The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  I have not attained to that vigorous contempt which fortifies itself and which nothing can help, nothing disturb. I am one peg below that. Not from fear but from cunning, I want to go to earth like a rabbit and steal off as I pass away. It is not my intention to test or to display my constancy during that action. For whom would it be? Then all my right to reputation and all my concern for it will be at an end. I am satisfied with a death which will withdraw into itself, a calm and lonely one, entirely my own, one in keeping with my life – retiring and private. Contrary to Roman superstition (according to which a man was held wretched if he died without speaking and without his nearest kinsfolk to close his eyes)100 I have enough to do to console myself without having to console others; enough thoughts in my mind without fresh ones evoked by my surroundings; enough to think about without drawing on others. This event is not one of our social engagements: it is a scene with one character. Let us live and laugh among our own folk, but let us die, grinding our teeth, among strangers. Provided you can pay, you can always find someone to turn your head and massage your feet, and who will leave you alone as much as you like, showing you an unconcerned face and letting you think and moan in your own way.

  Every day I argue myself out of that childish and unkindly humour which makes us desire that our own ills should arouse compassion and mournful thoughts in those we love. So as to bring on their tears we exaggerate our misfortunes beyond all measure. And that steadfastness in supporting ill-fortune which we eulogize in everyone else, we arraign and condemn in close relatives when the ill-fortune is ours. We are not content that they should sympathize with our ills unless they are also afflicted by them. Joy we should spread: sadness, prune back as much as we can. [C] Whoever evokes pity without cause is not to be pitied when cause there is. To be always lamenting is to have none to lament you; so often to look pitiful arouses pity in nobody. Act dead when you are living, and you are likely to be treated as alive when you are dying. I have known it get the goat of some invalids if you said they had a healthy colour or a regular pulse; they would hold back their laughter since it would betray that they were cured; they hated good health because it aroused no compassion. And what is more, they were not women either.

  [B] I present my maladies, at most, for what they are and I avoid studied groans and words of foreboding. If not merriness at least composure is appropriate for those attending a sick wise man. Just because he knows he is in the opposite condition himself he picks no quarrel with health: he delights in contemplating in others health, strong and whole, at least enjoying it through their company. Just because he knows that he is sinking, he does not reject all thoughts of life or avoid ordinary conversation. I want to study illness when I am well: when it is present it makes a real enough impact without my imagination helping it. We prepare ourselves beforehand for such journeys as we are resolved to undertake, but the hour when we should be climbing into the saddle we devote to those about us and prolong it in their favour.

  I realize that there is an unexpected benefit from this publication of my manners: in some ways it serves me as a rule. Occasionally the thought comes over me that I should not prove disloyal to [C] this account of my life.101 [B] This public disclosure obliges me to stick to my path and not to belie the portrayal of my qualities, which are, on the whole, less deformed and objectionable than is commonly thought by the malice and distemper of present-day judgements. The consistency and straightforwardness of my ways produce an outward appearance which is easy to interpret, but because my style is rather novel and unusual it gives slander too easy a time. Yet it seems to me that anyone who wanted to criticize me honestly would find in my avowed and admitted imperfections quite enough to get his teeth into and to satisfy him without fencing with the wind. If it seems to such a man that, by forestalling his criticisms and revelations, I have made his bite toothless, it is reasonable that he should arrogate to himself the right to amplify and extend them (since offensives do have the right to go beyond justice) and he can take those defects whose roots in me I have revealed and magnify them into trees, using to that end not only such defects as have got a hold on me but also those which threaten me. Both in quality and quantity they are iniquitous: let him batter me with them. [C] I could frankly welcome the example of Dion the philosopher:102 Antigonus was trying to provoke him on the subject of his origins. He cut him short and retorted: ‘I am the son of a butcher – I branded slave – and of a prostitute whom my father married because of the baseness of his fortune. Both were punished for such-and-such a crime. When I was a youth an orator took a fancy to me and bought me. When he died he left me all his possessions. I transferred them here to Athens and devoted myself to philosophy. Biographers do not need to bother to seek news about me, for I will tell them how things stand.’

  Free and open avowal robs rebuke of its sinews and strips insult of its weapons. [B] Nevertheless when all is said and done it appears that I am as often praised as disparaged beyond reason. It appears to me that I have, since my boyhood, been afforded a degree of rank and honour above what is mine rather than below. [C] I would feel more at ease in a land where such rankings were either regulated or held in contempt. Among men, as soon as a legal altercation about the order of precedence in processions or seating exceeds a triple rejoinder, it is discourteous. To avoid such churlish disputes I am never afraid to take or yield precedence unjustly: no man has ever challenged my precedence without my letting him take it.

