The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  Ad primum lapidem vectari cum placet, hora

  Sumitur ex libro; si prurit frictus ocelli

  Angulus, inspecta genesi collyria quærit.

  [Does he want to be borne as far as the first milestone? Then he consults his almanack to find out the best time. Has he got a sore in the corner of an eye? Then he consults his horoscope before buying some ointment.]80

  If he trusts me a young man will often jump to the other extreme: if he does not, the least excess will undermine him: he makes himself disagreeable and clumsy in society. The most incompatible quality in a gentleman is to be over-nicely bound to one fixed idiosyncratic manner: and idiosyncratic it is, if it is not pliable and supple. There is disgrace in being incapable or afraid to do what your companions are up to. Such men should stay in their kitchens! Unbecoming it is, in everyone else: in a warrior it is vile and not to be endured; he, as Philopoemen said, must get accustomed to all kinds of this life’s changes and hardships.81

  Although I was brought up, as much as is humanly possible, for freedom and flexibility, nevertheless as I grow older I am becoming through indifference more fixed in certain forms (I am past the age for elementary schooling; now old age has no other concern than to look after itself); without my noticing it, custom has imprinted its stamp on me so well where some things are concerned that any departure from it I call excess; and I cannot, without turning it into an assay of myself, sleep by day, eat snacks between meals, nor eat breakfast, nor go to bed after supper without having a considerable gap, [C] say three hours or more, [B] nor have sexual intercourse except before going to sleep, nor do it standing up, nor remain soaking with sweat, nor drink either water or wine unmixed, nor remain for long with my head uncovered, nor have my haircut after dinner. I would feel just as ill at ease without gloves or shirt, or without a wash on leaving the table and when getting up in the morning, or lying in a bed without canopy and curtains, as I would if forced to do without things which really matter.

  I could dine easily enough without a tablecloth, but I feel very uncomfortable dining without a clean napkin as the Germans do. I dirty my napkins more than they or the Italians and rarely seek the aid of spoon or fork. I regret that we have not continued along the lines of the fashion started by our kings, changing napkins like plates with each course.

  We are told that as Marius grew older, tough old soldier though he was, he became choosy about his wine and would only drink it out of his own special goblet. [C] I too incline82 towards glasses of a particular shape and I no more like drinking out of a common cup than I would like eating out of common fingers; and I dislike all metals compared with clear transparent materials. Let my eyes too taste it to the full.

  [B] Several such foibles I owe to habit: on the other hand Nature has contributed her own, such as my not being able to stand more than two proper meals a day without overloading my stomach, nor to go without a meal altogether without filling myself with wind, parching my mouth and upsetting my appetite; nor can I stand a long exposure to the evening dew. During these last few years when a whole night has to be spent (as often happens) on some military task, my stomach begins to bother me after five or six hours; I have splitting headaches and can never get through to morning without vomiting. Then, while the others go to breakfast, I have a sleep; after which I am quite happy again.

  I had always been taught that evening dew formed only after night-fall, but upon frequenting a nobleman who was imbued with the belief that such dew is more dangerous and severe two or three hours before sunset (when he scrupulously avoids going out) he made such an impression on me that I almost not so much believed it as felt it. Well now, that very doubt and concern for our health can hammer our thought-process and change us. Those who slide precipitously down slopes such as that bring disaster upon themselves. There are several gentlemen for whom I feel pity: through the stupidity of their doctors they shut themselves up indoors while still young and healthy; it would be better to put up with a chill rather than forever to forgo joining in common everyday life outdoors. [C] What a grievous skill medicine is, disparaging for us the more delightful hours of the day. [B] Let us extend our hold on things by every means we possess. Usually if you stubborn things out you toughen yourself up, correcting your complexion by despising it and seducing it, as Caesar did his epilepsy. We should give ourselves, but not enslave ourselves, to the best precepts, except in such cases (if there be any) in which constraint and slavery serve a purpose.

  Kings and philosophers shit: and so do ladies.83 The lives of public figures are devoted to etiquette: my life, an obscure and private one, can enjoy all the natural functions: moreover to be a soldier and to come from Gascony are both qualities given to forthrightness. And so of that activity I shall say that it needs to be consigned to a set hour – not daytime – to which we should subject ourselves by force of habit, as I have done, but not (as applies to me now that I am growing old) subject to the pleasures of a particular place and seat for this function, nor to making it uncomfortable by prolonging it or by being fastidious. All the same, is it not to some extent pardonable to require more care and cleanliness for our dirtiest functions? [C] ‘Natura homo mundum et elegans animal est.’ [By Nature Man is a clean and neat creature.]84 Of all the natural operations, that is the one during which I least willingly tolerate being interrupted. [B] I have known many a soldier put out by the irregularity of his bowels. My bowels and I never fail to keep our rendezvous, which is (unless some urgent business or illness disturbs us) when I jump out of bed.

