From my earliest childhood poetry has had the power to transpierce and transport me. But this living feeling, which is innate to me, has been variously affected by the variety of poetic forms – it is not a matter of higher or lower (for each was the highest of its kind) but of a difference of lustre: first came a gay and genial flowing; then a keen and sublime subtlety; and finally a ripe and constant power. Examples will convey this better: Ovid, Lucan, Virgil.11
But here are our poets waiting to compete:
[A] Sit Cato, dum vivit, sane vel Cæsare major,
[Let Cato while he lives be greater even than Cæsar,]
says one of them.
Et invictum, devicta morte, Catonem,
[Then undefeated, death-defeating Cato,]
says another.12 And the next, telling of the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey:
Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.
[The cause of the victors pleased the gods: that of the vanquished, Cato.]13
And the fourth, when praising Caesar:
Et cuncta terrarum subacta
Praeter atrocem animum Catonis.
[The whole world conquered, save for the unyielding soul of Cato.]14
And then the master of the choir,15 having listed and displayed the names of all the greatest of the Romans, ends in this wise:
his dantem jura Catonem.
[and then – a law to them all – Cato.]
38. How we weep and laugh at the same thing
[An understanding of the complexity of conflicting emotions helps us to avoid trivial interpretations of great men and their grief.]
[A] When we read in our history books that Antigonus was severely displeased with his son for having brought him the head of his enemy King Pyrrhus who had just been killed fighting against him and that he burst into copious tears when he saw it;1 and that Duke René of Lorraine also lamented the death of Duke Charles of Burgundy whom he had just defeated, and wore mourning at his funeral; and that at the battle of Auroy which the Count de Montfort won against Charles de Blois, his rival for the Duchy of Brittany, the victor showed great grief when he happened upon his enemy’s corpse: we should not at once exclaim,
Et cosi aven che l’animo ciascuna
Sua passion sotto et contrario manto
Ricopre, con la vista hor’ chiara hor bruna.
[Thus does the mind cloak every passion with its opposite, our faces showing now joy, now sadness.]2
When they presented Caesar with the head of Pompey our histories say3 that he turned his gaze away as from a spectacle both ugly and displeasing. There had been such a long understanding and fellowship between them in the management of affairs of State, they had shared the same fortunes and rendered each other so many mutual services as allies, that we should not believe that his behaviour was quite false and counterfeit – as this other poet thinks it was:
tutumque putavit
Jam bonus esse socer; lachrimas non sponte cadentes
Effudit, gemitusque expressit pectore læto.
[And now he thought it was safe to play the good father-in-law; he poured out tears, but not spontaneous ones, and he forced out groans from his happy breast.]4
For while it is true that most of our actions are but mask and cosmetic, and that it is sometimes true that
Hæredis fletus sub persona risus est;
[Behind the mask, the tears of an heir are laughter;]5
nevertheless we ought to consider when judging such events how our souls are often shaken by conflicting emotions. Even as there is said to be a variety of humours assembled in our bodies, the dominant one being that which normally prevails according to our complexion, so too in our souls: although diverse emotions may shake them, there is one which must remain in possession of the field; nevertheless its victory is not so complete but that the weaker ones do not sometimes regain lost ground because of the pliancy and mutability of our soul and make a brief sally in their turn. That is why we can see that not only children, who artlessly follow Nature, often weep and laugh at the same thing, but that not one of us either can boast that, no matter how much he may want to set out on a journey, he still does not feel his heart a-tremble when he says goodbye to family and friends: even if he does not actually burst into tears at least he puts a foot over to stirrup with a sad and gloomy face. And however noble the passion which enflames the heart of a well-born bride, she still has to have her arms prised from her mother’s neck before being given to her husband, no matter what that merry fellow may say:
Est ne novis nuptis odio venus, arme parentum
Frustrantur falsis gaudia lachrimulis,
Ubertim thalami quas intra limina fundunt?
Non, ita me divi, vera gemunt, juverint.
[Is Venus really hated by our brides, or do they mock their parents’ joy with those false tears which they pour forth in abundance at their chamber-door? No. So help me, gods, their sobs are false ones.]6
And so it is not odd to lament the death of a man whom we would by no means wish to be still alive.
When I rail at my manservant I do so sincerely with all my mind: my curses are real not feigned. But once I cease to fume, if he needs help from me I am glad to help him: I turn over the page. [C] When I call him a dolt or a calf I have no intention of stitching such labels on to him for ever: nor do I believe I am contradicting myself when I later call him an honest fellow. No one characteristic clasps us purely and universally in its embrace. If only talking to oneself did not look mad, no day would go by without my being heard growling to myself, against myself, ‘You silly shit!’ Yet I do not intend that to be a definition of me.
