The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [B] I have a lexicon all to myself: I ‘pass’ the time when tide and time are sticky and unpleasant: when good, I do not want to ‘pass’ time, I [C] savour it and hold on to it.170 [B] We must run the gauntlet through the bad and recline on the good. ‘Pastimes’ and ‘to pass the time’ are everyday expressions which correspond to the practice of those clever folk who think that they can use their life most profitably by letting it leak and slip away, by-passing it or avoiding it and (as far as they can manage to do so) ignoring it and fleeing from it as painful and contemptible. But I know life to be something different: I find it to be both of great account and delightful – even as I grasp it now [C] in its final waning; [B] Nature has given it into our hands garnished with such attributes, such agreeable ones, that if it weighs on us, if it slips uselessly from us, we have but ourselves to blame. [C] ‘Stulti vita ingrata est, trepida est, tota in futurum fertur.’ [It is the life of the fool which is graceless, fearful and entirely sacrificed to the future.]171

  [B] That is why I so order my ways that I can lose my life without regret, not however because it is troublesome or importunate but because one of its attributes is that it must be lost. [C] Besides, finding it not unpleasant to die can only rightly become those who find life pleasant. [B] To enjoy life requires some husbandry. I enjoy it twice as much as others, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attachment to it. Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it.

  Others know the delight of happiness and well-being: I know it as they do, but not en passant, as it slips by. We must also study it, savour it, muse upon it, so as to render condign thanksgivings to Him who vouchsafes it to us. Other folk enjoy all pleasures as they enjoy the pleasure of sleep: with no awareness of them. Why, with the purpose of not allowing even sleep to slip insensibly away, There was a time when I found it worthwhile to have my sleep broken into so that I could catch I glimpse of it. I deliberate with my self upon any pleasure. I do not skim it off: I plumb it, and now that my reason has grown chagrin and squeamish I force it to accept it. Do I find myself in a state of calm? Is there some pleasure which thrills me? I do not allow it to be purloined by my senses: I associate my Soul with it, not so that she will [C] bind herself to it172 [B] but take joy in it: not losing herself but finding herself in it; her role is to observe herself as mirrored in that happy state, to weigh that happiness, gauge it and increase it. She measures how much she owes to God for having her conscience and her warring passions at peace, with her body in its natural [C] state, [B] enjoying ordinately and [C] appropriately [B] those sweet and pleasant functions by which it pleases Him, through His grace, to counterbalance the pains with which His justice in its turn chastises us;173 she gauges how precious it is to her to have reached such a point that, no matter where she casts her gaze, all around her the heavens are serene – no desire, no fear or doubt bring disturbing gales; nor is there any hardship, [C] past, present or future [B] on which her thoughts may not light without anxiety. This meditation gains a great splendour by a comparison of my condition with that of others. And so I [C] pass in review,174 [B] from hundreds of aspects, those whom fortune or their own mistakes sweep off into tempestuous seas, as well as those, closer to my own case, who accept their good fortune with such languid unconcern. Those folk really do ‘pass’ their time: they pass beyond the present and the things they have in order to put themselves in bondage to hope and to those shadows and vain ghosts which their imagination holds out to them –

  Morte obita quales fama est volit are figuras,

  Aut quæ sopitos deludunt somnia sensus

  [Like those phantoms which, so it is said, flit about after death or those dreams which delude our slumbering senses]

  – the more you chase them, the faster and farther they run away. Just as Alexander said that he worked for work’s sake –

  Nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum:

  [Believing he had not done anything, while anything remained to be done:]

  – so too your only purpose in chasing after them, your only gain, lies in the chase.175