  [B] Apart from that profit which I derive from writing about myself, there is another which I hope for: if it chances before I die that my humours should please and suit some decent man, he might try to bring us together. I am meeting him more than half-way, since all that he could have gained from a long acquaintance and intimacy with me, he could get more reliably and minutely in three days from my account. [C] A pleasing fancy: many things that I would not care to tell to any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller’s stall:

  Excutienda damns prœcordia.

  [We give them our inner hearts to ransack.]103

  [B] If on equally good evidence I knew a man who was right for me I would certainly go far to find him, for in my judgement the sweetness of well-matched and compatible fellowship can never cost too dear. O! a friend! How true is that ancient judgement, that the frequenting of one is more sweet than the element water, more necessary than the element fire.104

  To get back to my narration: there is no great evil in dying alone and afar. [C] Indeed we reckon that it is a duty to seek seclusion for natural functions less ugly than that one and less repulsive. [B] And, farther, those who are reduced by their sufferings to drag out a long existence should perhaps not wish to burden a large family with their misery. [C] (That is why the Indians in one particular territory thought it right to kill anyone who had fallen into such distress, while in another they would abandon him alone to save himself as best he could.) [B] Is there anyone for whom those long a-dying are not in the end an intolerable burden? Our duties to each other do not extend that far. Inevitably you teach cruelty to those who love you best, making your wife and children, by long accustoming, grow callous, no longer feeling or pitying your afflictions. (The groans of my colic paroxysms no longer bring distress to anybody.) And even if we were to derive some pleasure from their company (which is not always the case, because of the dissimilarity of our circumstances which readily produces contempt and hatred towards anyone whomsoever) is it not an abuse to make it last an entire age? The more I were to see them generously constraining themselves for my sake the more I should regret the trouble they were taking. We have a right to lean on others, but not to lie that heavily on top of them, supporting ourselves by their collapse – like that man who had little boys’ throats slit so as to use their blood to cure an illness of his, or like that other man who was supplied with little mites to warm his old limbs at night and to mingle the sweetness of their breath with the heavy sournes
s of his own.

  As an asylum for such a condition and so feeble an existence I would be inclined to prescribe myself Venice. [C] Decrepitude is a solitary quality: I am sociable to the point of excess, yet from this day forward it seems reasonable that I should withdraw my importunity from the sight of the world and brood over it myself, retreating and shrinking into my shell as tortoises do. I am learning to see people without clinging to them – that would be an outrage on so steep a decline. It is time to turn my back on company.

  [B] ‘But on so long a journey you will end up in some thieves’ kitchen where you will lack everything.’ – I carry most of my necessities with me. At all events we have no way of avoiding Fortune if she undertakes to fall upon us. When I am ill I want nothing beyond the natural order: what Nature cannot work in me I do not want some quack’s pill to do. While I am still in one piece and next-door to health, at the very onset of any fever or sickness which strikes me down, I reconcile myself to God by the last rites of Christianity; I find myself liberated and relieved by them, seeming to have got so much the better of my illness. Of lawyer and counsel I have even less need than of the doctor: do not expect me when I am ill to settle any affairs not already settled when I was in good health. What I intend to do to prepare for my death is done already: I would not dare to put it off for one single day. So if something remains undone, that means either that doubt has made me defer a decision (for sometimes the best decision is not to make one) or that quite simply I have wanted to do nothing about it.

  My book I write for a few men and for a few years. If it had been on a lasting subject I would have entrusted it to a more durable language. Judging from the constant changes undergone by our own tongue up to the present, who can hope that its contemporary form will be current fifty years from now? [C] (It goes flowing through our fingers every day, and during my lifetime half of it has changed. We say that it is perfect now: each age says that of its own. I do not think it has reached perfection while it is still running away and changing form. It is up to good and useful writings to buckle French on to themselves, and its reputation will follow the fortunes of our State.)

  [B] That is why I am not afraid to put in several personal details the currency of which will be exhausted during the lifetime of those who are alive today and which touch upon the private knowledge of some folk, who will see further into them than the general public can. When all is said and done I have no wish (as I know often happens whenever the dead are recalled to memory) that people should start arguing, claiming ‘This is how he thought; this is how he lived’; ‘If only he had uttered a few last words he would have said this or given away that’; ‘I knew him better than anyone else.’ Here I make known, as far as propriety allows, my feelings and inclinations. I do so more freely and readily by word of mouth for any who want to know; nevertheless if you look into these memoirs of mine you will find that I have said everything or intimated everything. What I have been unable to express in words I point towards with my finger:

  Verum animo satis hæc vestigia parva sagaci

  Sunt, per quæ possis cognoscere cætera tute.

