The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  But think of the years of piano practice that preceded that final descent from music into language, into sentences and paragraphs. Into this.

  All the years alone in little rooms with music. The little living room on Linwood where the baby grand crouched in its shiny chestnut coat, the biggest thing, except for our Ford, that we owned. But even more, the studio cells of my girls’ school, the cloistered nuns of the old French order presiding serenely, where one day a week in the refectory (not “lunchroom” or “cafeteria”) we spoke only French. Puis-je avoir les cornichons, si vous plaît, ma soeur? And the little sour pickles in a cut-glass dish were handed over with an approving smile. Bien sûr, ma chère.

  The building, rosy brick with a soaring campanile, the nuns in their Renaissance gowns gliding from the cloister with its bewitching sign, ENCLOSURE, we students wearing our Madeleine uniforms, the entire atmosphere that the shadowy marble halls held in a fierce embrace—none of it would have been foreign to Montaigne. His religion, his nation, shades of his ancien régime.

  But it’s wrong to say that the embrace of the place was fierce. It was piano, pianissimo. As if lute music followed us too, up and down the worn marble staircases. The gentleness insinuated itself, wielding the power of assumption and habit, not brute might. Gentleness was the paradoxical strength of the place, the reason the word fierce, though inaccurate, comes to mind. There was no threat of violence in that muscle, but muscle it was. Nobody was a bully. An unchallenged chatelaine authority ruled. We, in our blue serge uniforms, formed a well-behaved vassal estate.

  This comme il faut world, improbably transported to the Upper Midwest, gasped its last gasp with us, its social order held in the double embrace of religion and good manners, having come up the Mississippi from St. Louis after the Civil War, several founding nuns bearing in their ménage a brocade chair eventually placed in the school library and said to have been sat in by Bonaparte.

  This wrought-iron gentility remained neatly caged in a leafy Victorian neighborhood of a provincial midwestern capital well past the middle of the twentieth century. In St. Paul, a city that usually thinks of itself as Irish Catholic, the oldest families, the ones who had sent their daughters to our school for generations, bore French names—DesLauriers, LaBossiere, Villaume. I did not belong to this caste, but was admitted as a favor to my great-aunt, who as a retired state school inspector had helped the cloistered nuns earn their teaching certificates without breaching the convent wall. Aunt Aggie, she of the soulful recitation of Romantic poetry—O for a beaker of the warm South.

  The city’s earliest ancestral link was not, after all, to the pioneers of the nineteenth century who were much invoked in American history class for having “settled” Minnesota, as if they had covered it up and put it to bed. We touched further back, to seventeenth-century French fur traders, the coureurs de bois, the first Europeans to trespass the rivers and boreal forests of the New World. They scouted the territory only a few decades after Montaigne was affixing his final editorial notes on bits of paper glued to the margins of the endlessly revised, ever-expanding book, the only one he wrote. The book of life—his life.

  The Essais. His attempts—to make sense of his world, even to contend with the first glimmers of ours, the reports and rumors just arriving from the fabulous New World, “the Indies” far south of North America, but still our world. The New World, as my Czech peasant grandmother also called it, having left the old country.

  Montaigne holds a bead on the tabloid eye of his own world as it first glimpses ours. He reports and muses on the conversations he has pursued with “a man who had lived for ten or twelve years in that other world which has been discovered in our century.”

  Montaigne is aware of the fantasias hatched by this exotic otherness in the European mind—“I am afraid we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity than capacity. We embrace everything, but we clasp only wind.” How tempting to believe in monsters, as they are drawn around the margins of maps of early modern cartographers.

  In an effort to protect himself from credulity, Montaigne notes how carefully he chooses his informant about this new world. “Clever people observe more things and more curiously,” he admits, “but they interpret them; and to lend weight and conviction to their interpretation, they cannot help altering history a little.”

  The first mistrustful critique of nonfiction.

