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

Sometimes the very significance or interest of a piece of information drove it out of his mind. Once, being lucky enough to meet a group of Tupinambá people brought over by French colonists from Brazil, he listened eagerly to their answers when they were asked what they thought of France. They replied with three remarks, all fascinating — but when Montaigne came to recount the conversation in his Essays , he could remember only two. Other lapses were worse. In a published letter describing the death of La Boétie — the man he loved most in his life — he confessed that he might have forgotten some of his friend’s final acts and parting words.

Montaigne’s admission of such failings was a direct challenge to the Renaissance ideal of oratory and rhetoric, which held that being able to think well was the same as being able to speak well, and being able to speak well depended upon remembering your flow of argument together with sparkling quotations and examples to adorn it. Devotees of the art of memory, or ars memoriae , learned techniques for stringing together hours’ worth of rhetoric, and even developed these techniques into a whole program of philosophical self-improvement. This had no appeal for Montaigne.

From the start, some readers have refused to believe that his memory could really be as bad as he claimed. This irritated him so much that he complained about it in the Essays . But doubters continued to point out that, for example, he seemed to have no difficulty remembering quotations from his reading: so many appear in the Essays , not least the one about feeling like a leaking pot. Either he was less leaky than he claimed, or he was less lazy, for if he did not remember the quotations, he must have written them down. Some people became positively angry about this. One near-contemporary of his, the poet Dominique Baudier, said that Montaigne’s lamentations about his memory drove him to “nausea and laughter”—an extreme reaction. The seventeenth-century philosopher Malebranche felt Montaigne was lying to him, a serious charge against a writer who always made much of his honesty.

It was a charge that had something to it. Montaigne surely did remember more than he let on. It is not unusual to feel let down by one’s memory: this is part of the imperfect human condition. An undisciplined memory is also just what one might expect from Montaigne’s easygoing upbringing and his dislike of forcing himself in anything. His apparent modesty on this subject can also be translated into a subtle claim to virtues which he thought more important. One of these, ironically, was honesty. As the old saying had it, bad memories make bad liars. If Montaigne was too forgetful to keep stories straight in his head, he had to tell the truth. Also, his lack of memory kept his speeches brief and his anecdotes concise, since he could not remember long ones, and it enabled him to exercise good judgment. People with good memories have cluttered minds, but his brain was so blissfully empty that nothing could get in the way of common sense. Finally, he easily forgot any slight inflicted on him by others, and therefore bore few resentments. In short, he presented himself as floating through the world on a blanket of benevolent vacancy.

Where Montaigne’s memory did seem to work well, if he wanted it to, was in reconstructing personal experiences such as the riding accident. Instead of resolving them into neat, superficial anecdotes, he could recover feelings from the inside — not perfectly, because the Heraclitan stream kept carrying him away, but very closely. The nineteenth-century psychologist Dugald Stewart speculated that Montaigne’s lack of control of his memory made him better at such tasks. Montaigne was attuned to the kind of “involuntary” memory that would one day fascinate Proust: those blasts from the past that irrupt unexpectedly into the present, perhaps in response to a long-forgotten taste or smell. Such moments seem possible only if they are surrounded by an ocean of forgetfulness, as well as a suitable mood and sufficient leisure.

Montaigne certainly did not like to strain at things. “I have to solicit it nonchalantly,” he said of his memory. “It serves me at its own time, not at mine.” Any effort to haul something back on demand just drove the sought item further into the shadows. Conversely, he noticed, nothing made an incident stick in the memory more than a conscious effort to forget it.

“What I do easily and naturally,” he wrote, “I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict command.” Allowing his memory to follow its own path formed part of his general policy of letting nature govern his actions. In his childhood, the result was that he often appeared to be lazy and good for nothing, and in many ways he probably was. Despite his father’s constant efforts to motivate him, he wrote, he turned out to be “so sluggish, lax, and drowsy that they could not tear me from my sloth, not even to make me play.”

By his own estimation, he was not only idle but slow-witted. His intelligence could not penetrate the slightest cloud: “There is no subtlety so empty that it will not stump me. Of games in which the mind has a part — chess, cards, draughts, and others — I understand nothing but the barest rudiments.” He had a “tardy understanding,” a “weak imagination,” and a “slow mind,” none of which was helped by his lack of recall. All his faculties slumbered along together, snoring gently: he makes his brain sound like a tea party at which all the guests were Dormice.

But, again, there were benefits. Once he had grasped something, he grasped it firmly. Even as a child, he says, “What I saw, I saw well.” Moreover, he deliberately used his inert manner as a cover under which he could hide any number of “bold ideas” and independent opinions. His apparent modesty made it possible for him to claim something more important than quick wits: sound judgment.

Montaigne would make a good model for the modern “Slow Movement,” which has spread (in a leisurely fashion) to become something of a cult since its inception in the late twentieth century. Like Montaigne, its adherents make slow speed into a moral principle. Its founding text is Sten Nadolny’s novel The Discovery of Slowness , which relates the life of Arctic explorer John Franklin, a man whose natural pace of living and thinking is portrayed as that of an elderly sloth after a long massage and a pipe of opium. Franklin is mocked as a child, but when he reaches the far North he finds the environment perfectly suited to his nature: a place where one takes one’s time, where very little happens, and where it is important to stop and think before rushing into action. Long after its publication in Germany in 1983, The Discovery of Slowness remained a best seller and was even marketed as an alternative management manual. Meanwhile, Italy generated the Slow Food movement, which began in protest against the Rome branch of McDonald’s and grew to become an entire philosophy of good living.

Montaigne would have understood all this very well. For him, slowness opened the way to wisdom, and to a spirit of moderation which offset the excess and zealotry dominating the France of his time. He was lucky enough to be naturally immune to both, having no tendency to be carried away by the enthusiasms others seemed prone to. “I am nearly always in place, like heavy and inert bodies,” he wrote. Once planted, it was easy for him to resist intimidation, for nature had made him “incapable of submitting to force and violence.”

As with most things in Montaigne, this is only part of the story. As a young man he could fly off the handle, and he was restless: in the Essays he says, “I know not which of the two, my mind or my body, I have had more difficulty in keeping to one place.” Perhaps he only played the sloth when it suited him.