How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  There is no more beautiful life than that of a carefree man; Lack of care is a truly painless evil. (Sophocles)

  The beams form a vivid reminder of Montaigne’s decision to move from public life into a meditative existence—a life to be lived, literally, under the sign of philosophy rather than that of politics. Such a shift of realms was also part of the ancients’ advice. The great Stoic Seneca repeatedly urged his fellow Romans to retire in order to “find themselves,” as we might put it. In the Renaissance, as in ancient Rome, it was part of the well-managed life. You had your period of civic business, then you withdrew to discover what life was really about and to begin the long process of preparing for death. Montaigne developed reservations about the second part of this, but there is no doubt about his interest in contemplating life. He wrote: “Let us cut loose from all the ties that bind us to others; let us win from ourselves the power to live really alone and to live that way at our ease.”

  Seneca, in advising retirement, had also warned of dangers. In a dialogue called “On Tranquillity of Mind,” he wrote that idleness and isolation could bring to the fore all the consequences of having lived life in the wrong way, consequences that people usually avoided by keeping busy—that is, by continuing to live life in the wrong way. The symptoms could include dissatisfaction, self-loathing, fear, indecisiveness, lethargy, and melancholy. Giving up work brings out spiritual ills, especially if one then gets the habit of reading too many books—or, worse, laying out the books for show and gloating over the view.

  (illustration credit i2.3)

  In the early 1570s, during his shift of values, Montaigne seems to have suffered exactly the existential crisis Seneca warned of. He had work to do, but less of it than he was used to. The inactivity generated strange thoughts and a “melancholy humor” which was out of character for him. No sooner had he retired, he said, than his mind galloped off like a runaway horse—an apt comparison, considering what had recently happened. His head filled with nonsense, just as a fallow field fills with weeds. In another vivid image—he loved piling up effects like this—he compared his idle brain to a woman’s unfertilized womb, which, as contemporary stories maintained, gives birth only to shapeless lumps of flesh instead of babies. And, in a simile borrowed from Virgil, he described his thoughts as resembling the patterns that dance across the ceiling when sunlight reflects off the surface of a water bowl. Just as the tiger-stripes of light lurch about, so an unoccupied mind gyrates unpredictably and brings forth mad, directionless whimsies. It generates fantasies or reveries—two words with less positive associations than they have today, suggesting raving delusions rather than daydreams.

  His “reverie” in turn gave Montaigne another mad idea: the thought of writing. He called this a reverie too, but it was one that held out the promise of a solution. Finding his mind so filled with “chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose,” he decided to write them down, not directly to overcome them, but to inspect their strangeness at his leisure. So he picked up his pen; the first of the Essays was born.

  Seneca would have approved. If you become depressed or bored in your retirement, he advised, just look around you and interest yourself in the variety and sublimity of things. Salvation lies in paying full attention to nature. Montaigne tried to do this, but he took “nature” primarily to mean the natural phenomenon that lay closest to hand: himself. He began watching and questioning his own experience, and writing down what he observed.

  At first, this mainly meant following his personal enthusiasms, especially stories from his reading: tales from Ovid, histories from Caesar and Tacitus, biographical snippets from Plutarch, and advice on how to live from Seneca and Socrates. Then he wrote down stories he heard from friends, incidents from the day-to-day life of the estate, cases that had lodged in his mind from his years in law and politics, and oddities he had seen on his (so far limited) travels. These were his modest beginnings; later, his material grew until it included almost every nuance of emotion or thought he had ever experienced, not least his strange journey in and out of unconsciousness.

  The idea of publication may have crossed his mind early on, though he claimed otherwise, saying he wrote only for family and friends. Perhaps he even began with the intention of composing a commonplace book: a collection of thematically arranged quotations and stories, of a kind popular among gentlemen of the day. If so, it did not take him long to move beyond this, possibly under the influence of the one writer he liked more than Seneca: Plutarch. Plutarch had made his name in the first century AD with lively potted biographies of historical figures, and also wrote short pieces called Moralia, which were translated into French in the year Montaigne began writing his Essays. These gathered together thoughts and anecdotes on questions ranging from “Can animals be called intelligent?” to “How does one achieve peace of mind?” On the latter point, Plutarch’s advice was the same as Seneca’s: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it.

  As the 1570s went on and Montaigne adjusted to his new post-crisis life, paying attention became a favorite pastime. His biggest writing year was 1572: that was when he began most of the essays of Book I and some in Book II. The rest followed in 1573 and 1574. Yet it would be a long time before he felt ready to publish; perhaps only because it did not occur to him, or perhaps because it took him many years to be satisfied with what he had done. A decade would pass from his retirement in 1570 to the day after his forty-seventh birthday, March 1, 1580, when he signed and dated the preface to the first edition of the Essays and made himself famous overnight.