  [Those slight traces are enough for a keen mind and will safely lead you to discover the rest.]105

  About myself nothing is wanting and there is nothing to guess. If you must discuss such things, I want it to be done truly and fairly. I would willingly come back from the next world to refute anyone who, even to do me honour, would fashion me other than I was. I know that people make even the living different when they talk of them. Had I not with all my might come to the defence of a friend whom I had lost, they would have ripped him into hundreds of incompatible little features.106

  To finish talking of my foibles, I admit that I hardly ever arrive at my lodgings during my travels without the question passing through my mind whether I could be ill and die there comfortably, lodged as I like in a place entirely to my taste – no noise, not filthy, smoky or stuffy. By such trivial amenities I seek to cajole death or (to put it better) to relieve myself of all other impediments to enable me to concentrate on death alone: it will probably weigh heavily enough on me without adding to the burden. I want it to have a share in the comforts and conveniences of my life. Death forms a big chunk of it, an important one: from this day forth I hope it will not belie my past.

  Some forms of death are easier than others: death takes on qualities which differ according to each man’s way of thinking. Among natural deaths, pleasant and easy it seems to me is the one which comes from our growing torpid and weak. Among violent ones, I find it far harder to think of a precipice than the collapse of a wall, a slash from a sword than a volley from harquebuses; and I would rather have drunk Socrates’ poison than to have run myself through like Cato. And although it all comes to the same, my imagination can feel a difference as great as life from death between jumping into a fiery furnace and into the stream of a smooth river – [C] so absurdly does our fear look more at the means than the result. [B] It only takes a moment, but I would give several days of my life to spend that moment in my own fashion. Since each man’s fancy can find greater or less harshness in it, since each has some preference between ways of dying, let us assay going a little further and finding one quite free from unpleasantness. Might we not even make death luxurious like Antony and Cleopatra, those fellows in death? I leave aside as harsh the efforts devised by philosophy, and as ideal those devised by religion; but among lesser men we find a certain Petronius and a certain Tigillinus in Rome, who were required to kill themselves, lulling death to sleep,107 so to speak, by their voluptuous preparations. They made death flow gently along, slipping it in among their usual wanton pastimes, between their girls and their drinking-companions: no mention of consolation, no mention of wills, no ambitious show of constancy, no talk of their condition in the life to come, but amidst games and festivities, jokes and common everyday conversation, music and love-poetry. Could we not imitate their resolve, with a more honourable restraint? Since there are deaths good for fools and others for sages, let us find some which are good for people in between. [C] My imagination can present me with a kind of death which is easy and (since we have to die) desirable. The Roman tyrants virtually spared a criminal’s life when they allowed him to choose how he would die.

  Yet was not a philosopher as subtle, modest and wise as Theophrastus forced by reason to recite the verse which Cicero put into Latin as:

  Vitam regit fortuna, non sapientia.

  [Our life is governed by Fortune not philosophy.]108

  How Fortune helps me now to rate my life at bargain-price, having reduced it to the point where nobody needs it and nobody is inconvenienced by it! That is a situation which I would have accepted at any period of my existence, but at this time, when I must fold up my garments and pack my bags, I find a special pleasure in causing no one when I die either pleasure or displeasure. By skilfully balancing the accounts, Fortune has made those who have a claim to some material gain from my death also conjoint heirs to some material loss. Death often oppresses us in as much as it weighs on others: we are virtually as concerned for their concerns as for our own – sometimes more or entirely so.

  [B] Among the qualities I look for in my lodgings I do not include grandiose spaciousness – I hate it rather – but a simple individual charm more often met in places where there is less artifice and which Nature honours with some loveliness all her own: ‘Non ampliter sed munditer convivium.’ ‘Plus salis quant sumptus.’ [An elegant not a copious feast. More wit than waste.]109

  Moreover it is for those whose business drags them up over the Grisons in midwinter to be surprised on the highway by their own life’s end. I, who most often travel for my own pleasure, am not all that bad a guide. If it looks nasty to the left I turn off to the right; if I find myself unfit to mount the saddle, I stop where I am. By acting thus I really do see nothing which is not as pleasant and agreeable to me as my home. It is true that I always do find superfluity superfluous and that I am embarrassed by delica
cy, even, and by profusion. Have I overlooked anything which I ought to have seen back there? Then I go back to it: it is still on my road. I follow no predetermined route, neither straight nor crooked. Supposing when I do go to some place that I do not find there what I was told to expect: since others’ judgements do not agree with mine (I have more often proved them wrong) I do not regret my exertion; I have learned that something which they told me about is not there!