  The problem with such sophisticated observers, he says, is that “they never show you things as they are, but bend and disguise them according to the way they have seen them; and to give credence to their judgment and attract you to it, they are prone to add something . . . to stretch it out and amplify it.”

  Much better the witness he chooses as his informant—“a simple crude fellow” (homme simple et grossier). You must find “a man either very honest, or so simple that he has not the stuff to build up false inventions and give them plausibility; and wedded to no theory. Such was my man.”

  But is such our man? Montaigne is our witness, the first personal voice to report from the identity we claim for ourselves and keep trying to sort out—the modern self. Whatever else he proves himself to be in his pages, the Sieur de Montaigne is no simple, crude fellow.

  What do we mean when we invoke “the modern,” anyway? Isn’t an essential aspect of the modern sensibility the imposition of personal interpretation—the very thing Montaigne is warning against? More to the point, isn’t the essay, the form he invents and that fills our world with op-ed pieces and blog screeds, exactly what he claims to distrust? These “clever” people may well “observe more things and more curiously,” but they do so only to “interpret” and “lend weight and conviction to their interpretation.”

  We’re ever ready for a personal response. For us, “the personal” signals authenticity. It’s modernity’s primer coat of truth. Or perhaps its veneer. What do you think? we ask each other. We’re asking not just for an opinion but for subjective perception, which we take for honesty. But Montaigne is vexed that these clever witnesses “never show you things as they are, but bend and disguise them according to the way they have seen them.”

  But isn’t that the job? Saying what you see? Doesn’t the way you see create the value of saying what you see? It’s the point of attempting, trying. Of writing essays. For the secret life of an essay is to lift the veil on the process of thinking, that most intimate of acts, to reveal not a thought, but thinking. As he said of his project, I don’t portray being. I portray passing. This is the evergreen quality of Montaigne’s close observation, his curious notations. Not exactly the work of a reliably simple, crude fellow. It may be the reason he can seem, though he is not, “modern.”

  He would protest any distancing of himself from that homme simple et grossier. He claims a lumpen birthright. Pierre emerges again with another of his parenting theories. This one predates even the lute player and morning serenades. “The good father that God gave me,” Montaigne reports “with gratitude for his goodness,” saw to it that his son was “held over the baptismal font by people of the lowliest class, to bind and attach me to them.”

  Nor was this a mere gesture—though gestures performed in a world still awash in medieval metaphor as much as in the blood of religion were never “mere.” Peasant villagers didn’t just hold the baby over the baptismal font. Pierre took it further. “He sent me from the cradle to be brought up in a poor village of his and kept me there as long as I was nursing, and even longer, training me to the humblest and commonest way of life.”

  Pierre’s idea was to let children “be formed by fortune under the laws of the common people and of nature” (des loix populaires et naturelles). Children should be left “to custom to train them to frugality and austerity, so that they may have rather to come down from rigorousness than climb toward it.”

  Pierre had “still another goal” in housing his child for his first years with peasants, away from the château (
away from his mother too, perhaps—she gets short shrift and is hardly mentioned in the Essais, just as Montaigne barely mentions his own wife). “His notion,” Montaigne says, was “to ally me with the people and that class of men that needs our help; and he considered that I was duty bound to look rather to the man who extends his arms to me than the one who turns his back on me.”

  All in all, Montaigne approves his father’s method: “His plan,” he writes, “has succeeded not at all badly.” Some self-satisfaction in that voice. Montaigne admits that his tendency to devote himself to the peasants, les petits, may bear a touch of “vainglory” as well as “natural compassion.” A patronizing note sounds—or the postmodern liberal ear cannot help hearing one. The toot of baronial benevolence. Montaigne admits it—that vainglory he notes.

  The American ear, tuned to self-reliance, rebels, sees this as noblesse oblige, reading the Essais two centuries after the French Revolution. We keep dashing forward—to our many refinements, our self-regard, the exhausting mental exertions of arranging ourselves as the purpose of the past. The destination of history? Us, of course.