  Writing had got Montaigne through his “mad reveries” crisis; it now taught him to look at the world more closely, and increasingly gave him the habit of describing inward sensations and social encounters with precision. He quoted Pliny on the idea of attending to such elusive fragments: “Each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up.” As Montaigne the man went about his daily life on the estate, Montaigne the writer walked behind him, spying and taking notes.

  When he came at last to write about his riding accident, therefore, he did it not only to shake out what remained of his fear of death like sand from his shoes, but also to raise his spying techniques to a level beyond anything he had tried before. Just as, in the days after the accident, he had made his servants repeatedly tell him the story of what had happened, so now he must have gone through it in his mind, reliving those floating sensations, that feeling of his breath or spirit lingering at the threshold of his body, and the pain of return. He “processed” it, as psychologists might say today, through literature. In doing so, he reconstructed the experience as it actually was, not as the philosophers said it should be.

  There was nothing easy about this new hobby of his. Montaigne liked to pretend that he threw the Essays together carelessly, but occasionally he forgot the pose and admitted what hard work it was:

  It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

  Montaigne may have extolled the beauty of gliding lightly over the surface of life; indeed, he did perfect that art as he got older. At the same time, as a writer, he worked at the art of plumbing the depths. “I meditate on any satisfaction,” he wrote. “I do not skim over it; I sound it.” He was so determined to get to the bottom even of a phenomenon that was normally lost by definition—sleep—that he had a long-suffering servant wake him regularly in the middle of the night in the hope of catching a glimpse of his own unconsciousness as it left him.

  Montaigne wanted to drift away, yet he also wanted to attach himself to reality and extract every grain of experience from it. Writing made it possible to do both. Even as he lost himself in his reveries, he secretly planted his hooks in everything that happened, so that he could draw it back at will. Learning how
to die was learning to let go; learning to live was learning to hang on.

  STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  In truth, however hard you try, you can never retrieve an experience in full. As a famous line by the ancient philosopher Heraclitus has it, you cannot step into the same river twice. Even if you return to the same spot on the bank, different water flows in upon you at every moment. Similarly, to see the world exactly as you did half an hour ago is impossible, just as it is impossible to see it from the point of view of a different person standing next to you. The mind flows on and on, in a ceaseless “stream of consciousness”—a phrase coined by the psychologist William James in 1890, though it was later made more famous by novelists.

  Montaigne was among the many who quoted Heraclitus, and he mused on how we are carried along by our thoughts, “now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm … every day a new fancy, and our humors shift with the shifts in the weather.” It is no wonder that the mind is like this, since even the apparently solid physical world exists in endless slow turmoil. Looking at the landscape around his house, Montaigne could imagine it heaving and boiling like porridge. His local river, the Dordogne, carved out its banks as a carpenter chisels grooves in wood. He had been astonished by the shifting sand dunes of Médoc, near where one of his brothers lived: they roamed the land and devoured it. If we could see the world at a different speed, he reflected, we would see everything like this, as “a perpetual multiplication and vicissitude of forms.” Matter existed in an endless branloire: a word deriving from the sixteenth-century peasant dance branle, which meant something like “the shake.” The world was a cosmic wobble: a shimmy.

  (illustration credit i2.4)

  Other sixteenth-century writers shared Montaigne’s fascination with the unstable. What was unusual in him was his instinct that the observer is as unreliable as the observed. The two kinds of movement interact like variables in a complex mathematical equation, with the result that one can find no secure point from which to measure anything. To try to understand the world is like grasping a cloud of gas, or a liquid, using hands that are themselves made of gas or water, so that they dissolve as you close them.

  This is why Montaigne’s book flows as it does: it follows its author’s stream of consciousness without attempting to pause or dam it. A typical page of the Essays is a sequence of meanders, bends, and divergences. You have to let yourself be carried along, hoping not to capsize each time a change of direction throws you off balance. In his chapter “Of Cripples,” for example, Montaigne starts conventionally enough by repeating a rumor about lame women: they are said to be more enjoyable to have sex with. Why might this be? he wonders. Is it because their movements are irregular? Maybe, but he adds, “I have just learned that ancient philosophy, no less, has decided the question.” Aristotle says that their vaginas are more muscular because they receive the nourishment of which the legs are deprived. Montaigne records this idea, but then doubles back and introduces a doubt: “What can we not reason about at this rate?” All such theories are unreliable. In fact, he eventually reveals, he has tried the experiment for himself, and has learned a quite different point: that the question means little, for your imagination can make you believe you are experiencing enhanced pleasure whether you “really” are or not. In the end, the oddity of the human mind is all we can be sure of—an extraordinary conclusion which seems to bear no relation to the topic he was originally aiming at.

