How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  All the schools had the same aim: to achieve a way of living known in the original Greek as eudaimonia, often translated as “happiness,” “joy,” or “human flourishing.” This meant living well in every sense: thriving, relishing life, being a good person. They also agreed that the best path to eudaimonia was ataraxia, which might be rendered as “imperturbability” or “freedom from anxiety.” Ataraxia means equilibrium: the art of maintaining an even keel, so that you neither exult when things go well nor plunge into despair when they go awry. To attain it is to have control over your emotions, so that you are not battered and dragged about by them like a bone fought over by a pack of dogs.

  It was on the question of how to acquire such equanimity that the philosophies began to diverge. Each had a different idea, for example, of how far one should compromise with the real world. The original Epicurean community, founded by Epicurus in the fourth century BC, required followers to leave their families and live like cult members in a private “garden.” Skeptics preferred to remain amid the public hurly-burly like everyone else, but with a radically altered mental attitude. Stoics were somewhere in between. The two best known Stoic writers, Seneca and Epictetus, wrote for an elite Roman readership who were deeply involved in the affairs of their time and had no time for gardens, but who desired oases of tranquillity and self-possession wherever they could find them.

  Stoics and Epicureans shared a great deal of their theory, too. They thought that the ability to enjoy life is thwarted by two big weaknesses: lack of control over emotions, and a tendency to pay too little attention to the present. If one could only get these two things right—controlling and paying attention—most other problems would take care of themselves. The catch is that both are almost impossible to do. So difficult are they that one cannot approach them head-on. It is necessary to sidle in from lateral angles, and trick oneself into achieving them.

  Accordingly, Stoic and Epicurean thinkers spent much time devising techniques and thought experiments. For example: imagine that today is the last day of your life. Are you ready to face death? Imagine, even, that this very moment—now!—is the last moment of your existence. What are you feeling? Do you have regrets? Are there things you wish you had done differently? Are you really alive at this instant, or are you consumed with panic, denial, and remorse? This experiment opens your eyes to what is important to you, and reminds you of how time runs constantly through your fingers.

  Some Stoics even acted out these “last moment” experiments with props and a supporting cast. Seneca wrote of a wealthy man named Pacuvius, who conducted a full-scale funeral ceremony for himself every day, ending with a feast after which he would have himself carried from the table to his bed on a bier while all the guests and servants intoned, “He has lived his life, he has lived his life.” You could achieve the same effect more simply and cheaply just by holding the idea of your own demise in your mind and paying full attention to it. The Epicurean writer Lucretius suggested picturing yourself at the point of death, and considering two possibilities. Either you have lived well, in which case you can go your way satisfied, like a well-fed guest leaving a party. Or you have not, but then it makes no difference that you are losing your life, since you obviously did not know what to do with it anyway. This may offer scant comfort on your deathbed, but if you think about it in the midst of life it helps you to change your perspective.

  Such shifts of attitude are the purpose of many of the thought experiments. If you have lost someone or something precious, you can try to value her, him, or it differently by imagining that you never knew that person, or never owned that object. How can you miss what you never had? A different angle produces a different emotion. Plutarch suggested such a ploy in a letter to his wife, after their two-year-old daughter died: he advised her to think back to before the girl was born, and pretend they were back in those days again. Whether this consoled her is not known, but at least it gave her something to focus on instead of swimming in an ocean of undifferentiated grief. Montaigne and La Boétie both knew this letter well, for La Boétie translated it into French and Montaigne edited his translation for publication. It may have come into Montaigne’s mind each time one of his own children died, as well as when he lost La Boétie. The friendship had been so short that it should not have been difficult to remember a time before it and recapture his pre-La Boétie nonchalance.

  Such tricks of the imagination can be used in mundane situations as well as extreme ones; they are effective even against mild feelings of boredom or depression. If you feel tired of everything you possess, suggests Plutarch, pretend that you have lost all these things and are missing them desperately. Whether the object is a favorite plate, a friend, a mistress, or the good fortune of living in a time of peace and in good health, this exercise magically makes it seem worth having after all. The principle is the same as when brooding on death: faced with the idea of losing something now, you realize its value.

  The key is to cultivate mindfulness: prosoche, another key Greek term. Mindful attention is the trick that underlies many of the other tricks. It is a call to attend to the inner world—and thus also to the outer world, for uncontrolled emotion blurs reality as tears blur a view. Anyone who clears their vision and lives in full awareness of the world as it is, Seneca says, can never be bored with life.

  A person who does not sleepwalk through the world, moreover, is freed to respond to situations in the right way, without hesitation—as if they were questions asked all of a sudden, as Epictetus puts it. A violent attack, a quarrel, the loss of a friend: all these are demands barked at you by life, as by a schoolteacher trying to catch you not paying attention in class. Even a moment of boredom is such a question. Whatever happens, however unforeseen it is, you should be able to respond in a precisely suitable way. This is why, for Montaigne, learning to live “appropriately” (à propos) is the “great and glorious masterpiece” of human life.

