The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  There is great silliness in extending by anticipation our human ills;. I do not want to be old before my time; I prefer to be old for a shorter one. I grab hold of even the slightest occasions of pleasure that. I come across. I know from hearsay that there are several species of pleasure which are wise, strong and laudable; but rumour has not enough power over me to arouse an appetite for them in me. [C] I do not so much want noble, magnificent and proud pleasures as sweetish ones, easy and ready to hand: ‘A natura discedimus; populo nos damus, nullius rei bono auctori’ [We are departing from what is natural, surrendering ourselves to the plebs who are never a good guide in anything.]4

  [B] My philosophy lies in action, in natural [C] and present [B] practice, and but little in ratiocination. Would that I could enjoy tossing hazelnuts and whipping tops!

  Non ponebat enim rumores ante salutem

  [Not for him did common report take precedence over his welfare.]5

  As a quality, pleasure-seeking is not very ambitious; of itself it reckons it is rich enough without bringing in the prize of reputation; it likes itself more in the shadows. If a man spends time savouring the tastes of wine and sauces when he is young, we ought to give him a good hiding. There is nothing I knew or valued less. I am learning about them now, I am ashamed to say: but what else can I do? I am even more ashamed and angry at the causes which drive me to it. It is for us to act the madman over trifles: young men ought to stand to their reputation and in the best places; youth is making its way forward in the world and seeking a name: we we are on our way back. [C] ‘Sibi arma, sibi equos, sibi hastas, sibi clavam, sibi pilam, sibi natationes et cursus habeant; nobis senibus, ex lusionibus multis, talos relinquant et tesseras.’ [Let them have their arms, their horses, their spears and their fencing-foils; let them toss balls and swim and race: and from the many pastimes let old men choose dice and knuckle-bones.]6 [B] The very laws send us back to our homes. The least I can do on behalf of this wretched state into which my age has thrust me is to furnish it, as we do childhood, with toys and playthings: for that is what we are declining into. Wisdom and folly both will have plenty to do if they are to support and succour me alternately in disastrous old age:

  Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem.

  [Mix a little brief folly in your counsels.]7

  I similarly flee from the slightest pin-pricks: those which once would have scarcely scratched me now run right through me. My mode of being is beginning to like dwelling on the pain. [C] ‘In fragili corpore odiosa omnis offensio est.’ [To a frail body every shock is vexatious.]8

  [B] Mensque pati durum sustinet ægra nihil.

  [A mind that is ill can tolerate no hardships whatsoever.]9

  I have always been delicately sensitive to attacks of pain; I am more tender still now and in every way defenceless.

  Et minimæ vires frangere quassa valent.

  [The least shock will shatter a cracked vessel.]

  My judgement prevents me from kicking and muttering against the indignities which Nature orders me to tolerate, but it does not stop me from feeling them. I would run from one end of the world to the other to seek a single twelve-month of gay and pleasant tranquillity: I have no other end but to live and enjoy myself. There is enough sombre and dull tranquillity for me now, but it sends me to sleep and dulls my brain: I can never be satisfied by it. If there is any man or any good fellowship of men in town or country, in France or abroad, sedentary or gadabout, whom my humours please and whose humours please me, they have but to whistle through their fingers and I’ll come to them, furnishing them with ‘essays’ in flesh and blood.

  Since it is the privilege of the mind to escape from old age I counsel it to do so with all my might: let it meanwhile sprout green and flourish, if it can, like mistletoe on a dead tree. But it is a traitor, I fear: it is so closely bound in brotherhood to the body that it is constantly deserting me to follow my body in its necessity. In vain do I try to divert it from this attachment; I set before it Seneca and Catullus and the ladies and their dances royales: but if its comrade has colic paroxysms it thinks it has them too! The very activities which are proper and peculiar to it cannot then raise it up: they too manifestly reek of snot. There is no alacrity about what the mind brings forth when there is none in its body at the very same time.

  [C] Magistri Nostri10 are wrong when they seek to explain the extraordinary transports of our spirit. Leaving aside the attribution of some of them to divine rapture, to love, to the harshness of war, to poetry, to wine, they do not allow the part played in them by good health, by boiling vigorous health, whole and idle, such as from time to time in former days my verdant years, so free from care, provided for me. That joyful fire gives rise to flashes in our spirit; they are lively and bright beyond our natural reach; they are some of our most lively enthusiasms, even though they are not the most frenzied. No wonder then if the opposite state overburdens my spirit, hammers it down and produces opposite results:

  [B] Ad nullum consurgit opus, cum corpore languet.

  [No task can make it struggle to its feet: it languishes with the body.]11

  Furthermore my spirit wants me to be beholden to it for its allegedly showing much less complicity in all this than is usually the practice among men. Let us at least drive away ills and hardships from our human intercourse while we are enjoying a truce:

  Dum licet, obducta solvatur fronte senectus.

  [So while it can, let old age smooth away the wrinkles on its brow.]

  ‘Tetrica sunt amoenenda jocularibus.’ [Gloomy thoughts should be made pleasant by jests.] I like the kind of wisdom which is gay and companionable; I fly from grating manners and from sourness; I am suspicious of grim faces.

