How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  In some ways, Montaigne’s world became a private universe unto itself, with its own values and an atmosphere of freedom. Yet he never made it a fortress. He insisted on welcoming anyone who arrived at the gate, though he knew the risks and admitted that sometimes it meant going to bed not knowing whether he would be murdered in his sleep by some itinerant soldier or vagrant. But the principle was too important. When Montaigne wrote, “I am all in the open and in full view,” he was not alluding only to social chitchat. He meant that he wanted to remain in free, honest communication with other human beings—even those who seemed bent on killing him.

  OPENNESS, MERCY, AND CRUELTY

  According to Giovanni Botero, an Italian political writer living in France in the 1580s, the French countryside of that decade was so rife with thieves and murderers that every house was obliged to keep “watchmen of the vineyards and orchards; gates, locks, bolts, and mastiffs.” Apparently Botero had not visited the Montaigne estate. There the only defender was a person whom Montaigne described as “a porter of ancient custom and ceremony, who serves not so much to defend my door as to offer it with more decorum and grace.”

  Montaigne lived this way because he was determined to resist intimidation, and did not want to become his own jailer. But he also believed that, paradoxically, his openness made him safer. Heavily guarded houses in the area suffered far more attacks than his did. He quoted Seneca for the explanation: “Locked places invite the thief. The burglar passes by what is open.” Locks made a place look valuable, and there could be no sense of glory in robbing a household where one was welcomed by an elderly doorkeeper. Also, the usual rules of fortification hardly apply in a civil war: “Your valet may be of the party that you fear.” You cannot barricade the gates against a threat that is already inside; far better to win the enemy over by behaving with generosity and honor.

  Events seemed to prove Montaigne right. Once, he invited a troop of soldiers in, only to realize that they were plotting to take advantage of his hospitality by seizing the place. They abandoned the plan, however, and the leader told Montaigne why: he had been “disarmed” by the sight of his host’s “face and frankness.”

  In the outer world, too, Montaigne’s openness protected him from violence. Once, traveling through a forest in a dangerous rural area, he was attacked by fifteen to twenty masked men, followed by a wave of mounted archers—a huge assault, apparently planned in advance. They took him to a thick part of the forest, rifled through his possessions, seized his traveling cases and money box, and discussed how to divide his horses and other equipment among themselves. Worse, they then got the idea of holding him as a hostage for further gain, but could not decide how much ransom to ask. Montaigne overheard them debating the matter and realized they were likely to set the sum excessively high, which would mean his death if no one could afford to pay. He could stand it no more, and called out to interrupt them. They already had everything they were going to get, he declared. However high they set the ransom, it made no difference: they would see none of it. It was a risky way to speak, but after this the bandits underwent a dramatic change. They huddled for a moment in fresh discussion, then the leader walked over to Montaigne with an air almost of friendliness. He removed his mask—a significant gesture, since the two men could now confront each other face to face, like human beings—and said that they had decided to let him go. They even gave back some of his possessions, including the money box. The leader explained it by saying that, as Montaigne wrote later, “I owed my deliverance to my face and the freedom and firmness of my speech.” He was saved by his natural, honest appearance, combined with his bravery in facing up to aggression.

  This was the kind of confrontation that could happen at any time, to any person, and Montaigne often wondered about the best way of dealing with it. Is it wiser to face up squarely to your enemy and challenge him, or should you curry favor by showing submission? Should you throw yourself on the aggressor’s mercy and hope that his sense of humanity will make him spare you? Or is that foolhardy?

  The problem is that each response brings its own dangers. Defiance might impress the other, but it might also infuriate him. Submission might inspire pity, but it is just as likely to draw your enemy’s contempt, so that he wipes you out with no more thought than he would give to stamping on an insect. As for appealing to his sense of humanity, how can you be sure that he has one?

  These questions were no easier to decide in the violent sixteenth century than on an ancient Mediterranean battlefield, or in an alleyway in a modern city, facing up to a mugger. They are perennial, and Montaigne did not see any one good answer. Yet he never tired of exploring the question. Again and again in the Essays, he sets up scenes featuring two individuals in confrontation, one defeated and obliged either to beg for his life or show defiance, the other required either to show mercy or deny it.

  In one such incident, described in the first essay in the book, the fifteenth-century Albanian military hero Skanderbeg was on the point of killing one of his own soldiers in a rage. The man appealed for pity, but Skanderbeg remained unmoved. In desperation, the soldier grabbed his sword and fought back—which so impressed Skanderbeg that his anger evaporated and he let the man go. Another story tells of Edward, Prince of Wales, who strode through a defeated French town ordering mass killings of citizens to left and right. He stopped only when he came to three men, cornered but still fighting. Admiring them, he spared their lives, and added as an afterthought that everyone else in the town might be spared as well.

  These stories imply that defiance is a better policy. But the same essay looks at incidents that turned out differently. When Alexander the Great attacked the city of Gaza, he found the enemy leader Betis “alone, abandoned by his men, his armor cut to pieces, all covered with blood and wounds, still fighting on.” Like Edward, Alexander admired this, but only for a moment. As Betis continued to defy him, staring him insolently in the face, Alexander lost patience. He had Betis pierced through the heels and dragged behind a cart until he was dead. The defeated leader had gone too far, and with the wrong opponent.