  Stoics and Epicureans alike approached this goal mainly through rehearsal and meditation. Like tennis players practicing volleys and smashes for hours, they used rehearsal to carve grooves of habit, down which their minds would run as naturally as water down a river bed. It is a form of self-hypnotism. The great Stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius kept notebooks in which he would go over the changes of perspective he wished to drill into himself:

  How good it is, when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is the mere juice of grapes, and your purple-edged robe simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood! And in sexual intercourse that it is no more than the friction of a membrane and a spurt of mucus ejected.

  At other times, he imagined flying up to the heavens so that he could gaze down and see how insignificant all human concerns were from such a distance. Seneca did this too: “Place before your mind’s eye the vast spread of time’s abyss, and consider the universe; and then contrast our so-called human life with infinity.”

  Another practice of the Stoics was to visualize time circling around on itself, over eons. Thus Socrates would be born again and would teach in Athens just as he did the first time; every butterfly would flap its wings in the same way; every cloud would pass overhead at the same speed. You yourself would live again, and have all the same thoughts and emotions as before, again and again without end. This apparently terrifying idea brought comfort, because—like the other ideas—it showed one’s own fleeting troubles at a reduced size. At the same time, because everything you had ever done would come back to haunt you, everything mattered. Nothing was flushed away; nothing could be forgotten. Meditating on this forced you to pay more attention to how you lived your everyday life. It posed a challenge, but also led to a kind of acceptance: to what the Stoics called amor fati, or love of fate. As the Stoic Epictetus wrote:

  Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as
it actually does happen, and your life will be serene.

  One should be able to accept everything just as it is, willingly, without giving in to the futile longing to change it. Montaigne seemed to find this trick easy: it came to him by nature. “If I had to live over again,” he wrote cheerfully, “I would live as I have lived.” But most people had to practice it, and this was where the mental exercises came in.

  Seneca (illustration credit i6.1)

  Seneca had an extreme trick for practising amor fati. He was asthmatic, and attacks brought him almost to the point of suffocation. He often felt that he was about to die, but he learned to use each attack as a philosophical opportunity. While his throat closed and his lungs strained for breath, he tried to embrace what was happening to him: to say “yes” to it. I will this, he would think; and, if necessary, I will myself to die from it. When the attack receded, he emerged feeling stronger, for he had done battle with fear and defeated it.

  Stoics were especially keen on pitiless mental rehearsals of all the things they dreaded most. Epicureans were more inclined to turn their vision away from terrible things, to concentrate on what was positive. A Stoic behaves like a man who tenses his stomach muscles and invites an opponent to punch them. An Epicurean prefers to invite no punches, and, when bad things happen, simply to step out of the way. If Stoics are boxers, Epicureans are closer to Oriental martial arts practitioners.

  Epicurus (illustration credit i6.2)

  Montaigne found the Epicurean approach more congenial in most situations, and he took their ideas even further. He claimed to envy lunatics, because they were always mentally elsewhere—an extreme form of Epicurean deflection. What did it matter if a madman’s idea of the world was skewed, so long as he was happy? Montaigne retold classical stories such as that of Lycas, who went about his daily life and successfully held down a job while believing that everything he saw was taking place on stage, as a theatrical performance. When a doctor cured him of this delusion, Lycas became so miserable that he sued the doctor for robbing him of his pleasure in life. Similarly, a man named Thrasylaus nurtured the belief that every ship that came in and out of his local port of Piraeus was carrying wonderful cargoes just for him. He was happy all the time, for he rejoiced each time a ship came safely to port, and did not seem to worry that the cargoes never materialized. Alas, his brother Crito had his delusion treated, and that was the end of it.

  Not everyone can have the benefit of being insane, but anyone can make life easier for themselves by turning down the beam of their reason slightly. With grief, in particular, Montaigne learned that he could not recover simply by talking himself out of it. He did try some Stoic tricks, and he was not afraid to focus his attention on La Boétie’s death long enough to write his account of it. But most of the time he found it more helpful to divert his attention to something else altogether:

  A painful notion takes hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it. I substitute a contrary one for it, or, if I cannot, at all events a different one. Variation always solaces, dissolves, and dissipates. If I cannot combat it, I escape it; and in fleeing I dodge, I am tricky.

  He used the same technique to help others. Once, trying to console a woman who was (unlike some widows, he implies) genuinely suffering grief for her dead husband, he first considered the more usual philosophical methods: reminding her that nothing can be gained from lamentation, or persuading her that she might never have met her husband anyway. But he settled on a different trick: “very gently deflecting our talk and diverting it bit by bit to subjects nearby, then a little more remote.” The widow seemed to pay little attention at first, but in the end the other subjects caught her interest. Thus, without her realizing what was happening, he wrote, “I imperceptibly stole away from her this painful thought and kept her in good spirits and entirely soothed for as long as I was there.” He admitted that this did not go to the root of her grief, but it got her through an immediate crisis, and presumably allowed time to begin its own natural work.

