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

The changes of direction are partly explained by this questioning attitude, and partly by his having written the book over twenty years. A person’s ideas vary a lot in two decades, especially if the person spends that time traveling, reading, talking to interesting people, and practicing high-level politics and diplomacy. Revising earlier drafts of the Essays over and over again, he added material as it occurred to him, and made no attempt to box it into an artificial consistency. Within the space of a few lines, we might meet Montaigne as a young man, then as an old man with one foot in the grave, and then again as a middle-aged mayor bowed down by responsibilities. We listen to him complaining of impotence; a moment later, we see him young and lusty, “impertinently genital” in his desires. He is hot-headed and outspoken; he is discreet. He is fascinated by other people; he is fed up with the lot of them. His thoughts lie where they fall. He makes us feel the passage of time in his inner world. “I do not portray being,” he wrote, “I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another … but from day to day, from minute to minute.”

Among the readers to be fascinated by Montaigne’s way of depicting the flux of his experience was one of the great pioneers of “stream of consciousness” fiction in the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf. Her own purpose in her art was to immerse herself in the mental river and follow wherever it led. Her novels delved into characters’ worlds “from minute to minute.” Sometimes she left one channel to tune in elsewhere, passing the point of view like a microphone from one individual to another, but the flow itself never ceased until the end of each book. She identified Montaigne as the first writer to attempt anything of this sort, albeit only with his own single “stream.” She also considered him the first to pay such attention to the simple feeling of being alive. “Observe, observe perpetually,” was his rule, she said — and what he observed was, above all, this river of life running through his existence.

Montaigne was the first to write in such a way, but not the first to attempt to live with full attention to the present moment. That was another of the rules recommended by the classical philosophers. Life is what happens while you’re making other plans, they said; so philosophy must guide your attention repeatedly back to the place where it belongs —here . It plays a role like that of the mynah birds in Aldous Huxley’s novel Island , which are trained to fly around all day calling “Attention! Attention!” and “Here and now!” As Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out. The only one who can keep you mindful of this is you:

It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly … What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.

If you fail to grasp life, it will elude you. If you do grasp it, it will elude you anyway. So you must follow it — and “you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow.”

The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience — but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called Montaigne a writer who put “a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.” More recently, the critic Colin Burrow has remarked that astonishment, together with Montaigne’s other key quality, fluidity, are what philosophy should be, but rarely has been, in the Western tradition.

As Montaigne got older, his desire to pay astounded attention to life did not decline; it intensified. By the end of the long process of writing the Essays , he had almost perfected the trick. Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, “I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it … The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.” He discovered a sort of strolling meditation technique:

When I walk alone in the beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me.

At moments like these, he seems to have achieved an almost Zen-like discipline; an ability to just be .

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep.

It sounds so simple, put like this, but nothing is harder to do. This is why Zen masters spend a lifetime, or several lifetimes, learning it. Even then, according to traditional stories, they often manage it only after their teacher hits them with a big stick — the keisaku , used to remind meditators to pay full attention. Montaigne managed it after one fairly short lifetime, partly because he spent so much of that lifetime scribbling on paper with a very small stick.

In writing about his experience as if he were a river, he started a literary tradition of close inward observation that is now so familiar that it is hard to remember that it is a tradition. Life just seems to be like that, and observing the play of inner states is the writer’s job. Yet this was not a common notion before Montaigne, and his peculiarly restless, free-form way of doing it was entirely unknown. In inventing it, and thus attempting a second answer to the question of how to live—“pay attention”—Montaigne escaped his crisis and even turned that crisis to his advantage.

Both “Don’t worry about death” and “Pay attention” were answers to a midlife loss of direction: they emerged from the experience of a man who had lived long enough to make errors and false starts. Yet they also marked a beginning, bringing about the birth of his new essay-writing self.

MONTAIGNE’S ORIGINAL SELF, the one that did not write essays but merely moved and breathed like everyone else, had a simpler start. He came into this world on February 28, 1533—the same year as the future Queen Elizabeth I of England. His birth took place between eleven o’clock and noon, in the family château, which would be his lifelong home. He was named Michel, but, to his father at least, he would always be known as Micheau. This nickname appears even in documents as formal as his father’s will, after the boy had turned into a man.

In the Essays , Montaigne wrote that he had been carried in his mother’s womb for eleven months. This was an odd claim, since it was well known that such a prodigy of nature was barely possible. Mischievous minds would surely have leaped to indelicate conclusions. In Rabelais’s Gargantua , the eponymous giant also spends eleven months in his mother’s womb. “Does this sound strange?” Rabelais asks, and answers himself with a series of tongue-in-cheek case studies in which lawyers were clever enough to prove the legitimacy even of a child whose supposed father had died eleven months before its birth. “Thanks to these learned laws, our virtuous widows may, for two months after their husbands’ demise, freely indulge in games of grip-crupper with a pig in the poke, heels over head and to their hearts’ content.” Montaigne had read Rabelais, and must have thought of the obvious jokes, but he seemed unconcerned.