[B] If anyone should think when he sees me sometimes look bleakly at my wife and sometimes lovingly that either emotion is put on, then he is daft. When Nero took leave of his mother whom he was sending to be drowned, he nevertheless felt some emotion at his mother’s departure and felt horror and pity.7
[A] The sun, they say, does not shed its light in one continuous flow but ceaselessly darts fresh rays so thickly at us, one after another, that we cannot perceive any gap between them:
[B] Largus enim liquidi fons luminis, ætherius sol
Inrigat assidue cælum candore recenti,
Suppeditatque novo confestim famine lumen.
[That generous source of liquid light, the aethereal sun, assiduously floods the heavens with new rays and ceaselessly sheds light upon new light.]8
So, too, our soul darts its arrows separately but imperceptibly.
[C] Artabanus happened to take his nephew Xerxes by surprise. He teased him about the sudden change which he saw come over his face. But Xerxes was in fact thinking about the huge size of his army as it was crossing the Hellespont for the expedition against Greece; he first felt a quiver of joy at seeing so many thousands of men devoted to his service and showed this by a happy and festive look on his face; then, all of a sudden his thoughts turned to all those lives which would wither in a hundred years at most: he knit his brow and was saddened to tears.9
[A] We have pursued revenge for an injury with a resolute will; we have felt a singular joy at our victory… and we weep: yet it is not for that that we weep. Nothing has changed; but our mind contemplates the matter in a different light and sees it from another aspect: for everything has many angles and many different sheens. Thoughts of kinship, old acquaintanceships and affections suddenly seize our minds and stir them each according to their worth: but the change is so sudden that it escapes us:
[B] Nil adeo fieri celeri ratione videtur
Quam si mens fieri proponit et inchoat ipsa.
Ocius ergo animus quam res se perciet ulla,
Ante oculos quarum in promptu natura videtur.
[Nothing can be seen to match the rapidity of the thoughts which the mind produces and initiates. The mind is swifter than anything which the nature of our eyes allows them to see.]10
[A] That is why we deceive ourselves if we want to make this never-ending succession into one
continuous whole. When Timoleon weeps for the murder which, with noble determination, he committed, he does not weep for the liberty he has restored to his country; he does not weep for the Tyrant: he weeps for his brother.11 He has done one part of his duty: let us allow him to do the other.
39. On solitude
[Montaigne himself had withdrawn in solitude to his estates, as many an ancient philosopher and statesman had done, with leisure to seek after wisdom, goodness and tranquillity of mind. His advice that we should set aside for ourselves a ‘room at the back of the shop’ is a reminder that true solitude is a spiritual withdrawal from the world. Living in solitude did not mean living as a hermit but living with detachment – if possible away from courts and the bustle of the world. Living as though always in the presence of a great and admired figure was a Renaissance practice (Sir Thomas More lived as though always in the company of the elder Pico). Montaigne draws a sharp distinction between the solitude of rare saintly ecstatics and that of ordinary men.]
[A] Let us leave aside those long comparisons between the solitary life and the active one;1 and as for that fine adage used as a cloak by greed and ambition, ‘That we are not born for ourselves alone but for the common weal,’2 let us venture to refer to those who have joined in the dance: let them bare their consciences and confess whether rank, office and all the bustling business of the world are not sought on the contrary to gain private profit from the common weal. The evil methods which men use to get ahead in our century clearly show that their aims cannot be worth much.
Let us retort to ambition that she herself gives us a taste for solitude, for does she shun anything more than fellowship? Does she seek anything more than room to use her elbows?
The means of doing good or evil can be found anywhere, but if that quip of Bias is true, that ‘the evil form the larger part’, or what Ecclesiasticus says, ‘One good man in a thousand have I not found’3 –
[B] Rari quippe boni: numero vix sunt totidem, quot
Thebarum portæ, vel divitis ostia Nili.
[Good men are rare: just about as many as gates in the walls of Thebes or mouths to the fertile Nile.] –
[A] then contagion is particularly dangerous in crowds. Either you must loathe the wicked or imitate them. It is dangerous both to grow like them because they are many, or to loathe many of them because they are different.
[C] Sea-going merchants are right to ensure that dissolute, blasphemous or wicked men do not sail in the same ship with them, believing such company to be unlucky. That is why Bias jested with those who were going through the perils of a great storm with him and calling on the gods for help: ‘Shut up,’ he said, ‘so that they do not realize that you are here with me.’4 And (a more pressing example) when Albuquerque, the Viceroy of India for Emmanuel, King of Portugal, was in peril from a raging tempest, he took a boy on his shoulders for one reason only: so that by linking their fates together the innocence of that boy might serve him as a warrant and intercession for God’s favour and so bring him to safety.