  Montaigne writes about himself, from himself. But not quite for himself. He isn’t really modern—he’s about to be modern. He tilts and balances between a mind filled with stern classical moral guides—Virgil, Horace—who are quick with life for him, speaking in his ancient first language and, on the other hand, the reveals of the first-person voice. The shades of Socrates, Seneca, Ovid on one side, and then, emerging, a half-formed creature stepping into the glare of individualism, his personal voice, detached from every contrivance. That voice is the new world. His new world.

  And, in time, ours.

  Montaigne examines the only specimen available to him. The smear on his lab slide is himself.

  What seems to interest him about those early village years is not the benevolence he feels toward les petits. Whatever is good—or bad—about being “prone to devote myself to les petits” is not worth claiming as a virtue. He wants to know his use, not his psychology. His place, not his self. Yet there is this thing called the self—this newly whetted tool.

  He takes it up—the cudgel of thinking, barely nicked with personal narrative.

  What strikes him about his devotion to les petits, as he considers it from the dark of childhood memory in his cold adult tower, is how that devotion has seeped into his political will, how it elicits balance against the sovereignty of his own side (the Catholics) in the vicious Wars of Religion that bloody the landscape. “The side I condemn [the Protestants] in our wars I will condemn more harshly when it is flourishing and prosperous; I will be somewhat reconciled to it when I see it miserable and crushed.”

  The weakness and vulnerability of the Protestant “other side” (note: not “the enemy”) call forth not the bray of victory, but the somewhat wistful urge for harmony and reconciliation. And not only when the other side is “miserable and crushed.” The question is one of balance, the equity of compassion. It draws him out of himself, from his own side to the other.

  What interests Montaigne and seems to bemuse him is that he’s for the underdog in all struggles, all fights. How did that happen? He looks to the raw village of his nurse and les petits huddled there. Did they do this to his mind, his self? Make him more empathic than he intended? For him “the other” is not nearly as other as it is, apparently, for us. His mind has not been wounded by centuries of separateness, isolation—by being first and primarily an individual. He belongs. And understands that so too do all others—they too belong, if not to his “side.”

  * * *

  —

  The essayist sits—he also paces—in his tower. He loafs and invites his soul—as Whitman calls this kind of work three centuries later. Montaigne can survey his entire estate, spread before him from his library where he writes and inquires of himself. His mind forms “so frivolous and vain a subject,” he warns the reader on the first page of his book, it’s a waste of time for anyone else to bother with it.

  He is Catholic, some of his immediate relatives are Protestant. His neighbors, on either side of the religious divide, lock their châteaux, turn them into castle keeps. They await the worst, and often it comes, marauding raiders storming citadels, invading sanctuaries. Human torches flame and smoke, bowels are disgorged, the stench of holy murder everywhere.

  Montaigne can see it from his tower. The smoke, the ruin. He doesn’t lock his gates. He keeps his château open. It is never attacked.

  He sits in his room, loafing, inviting his soul. Or wherever the words on the page come from.

  But he’s also off on the perilous Gascon roads, men at his side, a soldier-diplomat trusted by kings, performing shuttle diplomacy, happier on horseback than anywhere on earth, he says. He serves, when asked, as mayor of Bordeaux, he writes persuading letters, he advises and cajoles and adjudicates. The Catholic king and his retinue ride into his courtyard. They stay the night. Later the Protestant king and his men stop to parley at the château. The hospitality of Montaigne and his wife comes down through the Bordeaux records.

  He threads the needle of strife with his silken thread.

  Disaster averted.

  Then the truce is broken. Mayhem yet again, stench rising from village to village, les petits scattered, the lords of the land gutted on pikes.

  The Wars of Religion continue his entire lifetime. They are his world. His piano life, his fortissimo age.

  * * *

  —

  The piano lessons started early, age eight—mine was another father determined to fill his child’s mind with music. Soon the Sunday dinner recitals begin, aunts and uncles sitting docilely with their coffee. I’m told to go to the piano, my father pulls rosin along the bow of his violin. How about a duet for everyone, Patricia? We seesaw our way along Dvořák’s Humoresque #9.

