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

This, then, was death at close quarters — probably Montaigne’s first such intimate encounter with the death of someone he loved deeply. The physical reality was shocking, especially since it came from such a terrifying disease, though Montaigne says nothing of any personal fear of infection. Among the thoughts likely to have gone through his mind is the one that would later come back to him in the light of his own experience: the hope that death might be a tranquil affair for the person undergoing it, however little it looked that way from outside. He and La Boétie had discussed this question once: Montaigne thought it could be the case, but La Boétie disagreed. Now Montaigne must fervently have hoped that it was he who was right. It would be better to think that La Boétie had felt nothing but bliss while his body sweated and struggled. When Montaigne came to write about his own loss of consciousness later, one can almost see him taking up that old argument again — asking his friend, “See, you didn’t suffer, did you?” and hoping that La Boétie would reply, “No.”

Although he transmuted his sorrow into literature, Montaigne’s grief was overwhelming, and it seemed to become greater with time. After La Boétie died, everything was “nothing but dark and dreary night.” Traveling in Italy nearly eighteen years later, he wrote in his private diary: “This same morning, writing to Monsieur d’Ossat, I was overcome by such painful thoughts about Monsieur de La Boétie, and I was in this mood so long, without recovering, that it did me much harm.” He also wrote in the Essays about how he longed for a true companion in Italy — someone whose ways harmonized with his own, and who liked to do the things he liked to do. “I have missed such a man extremely on all my travels.”

No pleasure has any savor for me without communication. Not even a merry thought comes to my mind without my being vexed at having produced it alone without anyone to offer it to.

He never ruled out the possibility of finding someone to reprise La Boétie’s role. Seneca had advised this: a wise man should be so good at making new friends that he can replace an old one without skipping a beat. Sometimes, in the Essays , Montaigne seems to issue a come-hither call to candidates: he hopes his book will please “some worthy man” who will seek him out. Yet he did not really feel that anyone could replace the original. He was forever disappointed:

Is it not a stupid humor of mine to be out of tune with a thousand to whom I am joined by fortune, whom I cannot do without, only to cling to … a fantastic desire for something I cannot recapture?

Whenever Montaigne sounds cool or detached from other people, as he sometimes does, one has to remember La Boétie. People should not, he writes, be “joined and glued to us so strongly that they cannot be detached without tearing off our skin and some part of our flesh as well.” These are the words of a man who knows what it feels like to be flayed in this way.

In life, Montaigne apparently rebelled against La Boétie’s improving influence at times, but now no trace remained of this. With La Boétie safely dead, Montaigne could surrender to him unreservedly — and he could do what La Boétie had begged him to do: give him a place.

First he absorbed many of La Boétie’s books into his library, making room for his friend among his own most treasured possessions. Then he wrote about La Boétie’s death, rescuing as much as he could remember of the young philosopher’s testament to posterity. He prepared a stack of La Boétie’s writings for publication. Finally, when he retired, he made his friend the guiding spirit of his own new career. Alongside the main inscription about his retirement, he added another to his library wall: it is now worn and hard to decipher, but seems to consecrate all his future “studious work” to the memory of La Boétie, “the sweetest, dearest, and most intimate friend” the sixteenth century could produce. La Boétie was to watch over everything Montaigne did in his library: he would be his literary guardian angel.

By dying, La Boétie changed from being Montaigne’s real-life, flawed companion to being an ideal entity under Montaigne’s control. He became less a person than a sort of philosophical technique. Seneca had advised his followers to use their friends in this way. Having found some admirable man, he said, one should visualize him as an ever-present audience, in order to hold oneself to his exalted standards. If you would live for yourself, he wrote, you should live for others — above all for your chosen friend.

Montaigne was willing to try any trick of this kind, if it promised consolation. As he wrote in one of his dedications to La Boétie’s posthumous books: “He is still lodged in me so entire and so alive that I cannot believe that he is so irrevocably buried or so totally removed from our communication.” Letting La Boétie live on within himself was a way of fulfilling his friend’s dying wish, and easing his own loneliness. Meanwhile, he used techniques of distraction and diversion to get himself through the immediate shock of loss. Best of all, he discovered the therapeutic benefits of writing. By passing on La Boétie’s death narrative and farewell to the world in written form, he helped himself to relive the scene, and thus outlive it. He never fully got over La Boétie, but he learned to exist in the world without him, and, in so doing, to change his own life. Writing about La Boétie eventually led him to write the Essays: the best philosophical trick of all.

A BOUT ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHERS, Montaigne was usually dismissive: he disliked their pedantries and abstractions. But he showed an endless fascination for another tradition in philosophy: that of the great pragmatic schools which explored such questions as how to cope with a friend’s death, how to work up courage, how to act well in morally difficult situations, and how to make the most of life. These were the philosophies he turned to in times of grief or fear, as well as for guidance in dealing with more minor everyday irritations.

The three most famous such systems of thought were Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism: the philosophies collectively known as Hellenistic because they had their origins in the era when Greek thought and culture spread to Rome and other Mediterranean regions, from the third century BC onwards. They differed in details, but were so close in essentials as to be hard to distinguish much of the time. Like everyone else, Montaigne mixed and matched them according to his needs.

All the schools had the same aim: to achieve a way of living known in the original Greek as eudaimonia , often translated as “happiness,” “joy,” or “human flourishing.” This meant living well in every sense: thriving, relishing life, being a good person. They also agreed that the best path to eudaimonia was ataraxia , which might be rendered as “imperturbability” or “freedom from anxiety.” Ataraxia means equilibrium: the art of maintaining an even keel, so that you neither exult when things go well nor plunge into despair when they go awry. To attain it is to have control over your emotions, so that you are not battered and dragged about by them like a bone fought over by a pack of dogs.

It was on the question of how to acquire such equanimity that the philosophies began to diverge. Each had a different idea, for example, of how far one should compromise with the real world. The original Epicurean community, founded by Epicurus in the fourth century BC, required followers to leave their families and live like cult members in a private “garden.” Skeptics preferred to remain amid the public hurly-burly like everyone else, but with a radically altered mental attitude. Stoics were somewhere in between. The two best known Stoic writers, Seneca and Epictetus, wrote for an elite Roman readership who were deeply involved in the affairs of their time and had no time for gardens, but who desired oases of tranquillity and self-possession wherever they could find them.