  As for me, then, I love life and cultivate it as it has pleased God to vouchsafe it to us. I do not go yearning that it should be without the need to eat and drink: [C] indeed to wish that need redoubled would not seem to me a less pardonable error: ‘Sapiens divitiarum naturalium quaesitor acerrimus’ [The wise man is the keenest of seekers after the riches of Nature];176 nor [B] that we could keep up our strength by merely popping into our mouths a little of that drug by means of which Epimenides assuaged his appetite and kept alive;177 nor that we could, without sensation, produce children by our fingers and our heels [C] but rather, speaking with reverence, that we could also do it voluptuously with our fingers and our heels as well; [B] nor that our body should be without desire or thrills. Such plaints are [C] ungrateful and iniquitous. [B] I accept wholeheartedly [C] and thankfully [B] what Nature has done for me: I delight in that fact and am proud of it. You do wrong to that great and almighty Giver to [C] refuse [B] His gift, to [C] nullify [B] it or disfigure it. [C] Himself entirely Good, he has made all things good: ‘Omnia quae secundum naturam est, aestimatione digna sunt.’ [All things which are in accordance with Nature are worthy of esteem.]178

  [B] I embrace most willingly those of Philosophy’s opinions which are most solid, that is to say, most human, most ours: my arguments, like my manners, are lowly and modest. [C] To my taste she is acting like a child when she starts crowing out ergo, preaching to us that it is a barbarous match to wed the divine to the earthy, the rational to the irrational, the strict to the permissive, the decent to the indecent; that pleasure is a bestial quality, unworthy that a wise man should savour it; that the only enjoyment he gets from lying with his beautiful young wife is the pleasure of being aware that he is performing an ordinate action – like pulling on his boots for a useful ride! May Philosophy’s followers, faced with breaking their wife’s hymen, be no more erect, muscular nor succulent than her arguments are!179

  That is not what Socrates says – Philosophy’s preceptor as well as ours. He values as he should the body’s pleasure but he prefers that of the mind as having more force, constancy, suppleness, variety and dignity. And, according to him, even that pleasure by no means goes alone (he is not given to such fantasies): it merely has primacy. For him temperance is not the enemy of our pleasures: it moderates them.180

  [B] Nature is a gentle guide but no more gentle than wise and just: [C] ‘Intrandum est in return naturam et penitus quid ea postulet pervidendum.’ [We must go deeply into the nature of things and find out precisely what Nature wants.] [B] I seek her traces everywhere: we have jumbled them together with the tracks of artifice; [C] and thereby that sovereign good of the Academics and Peripatetics, which is to live according to Nature, becomes for that very reason hard to delimit and portray; so too that of the Stoics which is a neighbour to it, namely, to conform to Nature.181 [B] Is it not an error to reckon some functions to be less worthy because they are necessities? They will never beat it out of my head anyway that the marriage of Pleasure to Necessity [C] (with whom, according to an ancient, the gods ever conspire) [B] is a most suitable match.182 What are we trying to achieve by taking limbs wrought together into so interlocked and kindly a compact and tearing them asunder in divorce? On the contrary let us tie them together by mutual duties. Let the mind awaken and quicken the heaviness of the body: let the body arrest the lightness of the mind and fix it fast: [C] ‘Qui velut summum honum laudat animae naturam, et tanquam malum naturam carnis accusat, profecto et animam carnaliter appretit et carnem carnaliter fugit, quoniam id vanitate sentit humana, non veritate divina.’ [He who eulogizes the nature of the soul as the sovereign good and who indicts the nature of the fl
esh as an evil desires the soul with a fleshly desire and flees from the flesh in a fleshly way, since his thought is based on human vanity not on divine truth.]183

  [B] There is no part unworthy of our concern in this gift which God has given to us; we must account for it down to each hair. It is not a merely [C] formal [B] commission to Man to guide himself according to Man’s [C] fashioning: it is expressly stated, [B] inborn, [C] most fundamental, [B] and the Creator gave it to us seriously [C] and strictly. Commonplace intellects can be persuaded by authority alone, and it has greater weight in a foreign tongue; so, at this point, let us make another charge at it: ‘Stultitiae proprium quis non dixerit, ignave et contumaciter facere quae facienda sunt, et alio corpus impellere, alio animum, distrahique inter diversissimos motus?’ [Who would not say that it was really foolish to do in a slothful, contumacious spirit something which has to be done anyway, thrusting the body in one direction and the soul in another where it is torn between totally conflicting emotions?]184