  These domestic displays were only the tip of my iceberg. Hours of practice, of daydream repetition, led me along the narrow creaking corridor of my convent school, to the little cell filled up with a grand piano. The window overlooked the cloister garden, a nun drifting below, reading her breviary. Angelus time, after lunch, everyone else playing softball, screaming madly in the distance.

  I could hardly wait to get to that room. Not to practice. I just played, reinscribing errors and miscues and erratic tempi. Sister Mary Louise, preternaturally patient, did what she could. I was supposed to use the metronome, but I almost never did, maddened by its pedantic tick-tocking. It was interrupting me. Interrupting what, ma chère?

  Daydreams, the mind cantering over its landscape like an unbroken pony. The piano was a romantic sound track, not work I was doing. I was toiling elsewhere. Well, I wasn’t toiling. That was the point, that was the pleasure. I was swooning. I was—as he put it—lax, drowsy.

  Music made these travels possible. My hands moved over the keyboard, my mind went . . . anywhere it wanted to go. Paris and New York were familiar destinations, all the more vivid for knowing nothing about them, not even anyone who had seen them. I also visited, revisited, the insides of certain books—the coach Becky Sharp throws Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary out of, Tennyson’s flower plucked, root and all, from the crannied wall, Blake’s grain of sand, Ezra Pound’s petals on a wet, black bough—Sister Maria Coeli introduced all of them to us in English class.

  Books pulled me, pulled me back—or maybe they pushed me forward. I circled around them, kept circling. I also had to build a case against my brother who was a bully and against my mother who sided with my brother. I had to wonder why I wasn’t one of the pretty ones. Or was I? Awaiting the right person to see beneath the surface (think Jane Eyre). I was busy. I wrote poems up there in the practice room, and I kept a diary.

  I didn’t think of any of these sketchy bits of writing as essays. I called them nothing at all. It wasn’t writing. It was me. Ainsi, lecteur, je suis moy-mesmes la matière de mon livre. So, reader, I am myself the materi
al of my book. Montaigne’s inaugural words are the motto of every diary.

  Montaigne warned the reader against bothering to read someone else’s musings—his own—even while knowing very well he was going to publish his book, offer it for sale to the public. But who has not been tempted to open a journal, a letter left on a hallway table, a postcard left face up? Montaigne knew his essays presented a fascination, even a slightly illicit one. He knew his readers perhaps better than he knew himself—as writers do, being passionate readers before they become writers. And therefore knowing what allures, what enchants.

  It had a lock and a key, the first book I wrote. A red leatherette five-year diary. The lock and key were the most important part—absolute privacy, invitation to candor. A book that was a room to live in alone.

  So writing was not fundamentally storytelling. It was attention. The hunting and gathering stage of civilization, the collecting of . . . what? Truth. Not “the truth” as it was purveyed in religion class, swanning forward, immutable, grandiose, the brittle carapace of dogma holding it aloft. This other truth was fluid, the mote in the eye, the sniff of the nose, the stroke of the hand reaching out. It was the truth of noticing, the patchwork of reality. It had no superstructure, no organization. Its order was the integrity of the eye, moving over chaos, but repudiating chaos by the fact of its attention. The mind, displayed in a tumble of sentences, was the world’s organizing angel, the companion of a life. To notice was to follow faithfully. A faithful companion. Whither thou goest, I will go.

  * * *

  —

  Every few months Sister Mary Louise handed me new sheet music. I never knew exactly when this would happen, but it always renewed my flagging, phony dedication to discipline. Getting new sheet music was turning over a literal new leaf. I hadn’t mastered the earlier pieces, but Sister probably felt I’d gone as far as I was going to get, given my louche practice habits. New music might help. Her moist, protuberant eyes shone behind her glasses, radiating an unshakable trust in extending the second, third, and ever-renewable next chance.