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

This experience went far beyond Montaigne’s earlier imaginings about dying. It was a real voyage into death’s territory: he slipped in close and touched it with his lips. He could taste it, like a person sampling an unfamiliar flavor. This was an essay of death: an exercise or exercitation , the word he used when he came to write about the experience. He would later spend much time going over the sensations in his mind, reconstructing them as precisely as possible so as to learn from them. Fortune had handed him the perfect opportunity to test the philosophical consensus about death. But it was hard to be sure that he had learned the right answer. The Stoics would certainly have looked askance at his results.

Parts of the lesson were correct: through his exercitation , he had learned not to fear his own nonexistence. Death could have a friendly face, just as the philosophers promised. Montaigne had looked into this face — but he had not stared into it lucidly, as a rational thinker should. Instead of marching forward with eyes open, bearing himself like a soldier, he had floated into death with barely a conscious thought, seduced by it. In dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there. You die in the same way that you fall asleep: by drifting away. If other people try to pull you back, you hear their voices on “the edges of the soul.” Your existence is attached by a thread; it rests only on the tip of your lips, as he put it. Dying is not an action that can be prepared for. It is an aimless reverie.

From now on, when Montaigne read about death, he would show less interest in the exemplary ends of the great philosophers, and more in those of ordinary people, especially those whose deaths took place in a state of “enfeeblement and stupor.” In his most mature essays, he wrote admiringly of men such as Petronius and Tigillinus, Romans who died surrounded by jokes, music, and everyday conversation, so that death simply flowed into them amid the general good cheer. Instead of turning a party into a death scene, as Montaigne had done in his youthful imagination, they turned their death scenes into parties. He particularly liked the story of Marcellinus, who avoided a painful death from disease by a gentle method of euthanasia. After fasting for several days, Marcellinus laid himself down in a very hot bath. No doubt he was already weakened by his illness; the bath simply steamed the last breaths of life out of him. He passed out slowly, and then he passed away. As he went, he murmured languorously to his friends about the pleasure he was experiencing.

One might expect pleasure in a death like that of Marcellinus. But Montaigne had learned something more surprising: that he could enjoy the same delightful floating sensations even while his body seemed to be convulsed, thrashing around in what looked to others like torment.

This discovery of Montaigne’s ran counter to his classical models; it also defied the Christian ideal which dominated his own era. For Christians, one’s last thought should be the sober commending of one’s soul to God, not a blissful “Aaaaah …” Montaigne’s own experience apparently included no thoughts of God at all. Nor did it seem to occur to him that dying inebriated and surrounded by wenches might jeopardize a Christian afterlife. He was more interested in his purely secular realization that human psychology, and nature in general, were the dying man’s best friends. And it now seemed to him that the only people who regularly died as bravely as philosophers should were those who knew no philosophy at all: the uneducated peasants in his local estates and villages. “I never saw one of my peasant neighbors cogitating over the countenance and assurance with which he would pass this last hour,” he wrote — not that he would necessarily have known if they did. Nature took care of them. It taught them not to think about death except when they were dying, and very little even then. Philosophers find it hard to leave the world because they try to maintain control. So much for “To philosophize is to learn how to die.” Philosophy looked more like a way of teaching people to unlearn the natural skill that every peasant had by birthright.

On this occasion, despite his willingness to float away, Montaigne did not die. He recovered — and from then on, lived a bit differently. From his essay of death, he took a decidedly unphilosophical philosophy lesson, which he summed up in the following casual way:

If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.

“Don’t worry about death” became his most fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live. It made it possible to do just that: live .

But life is more difficult than death; instead of passive surrender, it takes attention and management. It can also be more painful. Montaigne’s pleasurable drift on the currents of oblivion did not last. When he revived fully, after two or three hours, it was to find himself assailed with aches, his limbs “battered and bruised.” He suffered for several nights afterwards, and there were longer-term consequences. “I still feel the effect of the shock of that collision,” he wrote, at least three years later.

His memory took longer to come back than his physical sensations, although he spent several days trying to reconstruct the event by interrogating witnesses. None of it struck any spark until the whole incident came back at a blow, with a shock like being struck by lightning — a reprise of the “thunderbolt” of the initial impact. His return to life was as violent as the accident: all jostlings, impacts, flashes, and thunderclaps. Life thrust itself deeply into him, whereas death had been a light and superficial thing.

From now on, he tried to import some of death’s delicacy and buoyancy into life. “Bad spots” were everywhere, he wrote in a late essay. We do better to “slide over this world a bit lightly and on the surface.” Through this discovery of gliding and drifting, he lost much of his fear, and at the same time acquired a new sense that life, as it passed through his body— his particular life, Michel de Montaigne’s — was a very interesting subject for investigation. He would go on to attend to sensations and experiences, not for what they were supposed to be, or for what philosophical lessons they might impart, but for the way they actually felt. He would go with the flow.

This was a new discipline for him, one which took over his daily routine, and — through his writing — gave him a form of immortality. Thus, around the middle of his life, Montaigne lost his bearings and found himself reborn.

THE RIDING ACCIDENT, which so altered Montaigne’s perspective, lasted only a few moments in itself, but one can unfold it into three parts and spread it over several years. First, there is Montaigne lying on the ground, clawing at his stomach while experiencing euphoria. Then comes Montaigne in the weeks and months that followed, reflecting on the experience and trying to reconcile it with his philosophical reading. Finally, there is Montaigne a few years later, sitting down to write about it — and about a multitude of other things. The first scene could have happened to anyone; the second to any sensitive, educated young man of the Renaissance. The last makes Montaigne unique.

The connection is not a simple one: he did not sit up in bed and immediately start writing about the accident. He began the Essays a couple of years later, around 1572, and, even then, he wrote other chapters before coming to the one about losing consciousness. When he did turn to it, however, the experience made him try a new kind of writing, barely attempted by other writers: that of re-creating a sequence of sensations as they felt from the inside, following them from instant to instant. And there does seem to be a chronological link between the accident and another turning point in his life, which opened up his path into literature: his decision to quit his job as magistrate in Bordeaux.