Spanish converso (converted Jewish) father of the Protestant religion,^[dubious – discuss^] and a Spanish Roman Catholic mother, who had left Spain in 1497 to join kin who had already settled in Toulouse. Although she lived a great part of Montaigne's life near him, and even survived him, she is only mentioned twice in his work. Montaigne's relationship with his father, however, played a prominent role in his life and works. From the moment of his birth, Montaigne's education followed a pedagogical plan sketched out by his father and refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth, Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, 'in order to', according to the elder Montaigne, 'draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help.'^{[citation needed]} After these first spartan years spent amongst the lowest social class, Montaigne was brought back to the Château. The objective was for Latin to become his first language. The intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus who couldn't speak French). His father only hired servants who could speak Latin and they also were given strict orders to always speak to the boy in Latin, or when he was in their presence. The same rule applied to his mother, father and servants, who were obliged only to use Latin words he himself employed, and thus acquired a knowledge of the very language his tutor taught him. Montaigne's Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, exercises of solitary meditation, rather than books. Music was played from the moment of Montaigne's awakening. An épinettier (playing a zither original to the French region of Vosges) constantly accompanied Montaigne and his tutor, playing a tune any time the boy became bored or tired. When he wasn't in the mood for music, he could do whatever he wished: play games, sleep, be alone - most important of all was that the boy wouldn't be obliged to anything, but that, at the same time, he would have everything in order to take advantage of his freedom.

Is it me, or would that life have made you completely crazy? I recognize that it’s the lifestyle that allowed him to think through so many issues, and form opinions and wrestle with his thoughts until they were both clear and concise in his writing, but good God, I feel like that’s a childhood that could just as easily breed a complete lunatic. Fascinating stuff.

And, lastly, a few other interesting (to me) things that I noted in my reading:

·      I found it really cool how Montaigne does specify that he is writing about his own experiences in a very specific place at a very specific time. (I’m thinking of statements like, “In my part of the world they say . . .” which I saw more than once.) I think this enables him to both make some important, meaningful generalizations and also give his readers, historically speaking, a really cool, really definitive look at a very precise time/place in the world.

·      Many of the beginnings of Montaigne’s essays start with a funny or self-deprecating anecdote. For instance, the beginning of “On Liars” starts with him mocking his own memory. Apparently, the modern essayists are not the first to recognize that mocking oneself can win you some loyalty/readership.

·      Did anyone else catch the bit in the “On Fear” essay that must have surely influenced FDR: “”It is fear that I am most afraid of.”

·      This quote struck me as very in tune with my/our/people’s views on creative nonfiction. I just really dug it: “Truth has its difficulties, its awkwardnesses and its incompatibilities with us. It is often necessary to deceive us so as to stop us from deceiving ourselves, hooding our eyes and dazzling our minds so as to train them and cure them.”

·      All in all, I’m so glad I’ve now had this exposure to Montaigne.

In other independent-study related discussion, I think we had tentatively mapped out who each of us would “focus on” on in terms of our “presentation” for Kyoko’s class in the fall. I think I landed on Emerson (which I’m happy with), but wanted to confirm. Who is everyone else taking?

Hope summer has started well for all of you. Despite the fact that I’m feeling pretty sick of Montaigne right now (blasphemy, I know), I’m glad we’re doing this.

Jessica