[A] It is not that a wise man cannot live happily anywhere nor be alone in a crowd of courtiers, but Bias says that, if he has the choice, the wise man will avoid the very sight of them. If he has to, he will put up with the former, but if he can he will choose the other. He thinks that he is not totally free of vice if he has to contend with the vices of others. [B] Those who haunted evil-doers were chastised [C] as evil [A] by Charondas.5
[C] There is nothing more unsociable than Man, and nothing more sociable: unsociable by his vice, sociable by his nature. And Antisthenes does not seem to me to have given an adequate reply to the person who reproached him for associating with the wicked, when he retorted that doctors live among the sick: for even if doctors do help the sick to return to health they impair their own by constantly seeing and touching diseases as they treat them.6
[A] Now the end I think is always the same: how to live in leisure at our ease. But people do not always seek the way properly. Often they think they have left their occupations behind when they have merely changed them. There is hardly less torment in running a family than in running a whole country. Whenever our soul finds something to do she is there in her entirety: domestic tasks may be less important but they are no less importunate. Anyway, by ridding ourselves of Court and market-place we do not rid ourselves of the principal torments of our life:
ratio et prudentia curas,
Non locus effusi late maris arbiter, aufert.
[it is reason and wisdom which take away cares, not places affording wide views over the sea.]7
Ambition, covetousness, irresolution, fear and desires do not abandon us just because we have changed our landscape.
Et post equitem sedet atra cura.
[Behind the parting horseman squats black care.]8
They often follow us into the very cloister and the schools of philosophy. Neither deserts nor holes in cliffs nor hair-shirts nor fastings can disentangle us from them:
haerit lateri letalis arundo.
[in her side still clings that deadly shaft.]9
Socrates was told that some man had not been improved by travel. ‘I am sure he was not,’ he said. ‘He went with himself!’10
Quid terras alio calentes
Sole mutamus? patria quis exul
Se quoque fugit?
[Why do we leave for lands warmed by a foreign sun? What fugitive from his own land can flee from himself?]11
If you do not first lighten yourself and your soul of the weight of your burdens, moving about will only increase their pressure on you, as a ship’s cargo is less troublesome when lashed in place. You do more harm than good to a patient by moving him about: you shake his illness down into the sack, [Al] just as you drive stakes in by pulling and waggling them about. [A] That is why it is not enough to withdraw from the mob, not enough to go to another place: we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession.
[B] Rupi jam vincula dicas:
Nam luctata canis nodum arripit; attamen illi,
Cum fugit, a collo trahitur pars longa catenæ.
[‘I have broken my chains,’ you say. But a struggling cur may snap its chain, only to escape with a great length of it fixed to its collar.]12
We take our fetters with us; our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind; our imagination is full of them.
Nisi purgatum est pectus, quæ prælia nobis
Atque pericula tunc ingratis insinuandum?
Quantæ conscindunt hominem cuppedinis acres
Sollicitant curæ, quantique perinde timores?
Quidve superbia, spurcitia, ac petulantia, quantas
Efficiunt clades? quid luxus desidiesque?
[But if our breast remains unpurged, what unprofitable battles and tempests we must face, what bitter cares must tear a man apart, and then what fears, what pride, what sordid thoughts, what tempers and what clashes; what gross gratifications; what sloth!]13
[A] It is in our soul that evil grips us: and she cannot escape from herself:
In culpa est animus qui se non effugit unquam.
[That mind is at fault which never escapes from itself.]14
So we must bring her back, haul her back, into our self. That is true solitude. It can be enjoyed in towns and in kings’ courts, but more conveniently apart.
Now since we are undertaking to live, without companions, by ourselves, let us make our happiness depend on ourselves; let us loose ourselves from the bonds which tie us to others; let us gain power over ourselves to live really and truly alone – and of doing so in contentment.
Stilpo had escaped from the great conflagration of his city in which he had lost wife, children and goods; when Demetrius Poliorcetes saw him in the midst of so great a destruction of his homeland, yet with his face undismayed, he asked him if he had suffered no harm. He said, No. Thank God he had lost nothing of his.15 [C] The philosopher Ant
isthenes put the same thing amusingly when he said that a man ought to provide himself with unsinkable goods, which could float out of a shipwreck with him.16
[A] Certainly, if he still has himself, a man of understanding has lost nothing.
When the city of Nola was sacked by the Barbarians, the local Bishop Paulinus lost everything and was thrown into prison; yet this was his prayer: ‘Keep me O Lord from feeling this loss. Thou knowest that the Barbarians have so far touched nothing of mine.’ Those riches which did enrich him and those good things which made him good were still intact.17
There you see what it means to choose treasures which no harm can corrupt and to hide them in a place which no one can enter, no one betray, save we ourselves. We should have wives, children, property and, above all, good health… if we can: but we should not become so attached to them that our happiness depends on them. We should set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum. Within it our normal conversation should be of ourselves, with ourselves, so privy that no commerce or communication with the outside world should find a place there; there we should talk and laugh as though we had no wife, no children, no possessions, no followers, no menservants, so that when the occasion arises that we must lose them it should not be a new experience to do without them. We have a soul able able to turn in on herself; she can keep herself company; she has the wherewithal to attack, to defend, to receive and to give. Let us not fear that in such a solitude as that we shall be crouching in painful idleness:
The Complete Essays Page 36