  Some of this came from Montaigne’s Epicurean reading; some from his own hard-won experience. “I was once afflicted with an overpowering grief,” he wrote, clearly thinking of La Boétie. It could have destroyed him had he relied only on his powers of reason to rescue him. Instead, understanding that he needed “some violent diversion,” he managed to develop a crush on someone. He does not say who, and it seems to have been insignificant, but it gave his emotions somewhere to go.

  Similar tricks worked for another unwelcome emotion, anger: Montaigne once successfully cured a “young prince,” probably Henri de Navarre (the future Henri IV), of a dangerous passion for revenge. He did not talk the prince out of it, or advise him to turn the other cheek, or remind him of the tragic consequences that could result. He did not mention the subjects of anger or revenge at all:

  I let the passion alone and applied myself to making him relish the beauty of a contrary picture, the honor, favor, and good will he would acquire by clemency and kindness. I diverted him to ambition. That is how it is done.

  Later in his life, Montaigne used the trick of diversion against his own fear of getting old and dying. The years were dragging him towards death; he could not help that, but he need not look at it head-on. Instead, he faced the other way, and calmed himself by looking back with pleasure over his youth and childhood. Thus, he said, he managed to “gently sidestep and avert my gaze from this stormy and cloudy sky that I have in front of me.”

  He became such a connoisseur of side-stepping techniques that he even found political sleight-of-hand admirable, so long as it was not used to support tyranny. One story he relished was that of how Zaleucus, prince of the Locrians of ancient Greece, reduced excessive spending in his realm. He ordered that any woman could be attended by several maids, but only when she was drunk, and that she could wear as many gold jewels and embroidered dresses as she liked, if she was working as a prostitute. A man could sport gold rings if he was a pimp. It worked: gold jewelry and large entourages disappeared overnight, yet no one rebelled, for no one felt they had been forced into anything.

  From his own experience of nearly dying, Montaigne would learn that the best antidote to fear was to rely on nature: “Don’t bother your head about it.” From losing La Boétie, he had already discovered that this was the best way of dealing with grief. Nature has its own rhythms. Distraction works well precisely because it accords with how humans are made: “Our thoughts are always elsewhere.” It is only natural for us to lose focus, to slip away from both pains and pleasures, “barely brushing the crust” of them. All we need do is let ourselves be as we are.

  Montaigne took from his Stoic and Epicurean reading what worked for him, just as his own readers would always take just what they needed from the Essays without worrying about the rest. For his contemporaries, this meant seizing on his most Stoic and Epicurean passages. They interpreted his book as a manual for living, and hailed him as a philosopher in the old style, great enough to stand alongside the originals. His friend Étienne Pasquier called him “another Seneca in our language.” Another friend and colleague from Bordeaux, Florimond de Raemond, extolled Montaigne’s courage in the face of life’s torments, and advised readers to turn to him for wisdom, especially about how to come to terms with death. A sonnet by Claude Expilly, published with a 1595 edition of Montaigne’s book, praised its author as a “magnanimous Stoic” and spoke warmly of his manly way of writing, his fearlessness, and his ability to give strength to the weakest of souls. Montaigne’s “brave essays” will be praised for centuries to come, Expilly wrote, for—like the ancients—Montaigne teaches people to speak well, to live well, and to die well.

  This provides the first inkling of the transformations Montaigne would undergo in his readers’ minds over the centuries, as each generation adopted him as a source of enlightenment and wisdom. Each wave of readers found in him more or less what they expected, and, in many cases, what they themselves put there. Montaigne’s first audience w
as a late Renaissance one, filled with neo-Stoics and neo-Epicureans fascinated by the question of how to live well, and how to achieve eudaimonia in the face of suffering. They embraced him as one of themselves, and made him a best seller. They thus laid the foundations for all his future fame as a pragmatic philosopher, and as a guide to the art of living.

  MONTAIGNE IN SLAVERY

  Montaigne’s trick of absorbing La Boétie into himself, as a kind of ghost or secret sharer in all he did, might seem to run counter to his plan of distracting himself from grief. But in its way, it was a form of diversion: it led him away from thoughts of loss towards a new way of thinking about his present life. A split opened up between his own point of view and the one he imagined La Boétie might take, so that, at any moment, he could slip from one to the other. Perhaps this is what gave him the idea that, as he wrote elsewhere, “We are, I know not how, double within ourselves.”

  Montaigne himself remarked that he might not have written the Essays had this space not been opened in himself. Had he had “someone to talk to,” he said, he might only have published letters, a more conventional literary format. Instead, he had to stage his and La Boétie’s dialogue within himself. The modern critic Anthony Wilden has compared this maneuver to the master/slave dialectic in the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel: La Boétie became Montaigne’s imaginary master, commanding him to work, while Montaigne became the willing slave who sustained them both through the labor of writing. It was a form of “voluntary servitude.” Out of it emerged the Essays, almost as a by-product of Montaigne’s trick for managing sorrow and solitude.