  So, as I was saying, I can give no judgement about how the sick can be better looked after except that they should quietly hold to the pattern of life in which they have been schooled and brought up. Change of any kind produces bewilderment and trauma. Convince yourself if you can that chestnuts are harmful to the men of Périgord or Lucca, or milk and cheese to folk in the highlands! Yet the sick are constantly prescribed not merely a new way of life but an opposite one – such a revolution as could not be endured by a healthy man. Prescribe water for a seventy-year-old Breton; shut a sailorman up in vapour-bath; forbid. Basque manservant to go for walks! They are deprived of motion and finally of breath and the light of day:

  An vivere tanti est?

  [Is life worth that much?]85

  Cogimur a suetis animum suspendere rebus,

  Atque, ut vivamus, vivere desinimus.

  Hos superesse rear, quibus et spirabilis aer

  Et lux qua regimur redditur ipsa gravis?

  [We are compelled to deprive our souls of what they are used to; to stay alive we must cease to live! Should I count among the survivors those men for whom the very air they breathe and the light which lightens them have become a burden?]

  If doctors do nothing else, they do at least in plenty of time prepare their patients to die, sapping and retrenching their contacts with life.

  Sound or sick I willingly let myself follow such appetites as become pressing. I grant considerable authority to my desires and predispositions. I do not like curing one ill by another; I loathe remedies which are more importunate than the sickness: being subjected to colic paroxysms and then made to abstain from the pleasure of eating oysters are two ills for the price of one. On this side we have the illness hurting us, on the other the diet. Since we must risk being wrong, let us risk what gives us pleasure, rather. The world does the reverse, thinking that nothing does you good unless it hurts: pleasantness is suspect. In many things my appetite, of its own volition, has most successfully accommodated and adapted itself to the well-being of my stomach. When I was young I liked the tartness and sharp savour of sauces: my stomach being subsequently troubled by them, my taste for them at once followed its lead.

  [C] Wine is bad for the sick: it is the first thing I lose my taste for, my tongue finding it unpleasant, invincibly unpleasant. [B] Anything the taste of which I find unpleasant does me harm: nothing does me harm if I swallow it hungrily and joyfully. I have never been bothered by anything I have done in whic
h I found great pleasure. And that is why I have, by and large, made all medical prescriptions give way to what pleases me.

  when I was young –

  Quern circumcursans hue atque hue sæpe Cupido

  Fulgebat, crocina splendidus in tunica,

  [when shining Cupid flew here and there about me, resplendent in his saffron tunic,]86

  – I yielded as freely and as thoughtlessly as anyone to the pleasure which then seized hold of me:

  Et militavi non sine gloria,

  [and I fought not without glory,]

  making it last and prolonging it, however, rather than making sudden thrusts.

  Sex me vix memini sustinuisse vices.

  [I cannot recall managing it more than six times in a row.]87

  There is indeed some worry and wonder in confessing at what tender an age I happened to fall first into Cupid’s power – ‘happened’ is indeed right, for it was long before the age of discretion and awareness – so long ago that I cannot remember anything about myself then. You can wed my fortune to that of Quartilla, who could not remember ever having been a virgin.88

  Inde tragus celeresque pili, mirandaque matri

  Barba mæ.

  [My armpits had precocious hairs and stank like a goat: Mother was astonished by my early beard.]

  The doctors usually bend their rules – usefully – before the violence of the intense cravings which surprise the sick: such a great desire cannot be thought of as so strange or vicious that Nature is not at work in it. And then, what a great thing it is to satisfy our imagination. In my opinion that faculty concerns everything, at least more than any other does: the most grievous and frequent of ills are those which imagination loads upon us. From several points of view I like that Spanish saying: ‘Defienda me Dios de my.’ [God save me from myself] When I am ill what I lament is that I have no desire then which gives me the satisfaction of assuaging it: Medicine would never stop me doing so! It is the same when I am well: I have scarcely anything left to hope or to wish for now. It is pitiful to be faint and feeble even in your desires.

  The art of medicine has not reached such certainty that, no matter what we do, we cannot find some authority for doing it. Medicine changes according to the climate, according to the phases of the moon, according to. Fernel and according to Scaliger. If your own doctor does not find it good for you to sleep, to use wine or any particular food, do not worry: I will find you another who does not agree with his advice. The range of differing medical arguments and opinions embraces every sort of variety. I knew one wretched patient, weak and fainting with thirst as part of his cure, who was later laughed at by another doctor who condemned that treatment as harmful. Had his suffering been to some purpose? Well there is a practitioner of that mystery who recently died of the stone and who had used extreme abstinence in fighting that illness: his fellow-doctors say that, on the contrary, such deprivation had desiccated him, maturating the sand in his kidneys.

  I have noted that when I am sick or wounded talking excites me and does me as much harm as any of my excesses. Speaking takes it out of me and tires me, since my voice is so strong and booming that when I have needed to have a word in the ear of the great on a matter of some gravity I have often put them to the embarrassment of asking me to lower it.

