I finished a "selection" of Montaigne's essays today. Would never have made it but for "shelter in place." The "selection" was 436 pages, small print, and the style is not what you'd call "breezy": Montaigne's father had ideas about education, which resulted in a nothing-but-Latin rule at home, and it shows not only in the quotations and allusions from classical literature but also in the brocaded style. At the end, I was rewarding myself with one chapter of an Elmore Leonard novel (Maximum Bob) for every 5 pages of Montaigne.
In case you're wondering (and still reading), Montaigne was a 16th-century Frenchman. He is widely regarded as the progenitor of the modern "essay." He was born rich and as a young man, having suffered something like a mental crisis when both his father and best friend suddenly died, he retired to the family chateaux to think things over. Eventually he began writing down his thoughts in "assays" on various subjects. He kept revising his assays and composing new ones till dying, age 59, in 1592.
Some people place Montaigne on a level with Socrates for wisdom and overall human excellence. His essays are like self-help for people who think they're too smart for, I don't know, Suzy Ormond and Dr. Oz. He has a lot of opinions and advice, including about money and the practice of medicine. His idea seems to have been that the proper object of human reflection is human beings, and, since he knew himself best, he'd as we say "put himself out there"—he could be wrong about someone else, but not about himself. One thus learns arguably too much about his gallstones; also, that his favorite time to evacuate his bowels is immediately upon rising in the morning and his favorite time to have sex is just before falling asleep at night. Fairly representative, from what I can tell.
He tackles every subject. One of his early essays is titled, "To philosophize is to learn how to die"—probably a source for the frequent comparison to Socrates. A practicing Roman Catholic, he did not live to see his essays placed on the index of books the Church until 1966 forbade Catholics to read. There are signs (scholars say) that he self-edited with an eye toward pleasing (or at least not provoking) the Vatican, but if so the stratagem failed. He would not have been angry about that or, it seems, anything. He might have been amused, however, to behold the high esteem in which he's held, since he counsels against having too high or low a view of our fellows. I think one of his essays is the likely source for the saying about no man being a hero to his valet. As his last essay draws to a close, he writes:
It is an accomplishment, absolute and as it were God-like, to know how to enjoy our being as we ought. We seek other attributes because we do not understand the use of our own; and, having no knowledge of what is within, we sally forth outside ourselves. A fine thing to get up on stilts: for even on stilts we must ever walk with our legs! And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.
Now, back to Maximum Bob, uninterruptedly.
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