  Another essay, “That our happiness must not be judged until after our death,” starts with a platitude quoted from Solon: Call no man happy till he dies. Montaigne at once swerves to a more interesting thought: perhaps our judgment about whether a man has been happy has more to do with how he dies. A man who dies well tends to be remembered as if he also lived well. After giving examples of this, Montaigne changes tack again. In truth, a person who has had a good life could die very badly, and vice versa. In Montaigne’s own time, three of the most infamous individuals he had known died beautiful deaths, “composed to perfection.” The chapter has now become a long loaf with three twists, and Montaigne seems set to finish by saying that, in any case, he hopes his own death will go well. But at the very end he remarks that by “going well” he means going “quietly and insensibly”—hardly the usual notion of an admirable death. With this, the piece abruptly finishes, just as the reader is beginning to wonder whether this means Montaigne has lived well or not.

  Thus, most of Montaigne’s thought consists of a series of realizations that life is not as simple as he has just made it out to be.

  If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.

  The changes of direction are partly explained by this questioning attitude, and partly by his having written the book over twenty years. A person’s ideas vary a lot in two decades, especially if the person spends that time traveling, reading, talking to interesting people, and practicing high-level politics and diplomacy. Revising earlier drafts of the Essays over and over again, he added material as it occurred to him, and made no attempt to box it into an artificial consistency. Within the space of a few lines, we might meet Montaigne as a young man, then as an old man with one foot in the grave, and then again as a middle-aged mayor bowed down by responsibilities. We listen to him complaining of impotence; a moment later, we see him young and lusty, “impertinently genital” in his desires. He is hot-headed and outspoken; he is discreet. He is fascinated by other people; he is fed up with the lot of them. His thoughts lie where they fall. He makes us feel the passage of time in his inner world. “I do not portray being,” he wrote, “I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another … but from day to day, from minute to minute.”

  Among the readers to be fascinated by Montaigne’s way of depicting the flux of his experience was one of the great pioneers of “stream of consciousness” fiction in the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf. Her own purpose in her art was to immerse herself in the mental river and follow wherever it led. Her novels delved into characters’ worlds “from minute to minute.” Sometimes she left one channel to tune in elsewhere, passing the point of view like a microphone from one individual to another, but the flow itself never ceased until the end of each book. She identified Montaigne as the first writer to attempt anything of this sort, albeit only with his own single “stream.” She also considered him the first to pay such attention to the simple feeling of being alive. “Observe, observe perpetually,” was his rule, she said—and what he observed was, above all, this river of life running through his existence.

  Montaigne was the first to write in such a way, but not the first to attempt to live with full attention to the present moment. That was another of the rules recommended by the classical philosophers. Life is what happens while you’re making other plans, they said; so philosophy must guide your attention repeatedly back to the place where it belongs—here. It plays a role like that of the mynah birds in Aldous Huxley’s novel Island, which are trained to fly around all day calling “Attention! Attention!” and “Here and now!” As Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out. The only one who can keep you mindful of this is you:

  It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly … What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.

  If you fail to grasp life, it will elude you. If you do grasp it, it will elude you anyway. So you must follow it—and “you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow.”

  The trick is to maintain a kind of naive 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 op
en up an even more fantastical realm. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called Montaigne a writer who put “a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.” More recently, the critic Colin Burrow has remarked that astonishment, together with Montaigne’s other key quality, fluidity, are what philosophy should be, but rarely has been, in the Western tradition.

  As Montaigne got older, his desire to pay astounded attention to life did not decline; it intensified. By the end of the long process of writing the Essays, he had almost perfected the trick. Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, “I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it … The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.” He discovered a sort of strolling meditation technique:

  When I walk alone in the beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me.

  At moments like these, he seems to have achieved an almost Zen-like discipline; an ability to just be.

  When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep.

  It sounds so simple, put like this, but nothing is harder to do. This is why Zen masters spend a lifetime, or several lifetimes, learning it. Even then, according to traditional stories, they often manage it only after their teacher hits them with a big stick—the keisaku, used to remind meditators to pay full attention. Montaigne managed it after one fairly short lifetime, partly because he spent so much of that lifetime scribbling on paper with a very small stick.

  In writing about his experience as if he were a river, he started a literary tradition of close inward observation that is now so familiar that it is hard to remember that it is a tradition. Life just seems to be like that, and observing the play of inner states is the writer’s job. Yet this was not a common notion before Montaigne, and his peculiarly restless, free-form way of doing it was entirely unknown. In inventing it, and thus attempting a second answer to the question of how to live—“pay attention”—Montaigne escaped his crisis and even turned that crisis to his advantage.