  The following tale is worth a digression: there was in one of the schools of the Greeks a man who used to talk loudly as I do. The Master of debate sent to tell him to speak lower: ‘Let him send and tell me what volume he wants me to adopt,’ he said. The Master replied that he should pitch his voice to the ears of the man he was addressing.89 Now that was well said, provided that he meant, ‘Speak according to the nature of your business with your hearer.’ For if he meant, ‘It is enough if people can catch what you say,’ or, ‘Let yourself be governed by your hearer,’ then I do not believe that he was right. Volume and intonation contribute to the expression of meaning: it is for me to control them so that I can make myself understood. There is a voice for instructing, a voice for pleasing or for reproving. I may want my voice not simply to reach the man but to hit him or go right through him. When I am barking at my footman with a rough and harsh voice, a fine thing it would be if he came and said to me, ‘Speak more softly, Master. I can hear you quite well.’ [C] ‘Est quaedam vox ad auditum accommodata, non magnitudine sed proprietate.’ [There is a kind of voice which impresses the hearer not by its volume but its own peculiar quality.]90 [B] Words belong half to the speaker, half to the hearer. The latter must prepare himself to receive them according to such motion as they acquire, just as among those who play royal-tennis the one who receives the ball steps backwards or prepares himself, depending on the movements of the server or the form of his stroke.

  Experience has also taught me that we are ruined by impatience. Illnesses have their life and their limits,91 [C] their maladies and their good health. The constitution of illnesses is formed on the pattern of that of animals: from birth their lot is assigned limits, and so are their days. Anyone who makes an assay at imperiously shortening them by interrupting their course prolongs them and makes them breed, irritating them instead of quietening them down. I am of Crantor’s opinion that we should neither resist illnesses stubbornly and rashly nor succumb to them out of weakness but yield to them naturally, according to our own mode of being and to theirs.92 [B] We must afford them right-of-passage, and I find that they stay less long with me, who let them go their way; and through their own decline I have rid myself of some which are held to be the most tenacious and stubborn, with no help from that Art and against its prescriptions. Let us allow Nature to do something! She understands her business better than we do. – ‘But so-and-so died of it!’ – So will you, of that illness or some other. And how many have still died of it with three doctors by their arses? Precedent is [C] an uncertain looking-glass, [B] all-embracing, [C] turning all ways.93 [B] If the medicine tastes nice, take it: that is so much immediate gain at least. [C] I will not jib at its name or colour if it is delicious and whets my appetite for it. One of the principal species of profit is pleasure. [B] Among the illnesses which I have allowed to grow old and die of a natural death within me are rheums, fluxions of gout, diarrhoeas, coronary palpitations and migraines, which I lost just when I was half-resigned to having them batten on me. You can conjure them away better by courtesy than by bravado. We must quietly suffer the laws of Man’s condition. Despite all medicine, we are made for growing old, growing weaker and falling ill. That is the first lesson which the Mexicans teach to their children when, on leaving their mother’s womb, they greet them thus: ‘Child: thou hast come into this world to suffer: suffer, endure and hold thy peace.’

  It is unfair to moan because what can happen to any has happened to one: [C] ‘indignare si quid in te inique proprie constitutum est’ [if anything is unjustly decreed against you alone, that is the time to complain].94

  [B] Here you see an old man praying God to keep him entirely healthy and strong – that is to say, to make him young again:

  Stulte, quid hæc frustra votis puerilibus optas?

  [You fool. What do you hope to gain by such useless, childish prayers?]95

  Is it not madness? His mode of being does not allow it. [C] Gout, gravel and bad digestion go with long years just as heat, wind and rain go with long journeys. Plato does not believe that Aesculapius should trouble to provide remedies to prolong life in a weak and wasted body, useless to its country, useless to its vocation and useless for producing healthy robust sons: nor does he find such a preoccupation becoming to the justice and wisdom of God who must govern all things to a useful purpose.96 [B] It is all over, old chap: nobody can put you back on your feet; they will [C] at most [B] bandage and prop you up for a bit, [C] prolonging your misery an hour or so:

  [B] Non secus instantem cupiens fulcire ruinam,

  Diversis contra nititur obicibus,

  Donec certa dies, omni compage soluta,

  Ipsum cum rebus subruat auxilium.

  [A
s a man, desiring to keep a building from collapsing, shores it up with various props until there comes the day when all the scaffolding shatters and the props collapse together with the building.]97

  We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life. Without such blending our being cannot be: one category is no less necessary than the other. To assay kicking against natural necessity is to reproduce the mad deed of Ctesiphon who, to a kicking-match, challenged his mule.98

  I do not go in much for consultations over such deterioration as I feel: once those medical fellows have you at their mercy they boss you about: they batter your ears with their prognostics. Once, taking advantage of me when I was weak and ill, they abused me with their dogmas and their masterly [C] frowns,99 [B] threatening me with great suffering and then with imminent death. They did not succeed in knocking me down or dislodging me from my fortress, but I was jolted and jostled: my judgement was neither changed nor troubled by them but it was at least preoccupied, and that means so much agitation and strife. I treat my imagination as gently as I am able, freeing it if I can from the load of any pain and conflict. Anyone who can should help it, stroke it, mislead it. My wit is well suited to such service: it never runs out of specious arguments about anything. If it could convince as well as it preaches its help would be most welcome.