  Other stories show, just as clearly, the dangers of submission. Montaigne vividly remembered the case of Tristan de Moneins, the lieutenant-general who was lynched in a Bordeaux street after he presented himself too humbly to the salt-tax rioters in 1548. Once one has shown weakness and triggered a sort of hunting instinct in the other, all is lost. And there is rarely any hope if one really is facing a hunter. Montaigne was haunted by the image of a stag at bay after hours of pursuit, exhausted and trapped, having no option but to give himself up to the hunters—“asking for our mercy by his tears.” Such mercy will never be granted.

  However many confrontations Montaigne restaged in his mind’s eye, they all seemed to suggest different interpretations and different answers. This is why they fascinated him. In each case the defeated party must make a decision, but so must the victor, for things can go badly wrong for him if he misjudges the situation. If he spares someone who interprets his generosity as weakness, he may be killed in turn. If he is too harsh, he will attract rebellion and revenge.

  Christianity seems to offer a simple answer: the victor should always show mercy, and the victim should always turn the other cheek. But the real world cannot be relied upon to work that way—and neither could most Christians in this era of violent religious war. Montaigne paid little attention to theology: he was immersed in his classical reading and, as usual, seemed to forget the Christian angle. For him, in any case, the true difficulties were psychological rather than moral. Or if they were moral, it was in the broader sense of that term used in classical philosophy, where it did not mean following precepts but knowing how to make just and intelligent decisions in real life.

  Montaigne’s view, on balance, was that both victim and victor should take the path that entailed placing maximum trust in the other—that is, like good Christians, the defeated party should seek mercy and the victor should grant it. But both must do thi
s boldly, with an “open countenance,” free of cringing and submissiveness. A “pure and clean confidence” should characterize the situation on both sides. Montaigne would have found his ideal encounter in the scene that took place in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, when tanks moved in to suppress a demonstration. One man, incongruously carrying an ordinary shopping bag, stood calm and still in front of them; in response, the first tank’s driver stopped. Had the man been cowering or trying to escape, or, conversely, had he been yelling and waving his fists, it would have been easier for the driver to kill him. Instead, the man’s “pure and clean confidence” brought out a similar resolution in his opponent.

  This would not work for a stag, where fellow-feeling is blocked by the hunting relationship; perhaps it would not work between an accused witch and a torturer, where fanaticism and obedience to roles would get in the way. War disrupts normal psychology too, just as mob hysteria does. Although the Tiananmen Square scene was violent, it occurred in what was technically peacetime, whereas battle creates an altered state of mind. In the classical world, and to some extent in Montaigne’s time, it was considered only right that a soldier in battle should be incapable of restraint. He should be in a furor: a fearless, ecstatic frenzy in which no moderation or mercy could or should be expected.

  Montaigne found furor appalling, as he did most extreme states. He disliked the way Julius Caesar reportedly whipped up his soldiers to savagery before a battle with speeches like this:

  When weapons flash, no pious sentiments,

  Though you confront your fathers, you must feel;

  No, slash their venerable faces with the steel.

  Of all famous warriors, Montaigne most admired the Theban general Epaminondas, who was known for his ability to keep furor in check: once, in mid-battle and “terrible with blood and iron,” Epaminondas found himself face to face with an acquaintance in whose house he had stayed. He turned aside and did not kill him. That might seem unremarkable, but in theory a soldier should no more be capable of such conscious restraint than would a shark in a feeding frenzy. Epaminondas proved himself “in command of war itself,” as Montaigne wrote; he made the battle “endure the curb of benignity” at the very height of the ecstasy.

  Montaigne suspected that the furor tradition was often used merely as an excuse. “Let us take away from wicked, bloody, and treacherous natures this pretext of reason.” Brutality was bad enough in itself; brutality on the excuse of an elevated mental state was worse. Above all, he deplored the holy zeal of religious fanatics, who believed that God demanded such extreme, unreasoning violence as proof of devotion.

  Cruelty nauseated Montaigne: he could not help himself. He hated it cruelly, as he wrote, making a point of the paradox. His revulsion was instinctive, as much a part of him as the openness written all over his face. This was why he could not stand hunting. Even seeing a chicken having its neck wrung, or a hare caught by dogs, horrified him. The same perspective-leaping tendency that enabled him to borrow his cat’s point of view made it impossible for him to see a hare being ripped apart without feeling it in his own guts.

  If he could not watch a hare in pain, still less could he stomach the human tortures and judicial killings that were common in his day. “Even the executions of the law, however reasonable they may be, I cannot witness with a steady gaze.” In his own career, he was expected to order such punishments, but he refused to do so. “I am so squeamish about hurting that for the service of reason itself I cannot do it. And when occasions have summoned me to sentencing criminals, I have tended to fall short of justice.”