  [C] Tristemque vultus tetrici arrogantiam;

  [The sad arrogance of a gloomy face;]

  [B] Et habet tristis quoque turba cynaedos.

  [And buggers too are found in groups of sombre men.]

  [C] I wholeheartedly believe Plato when he says that great portents of the goodness or evil of a soul are easy or difficult humours. Socrates had a set expression but a serene and laughing one: it was not set as was that of the aged Crassus who was never known to laugh.12 [B] As a quality virtue is pleasing and gay. I know that few of those who will glower at the unrestrained freedom of my writings do not have greater cause to glower at the unrestrained freedom of their thoughts. I am certainly in harmony with their sentiments: it is their eyes I offend! What a well-ordered mind that is which can gloss over the writings of Plato burying all knowledge of his alleged affairs with Phaedo, Dion, Stella and Archeanassa! ‘Non pudeat dicere quod non pudeat sentire.’ [Let us be not ashamed to say whatever we are not ashamed to think.]13

  [B] I loathe a morose and gloomy mind which glides over life’s pleasures but holds on to its misfortunes and feeds on them – like flies which cannot get a hold on to anything highly polished and smooth and so cling to rough and rugged places and stay there; or like leeches which crave to suck only bad blood.14 I have moreover bidden myself to dare to write whatever I dare to do: I am loath even to have thoughts which I cannot publish. The worst of my deeds or qualities does not seem to me as ugly as the ugly cowardice of not daring to avow it. Everybody is circumspect about confessing, whereas they ought to be circumspect about doing: daring to do wrong is to some extent counterweighted and bridled by the courage needed to confess it. [C] Any man who would bind himself to tell all would bind himself to do nothing which we are forced to keep quiet about. God grant that my excessive licence may draw men nowadays to be free, rising above those cowardly counterfeit virtues which are born of our imperfections, and also grant that I may draw them to the pinnacle of reason at the expense of my own lack of moderation! If you are to tell of a vice of yours you must first see it and study it. Those who conceal it from others usually do so from themselves as well: they hold that it is not sufficiently hidden if they can see it, so they disguise it and steal it from their own moral awareness. ‘Quare vitia sua nemo confitetur? Quia e
tiam nunc in illis est; somnium narrare vigilantis est.’ [Why does nobody confess his faults? Because even now he remains within them: only after men have awakened can they relate their dreams.]15

  The body’s ills become clearer as they grow bigger: we discover that what we called a sprain or a touch of rheumatism is the gout. But as the soul’s ills grow in strength they are wrapped in greater obscurity: the more ill a man is, the less he realizes it. That is why the maladies of the soul need to be often probed in daylight, cut and torn from our hollow breasts by a pitiless hand. What applies to the benefactions we receive applies to the evils that we do: sometimes the only way to requite them is to acknowledge them. Is there some ugliness in our wrong-doing which dispenses us from the duty of acknowledging it?

  [B] I suffer such pains whenever I dissemble that I avoid being entrusted with another man’s secret, having no mind to deny what I know. I can keep quiet about it but I cannot deny it without strain and unease. To be really able to keep a secret you need to be made that way by nature, not doing so because you are under bond. When serving princes it is not enough to keep a secret: you need to be a liar as well. To the man who inquired of Thales of Milesia whether he should deny on oath that he had been a lecher I would have replied that he should not do so, for lying has always seemed worse to me than lechery. Thales gave quite different advice, telling him to swear the oath so as to cloak a bad vice by a lesser one. Yet this counsel means not so much choosing between vices as increasing their number.16

  Be it said en passant that if you present a man of conscience with the need to weigh an awkward situation against a vice he can easily strike the right bargain, but if you imprison him between two vices you oblige him to make a harsh choice – as happened to Origen who had either to commit idolatry or submit to being carnally assaulted by an ugly great Ethiopian paraded before him. He suffered the first alternative. Wrongly, it is said. So those women nowadays who protest to us that they would rather have ten lovers on their conscience than a single Mass would – by their false standards – not be making a bad choice.17

  There may be a lack of discretion in publishing one’s defects this way but there is no great danger of it becoming customary by example, for Ariston said that the winds which men most fear are those which uncover them.18 We must truss up those silly rags which cover over our morals. Men dispatch their consciences to the brothels and regulate their appearances. Even traitors and murderers are wedded to the laws of etiquette and dutifully stick to them. Yet it is not for injustice to complain of discourtesy [C] nor for wickedness to complain of indiscretion. It is a pity that a wicked man should not also be a boor and that his vice should be palliated by politeness. Such stucco belongs rightly to good healthy walls which are worth whitening or preserving.