  [B] Go on then, just to see: get that fellow over there to tell you one of these days what notions and musings he stuffs into his head, for the sake of which he diverts his thoughts from a good meal and regrets the time spent eating it. You will find that no dish on your table tastes as insipid as that beautiful pabulum of his soul (as often as not it would be better if we fell fast asleep rather than stayed awake for what we do it for) and you will find that his arguments and concepts are not worth your rehashed leftovers. Even if they were the raptures of Archimedes, what does it matter?185

  Here, I am not alluding to – nor am I confounding with the [C] scrapings of the pot [B] that we are, and with the vain longings and ratiocinations which keep us musing – those revered souls which, through ardour of devotion and piety, are raised on high to a constant and scrupulous anticipation of things divine; [C] souls which (enjoying by the power of a quick and rapturous hope a foretaste of that everlasting food which is the ultimate goal, the final destination, that Christians long for) scorn to linger over our insubstantial and ambiguous pleasurable ‘necessities’ and easily assign to the body the bother and use of the temporal food of the senses. [B] That endeavour is a privilege.186 [C] Among the likes of us there are two things which have ever appeared to me to chime particularly well together – supercelestial opinions: subterranean morals.

  That great man [B] Aesop saw his master pissing as he walked along. ‘How now,’ he said. ‘When we run shall we have to shit?’187 Let us husband our time; but there still remains a great deal fallow and underused. Our mind does not willingly concede that it has plenty of other hours to perform its functions without breaking fellowship during the short time the body needs for its necessities. They want to be beside themselves, want to escape from their humanity. That is madness: instead of changing their Form into an angel’s they change it into a beast’s; they crash down instead of winding high. [C] Those humours soaring to transcendency terrify me as do great unapproachable heights; and for me nothing in the life of Socrates is so awkward to digest as his ecstasies and his daemonizings, and nothing about Plato so human as what is alleged for calling him divine. [B] And of [C] our [B] disciplines it is those which ascend the highest which, it seems to me, are the most [C] base and [B] earth-bound. I I can find nothing so [C] abject [B] and so mortal in the life of Alexander as his fantasies about [C] his immortalization. [B] Philotas, in a retort he made in a letter, showed his mordant wit when congratulating Alexander on his being placed among the gods by the oracle of Jupiter Ammon: ‘As far as you are concerned I’m delighted,’ he said, ‘but there is reason to pity those men who will have to live with a man, and obey a man, who [C] trespasses beyond, and cannot be content with, [B] the measure of a man’:188

  [C] Diis te minorem quod geris, imperas.

  [Because you hold yourself lower than the gods, you hold imperial sway.]189

  [B] The noble inscription by which the Athenians honoured Pompey’s visit to their city corresponds to what I think:

  D’autant es tu Dieu comme

  Tu te recognois homme.

  [Thou art a god in so far as thou recognizest that thou art a man.]

  It is an accomplishment, absolute and as it were God-like, to know how to enjoy our being as we ought. We seek other attributes because we do not understand the use of our own; and, having no knowledge of what is within, we sally forth outside ourselves. [C] A fine thing to get up on stilts: for even on stilts we must ever walk with our legs! And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.

  [B] The most beautiful of lives to my liking are those which conform to the common measure, [C] human and ordinate, without miracles though and [B] without rapture.

  Old age, however, has some slight need of being treated more tenderly. Let us commend it to that tutelary god of health – and, yes, of wisdom merry and companionable:

  Frui paratis et valido mihi,

  Latoe, dones, et, precor, integra

  Cum mente, nec turpem senectam

  Degere, nee cythara carentem.

  [Vouchsafe, O Son of Latona, that I may enjoy those things I have prepared; and, with my mind intact I pray, may I not degenerate into a squalid senility, in which the lyre is wanting.]190

  Index

  Where there are numerous entries under a heading, bold type indicates more than a passing reference. Footnotes are not indexed.