  He was not the only writer of his time to oppose either hunting or torture. What is unusual in Montaigne is his reason for it: his visceral rapport with others. When speaking to the Brazilian Indians in Rouen, he was struck by how they spoke of men as halves of one another, wondering at the sight of rich Frenchmen gorging themselves while their “other halves” starved on their doorstep. For Montaigne, all humans share an element of their being, and so do all other living things. “It is one and the same nature that rolls its course.” Even if animals were less similar to us than they are, we would still owe them a duty of fellow-feeling, simply because they are alive.

  There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, and some mutual obligation.

  This obligation applies in trivial encounters as well as life-or-death ones. We owe other beings the countless small acts of kindness and empathy that Nietzsche would describe as “goodwill.” After the passage just quoted, Montaigne added this remark about his dog:

  I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time.

  He indulges his dog because he can imaginatively share the animal’s point of view: he can feel how desperate the dog is to banish boredom and get his human friend’s attention. Pascal mocked Montaigne for this, saying that Montaigne rides his horse as one who does not believe it to be his right to do so, and who wonders whether “the animal, on the contrary, ought really to be making use of him.” This is exactly right—and, as much as it annoyed Pascal, it would have pleased Nietzsche, whose final mental breakdown is (unreliably) reported to have begun with his flinging his arms around a horse’s neck on a Turin street and bursting into tears.

  Among less emotionally wrought readers, one much affected by Montaigne’s remarks on cruelty was Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf. In his memoirs, he held up Montaigne’s “On Cruelty” as a much more significant essay than people had realized. Montaigne, he wrote, was “the first person in the world to express this intense, personal horror of cruelty. He was, too, the first completely modern man.” The two were linked: Montaigne’s modernity resided precisely in his “intense awareness of and passionate interest in the individuality of himself and of all other human beings”—and nonhuman beings, too.

  Even a pig or a mouse has, as Woolf put it, a feeling of being an “I” to itself. This was the very claim that Descartes had denied so strenuously, but Woolf arrived at it through personal experience rather than Cartesian reasoning. He recalled being asked, as a young boy, to drown some unwanted day-old puppies—an astonishing task to give to a child, one might think. He did what he was told, but was more upset by it than he had expected. Years later, he wrote:

  Looked at casually, day-old puppies are little, blind, squirming, undifferentiated objects or things. I put one of them in the bucket of water, and instantly an extraordinary, a terrible thing happened. This blind, amorphous thing began to fight desperately for its life, struggling, beating the water with its paws. I suddenly saw that it was an individual, that like me it was an “I,” that in its bucket of water it was experiencing what I would experience and fighting death, as I would fight death if I were drowning in the multitudinous seas. It was I felt and feel a horrible, an uncivilized thing to drown that “I” in a bucket of water.

  What brought this incident back to Woolf, as an adult, was reading Montaigne. He went on to apply the insight to politics, reflecting especially on his memory of the 1930s, when the world seemed about to sink into a barbarism that made no room for this small individual self. On a global scale, no single creature can be of much importance, he wrote, yet in another way these I’s are the only things of importance. And only a politics that recognizes them can offer hope for the future.

  Writing about consciousness, the psychologist William James had a similar instinct. We understand nothing of a dog’s experience: of “the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts.” They understand nothing of ours, when for example they watch us stare interminably at the pages of a book. Yet both states of consciousness share a certain quality: the “zest” or “tingle” which comes when one
is completely absorbed in what one is doing. This tingle should enable us to recognize each other’s similarity even when the objects of our interest are different. Recognition, in turn, should lead to kindness. Forgetting this similarity is the worst political error, as well as the worst personal and moral one.

  In the view of William James, as of Leonard Woolf and Montaigne, we do not live immured in our separate perspectives, like Descartes in his room. We live porously and sociably. We can glide out of our own minds, if only for a few moments, in order to occupy another being’s point of view. This ability is the real meaning of “Be convivial,” this chapter’s answer to the question of how to live, and the best hope for civilization.

  10. Q. How to live? A. Wake from the sleep of habit

  IT ALL DEPENDS ON YOUR POINT OF VIEW

  THE ART OF seeing things from the perspective of another person or animal may come instinctively to some, but it can also be cultivated. Novelists do it all the time. While Leonard Woolf was thinking through his political philosophy, his wife Virginia was writing in her diary:

  I remember lying on the side of a hollow, waiting for L[eonard] to come & mushroom, & seeing a red hare loping up the side & thinking suddenly “This is Earth life.” I seemed to see how earthy it all was, & I myself an evolved kind of hare; as if a moon-visitor saw me.

  This eerie, almost hallucinatory moment gave Woolf a sense of how both she and the hare would look to someone who did not view them through eyes dulled by habit. It enabled her to de-familiarize the familiar—a mental trick, rather like those used by the Hellenistic philosophers when they imagined looking down on human life from the stars. Like many such tricks, it works by helping one pay proper attention. Habit makes everything look bland; it is sleep-inducing. Jumping to a different perspective is a way of waking oneself up again. Montaigne loved this trick, and used it constantly in his writing.