  [B] As a courtesy to the Huguenots who damn our private auricular confession I make my confession here in public, sincerely and scrupulously. St Augustine, Origen and Hippocrates publicly admitted the error of their opinions; I do more; I include my morals.19 I hunger to make myself known. Provided I do so truly I do not care how many know it. Or, to put it better, I hunger for nothing, but I go in mortal fear of being mistaken for another by those who happen to know my name. If a man does all for honour and glory what does he think he gains by appearing before the world in a mask, concealing his true being from the people’s knowledge? If you praise a hunchback for his fine build he ought to take it as an insult. Are people talking about you if they honour you for valour when you are really a coward? They mistake you for somebody else. It would amuse me as much if such a person were to be gratified when men raised their caps to him, thinking that he was the master of the band when he was merely one of the retainers. When King Archelaus of Macedonia was going along the street somebody threw water over him. His entourage wanted to punish the man. ‘Ah yes,’ he replied, ‘but he never threw it at me but at the man he mistook me for.’20 [C] When somebody told Socrates that people were gossiping about him he said, ‘Not at all. There is nothing of me in what they are saying.’21 [B] In my case, if a man were to praise me for being a good navigator, for being very proper or very chaste I would not owe him a thank you. Similarly, if anyone should call me a traitor, a thief or a drunkard I would not think that it was me he attacked. Men who misjudge what they are like may well feed on false approval: I cannot. I see myself and explore myself right into my inwards; I know what pertains to me. I am content with less praise provided that I am more known. [C] People might think that I am wise with the kind of wisdom which I hold to be daft.

  [B] It pains me that my Essays merely serve ladies as a routine piece of furniture – something to put into their salon. This chapter will get me into their private drawing-rooms; and I prefer my dealings with women to be somewhat private: the public ones lack intimacy and savour.

  When saying our goodbyes we feel warmer affection than usual for whatever we are giving up. I am taking a last farewell of this world’s sports: these are our final embraces. But now let us get round to my subject.

  The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation? We are not afraid to utter the words kill, thieve or betray; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth. Does that mean that the less we breathe a word about sex the more right we have to allow it to fill our thoughts?

  [C] It is interesting that the words which are least used, least written and the least spoken are the very ones which are best known and most widely recognized. No one of any age or morals fails to know them as well as he knows the word for bread. They are printed on each one of us without being published; they have no voice, no spelling. It is interesting too that they mean an act which we have placed under the protection of silence, from which it is a crime to tear it even to arraign it and to judge it. We dare not even flog it except by periphrasis and similitude. A criminal is greatly favoured if he is so abominable that even the laws think it illicit to touch him or to see him: he is freed by the beneficence of his condemnation and saved by its severity. Is it not the same concerning books, which become more saleable and publicized once they are suppressed? Personally. I intend to take Aristotle’s advice literally: he says that coyness serves as an ornament in youth and a defect in old age.22

  [B] In the school of the Ancients – the school I cling to far more than to the modern, [C] its virtues seeming greater to me and its vices less – [B] they preach these words at you:

  [B] Ceux qui par trop fuyant Venus estrivent

  Faillent autant que ceux qui trop la suivent.

  [Those who excessively strive to flee from Venus fail just like those who follow her excessively.]23

  Tu, Dea, tu rerum naturam sola gubernas,

  Nec sine te quicquam dias in luminis oras

  Exoritur, neque fit lætum nec amabile quicquam.

  [Thou alone, O goddess, rulest over the totality of nature; without thee nothing comes to the heavenly shores of light, nothing is joyful, nothing lovable.]

  I do not know who managed to make Pallas and the Muses fall out with Venus and chill their ardour for Cupid;24 yet I can find no deities who become each other more or who owe more to each other. Anyone who removed their amorous thoughts from the Muses would rob them of the most beauteous entertainment they provide and of the noblest subject-matter of their works; and anyone who made Cupid lose contact with poetry and its services would weaken him by depriving him of his weapons. In that way we charge both the god of sexual relationships and of tenderness, and the tutelary goddesses of elegance and justice, with the vices of ingratitude and churlishness.

  I have been struck off the roll of Cupid’s attendants but not for so long that my memory is not still imbued with his powers and his values:

  agnosco veteris vestigia flammæ.

  [I can recognize the tracks of my former passions.]25

  There are still some traces of heat and emotion
after the fever,

  Nec mihi deficiat calor hic, hiemantibus annis

  [And let me not lack that warmth in my winter years.]

  All gross and dried up as I am, I can still feel some lukewarm remnants from that bygone ardour:

  Qual l’alto Ægeo, per che Aquilone o Noto

  Cessi, che tutto prima il vuolse et scosse,

  Non s’accheta ei pero: ma’l sono e’l moto,

  Ritien de l’onde anco agitate è grosse.

  [As the Aegean sea when the North Wind and the South have dropped, which first had whipped and churned it up, does not at once grow calm but retains the roar and surge of the waves, huge still and thrashing.]

  To the best of my knowledge the powers and values of that god are found more alive and animated in poetry than in their proper essence:

  Et versus digitos habet.

  [Poetry has playful fingers too.]

  Poetry can show us love with an air more loving than Love itself. Venus is never as beautiful stark naked, quick and panting, as she is here in Virgil:

  Dixerat, et niveis hinc atque hinc diva lacertis

  Cunctantem amplexu molli fovet. Ille repente

  Accepit solitam flammam, notusque medullas

  Intravit calor, et labefacta per ossa cucurrit.