  Abra, 246

  Achilles, 211, 852

  Adrian (cardinal of Cometo), 247

  Aegisthus (myth, son of Thyestes), 826

  Aelius Verus (Roman emperor), 225

  Aeneas, 47

  Aerschot, Phillippe de Croi, Duke of, 247

  Aeschylus, 94, 211

  Aesculapius, 869, 1236

  Aesop, 460, 869, 873, 1172, 1211, 1241, 1267

  Aethalides, 624

  Afranius (Roman governor of Spain), 836

  Agamedes (myth. architect), 650

  Agamemnon, 1027

  Agarista (daughter of Clisthenes), 658

  Agathocles (King of Syracuse), 319

  Agenois, Lord Seneschal d’, 48

  Agesilaus (King of Sparta), 14, 85, 138, 161, 255, 306–7, 317, 496, 594, 822–3, 1123

  Agesilaus (philosopher), 216, 1008

  Agis (King of Sparta), 317, 392, 508, 823

  Agricola, 1175

  Agrippa, Marcus Vipsanius (Roman commander), 304, 689

  Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henry Cornelius, xxxiii, xxxvi

  Agrippina, 264

  Aignan, St, 248

  Ajax (King of Salamis), 639

  Alba (Alva) Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of, 28, 751

  Albertus Magnus (Albert of Cologne), 123

  Albucilla, 688

  Albuquerque, Alphonso d’ (Portuguese viceroy), 266

  Alcibiades (Athenian general and politician), 187, 719, 852, 942, 1018, 1051, 1156, 1215, 1255, 1260

  Alcinus, 456

  Alcmaeon of Crotona (Greek philosopher), 575, 627, 871

  Alexander III (the Great), 5–6, 27, 65, 85, 94, 138, 145, 183, 187, 256, 281, 292, 303–4, 317, 322, 329, 338–9, 378, 404, 453, 582, 645, 719, 753, 761, 803, 833, 837, 840, 852, 853–5, 913, 990, 1000, 1031, 1041, 1042, 1137, 1169, 1189, 1199, 1223, 1258, 1264, 1268

  Alexander VI (Pope), 247

  Alexander (Tyrant of Pheres), 786

  Alexandridas, 176

  Alfonso (king of Aragon), 296, 327

  Aliénor (Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II of England), 64

  Alviano, Bartolomeo d’ (Venetian general), 13

  Amafinius (Epicurean writer), 755

  Amasis (Egyptian king), 114

  Amestris (mother of Xerxes), 583

  Aminomachus (heir to Epicurus), 704

  Ammianus Marcellinus (Roman historian), 75, 455, 760, 820

  Amurath (Murad) I (Sultan of Turkey), 901

  Amurath (Murad) II (Sultan of Turkey), 226, 804

  Amurath (Murad) III (Sultan of Turkey), 769

  Amycus (myth. boxer
), 792

  Amyot, Jacques (Bishop of Auxerre, translator of Plutarch), xviii, li, 140, 309. 408

  Anacharsis (Scythian philosopher), 298, 387

  Anacreon, 1009

  Anaxagoras, 153, 505, 568, 578, 589, 600–601, 606

  Anaxarchus (Greek philosopher), 389

  Anaximander, 574–5, 606, 609

  Anaximenes of Miletus (Ionian philosopher), 179, 575

  Andreosso (husband of Joanna of Naples), 1002

  Androdus (Androcles) xxxii, 532–3

  Andronicus (Emperor of the East), 360

  Andros the Argive, 1228

  Angelica, 181

  Antaeus, 792

  Antigonus Dosun (King of Macedon), 392

  Antigonus Gonatus (King of Macedon), 262, 960, 1109

  Antigonus the one-eyed (Alexander’s general), 24, 292, 376, 530, 900, 1171

  Antinonides (Greek musician), 989

  Antinous (defender of Epirus), 399

  Antiochus (Soter) I, (King of Syria), 110

  Antiochus III, the Great (King of Sparta), 780

  Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) (King of Sparta), 316, 400, 389

  Antiochus of Ascalon, 1091

  Antipater (Alexander’s general), 161, 392

  Antipater (Stoic philosopher), 1106

  Antisthenes (Cynic philosopher), 267, 270, 281, 390, 478, 496, 553, 859, 920, 968, 1016, 1048, 1059–60, 1119, 1221