Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Turning to biographers, Montaigne liked those who went beyond the external events of a life and tried to reconstruct a person’s inner world from the evidence. No one excelled in this more than his favorite writer of all: the Greek biographer Plutarch, who lived from around AD 46 to around 120 and whose vast Lives presented narratives of notable Greeks and Romans in themed pairs. Plutarch was to Montaigne what Montaigne was to many later readers: a model to follow, and a treasure chest of ideas, quotations, and anecdotes to plunder. “He is so universal and so full that on all occasions, and however eccentric the subject you have taken up, he makes his way into your work.” The truth of this last part is undeniable: several sections of the Essays are paste-ins from Plutarch, left almost unchanged. No one thought of this as plagiarism: such imitation of great authors was then considered an excellent practice. Moreover, Montaigne subtly changed everything he stole, if only by setting it in a different context and hedging it around with uncertainties.

He loved the way Plutarch assembled his work by stuffing in fistfuls of images, conversations, people, animals, and objects of all kinds, rather than by coldly arranging abstractions and arguments. His writing is full of things , Montaigne pointed out. If Plutarch wants to tell us that the trick in living well is to make the best of any situation, he does it by telling the story of a man who threw a stone at his dog, missed, hit his stepmother instead, and exclaimed, “Not so bad after all!” Or, if he wants to show us how we tend to forget the good things in life and obsess only about the bad, he writes about flies landing on mirrors and sliding about on the smooth surface, unable to find a footing until they hit a rough area. Plutarch leaves no neat endings, but he sows seeds from which whole worlds of inquiry can be developed. He points where we can go if we like; he does not lead us, and it is up to us whether we obey or not.

Montaigne also loved the strong sense of Plutarch’s own personality that comes across in his work: “I think I know him even into his soul.” This was what Montaigne looked for in a book, just as people later looked for it in him: the feeling of meeting a real person across the centuries. Reading Plutarch, he lost awareness of the gap in time that divided them — much bigger than the gap between Montaigne and us. It does not matter, he wrote, whether a person one loves has been dead for fifteen hundred years or, like his own father at the time, eighteen years. Both are equally remote; both are equally close.

Montaigne’s merging of favorite authors with his own father says a lot about how he read: he took up books as if they were people, and welcomed them into his family. The rebellious, Ovid-reading boy would one day accumulate a library of around a thousand volumes: a good size, but not an indiscriminate assemblage. Some were inherited from his friend La Boétie; others he bought himself. He collected unsystematically, without adding fine bindings or considering rarity value. Montaigne would never repeat his father’s mistake of fetishizing books or their authors. One cannot imagine him kissing volumes like holy relics, as Erasmus or the poet Petrarch reportedly used to, or putting on his best clothes before reading them, like Machiavelli, who wrote: “I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workaday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them.” Montaigne would have found this ridiculous. He preferred to converse with the ancients in a tone of camaraderie, sometimes even teasing them, as when he twits Cicero for his pomposity or suggests that Virgil could have made more of an effort.

Effort was just what he himself claimed never to make, either in reading or writing. “I leaf through now one book, now another,” he wrote, “without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments.” He could sound positively cross if he thought anyone might suspect him of careful scholarship. Once, catching himself having said that books offer consolation, he hastily added, “Actually I use them scarcely any more than those who do not know them at all.” And one of his sentences starts, “We who have little contact with books …” His rule in reading remained the one he had learned from Ovid: pursue pleasure. “If I encounter difficulties in reading,” he wrote, “I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there. I do nothing without gaiety.”

In truth he did work hard sometimes, but only when he thought the labor was worthwhile. Annotations in Montaigne’s hand survive on a few books from his collection, notably a copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things — clearly a text that merited close attention. This is exactly the kind of book, idiosyncratic and intellectually adventurous, that you would expect Montaigne to want to take such trouble over.

Presenting himself as a layabout, flicking through a few pages before tossing the book aside with a yawn, suited Montaigne. It accorded with the dilettantish atmosphere he wanted to evoke in his own writing. As the copy of Lucretius shows, the truth must have been more complicated. But no doubt he did abandon whatever bored him: that was how he had been brought up, after all. Pierre taught him that everything should be approached in “gentleness and freedom, without rigor and constraint.” Of this, Montaigne made a whole principle of living.

Whenever Montaigne did exert himself to flick through a book, according to him, he promptly forgot almost everything he had read. “Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgment does its work with difficulty,” he wrote, before adding, “it is entirely lacking in me.”

There is no man who has less business talking about memory. For I recognize almost no trace of it in me, and I do not think there is another one in the world so monstrously deficient.

He admitted that this was a nuisance. It was annoying to lose his most interesting ideas simply because they came to him while he was out riding and had no paper on which to write them down. It would have been nice to remember more of his dreams, too. As he wrote, quoting Terence, “I’m full of cracks, and leak out on all sides.”

Montaigne often sprang to the defense of the mnemonically challenged. He felt “indignation” and “personal resentment” when reading, for example, about Lyncestes, who was obliged to give a speech of defense to a whole army after being accused of conspiring against Alexander the Great. Lyncestes memorized an oration, but, when he tried to deliver it, he got only a few words out before becoming confused and forgetting the rest. While he stammered and hedged, a nearby group of soldiers lost patience and ran him through with their pikes. They thought his inability to speak proved his guilt. “That certainly was good reasoning!” exclaimed Montaigne. It proved only that, under stress, an overburdened memory is likely to take fright at its load like a panicky horse, and dump the lot.

Even if one’s life was not at stake, learning a speech by heart was not necessarily a good idea. Spontaneous talk was usually more enjoyable to listen to. When Montaigne himself had to speak in public, he tried to be nonchalant, and used “unstudied and unpremeditated gestures, as if they arose from the immediate occasion.” He particularly avoided announcing a sequence of numbered points (“I will now discuss six possible approaches …”) because it was both boring and risky: one was likely either to forget some of them or to end up with too many.