Trying to make sense of Montaigne

Where to start with Montaigne? The sheer bulk of Montaigne’s essays, in the monster single-volume translation by Michael Screech, is forbidding enough - some 1280 pages. But let’s be a little more realistic: the essays are certainly readable, which is a good start. This post is about first impressions of reading Montaigne – although I’ve looked at the essays before, I can’t say I’ve ever really engaged with them. How do they appear on an initial read?

·       First of all, they are the writings of a thinker, someone willing to attempt to examine just what they think, unlike the complacency of, say, James Woodforde (I don't get the impression he ever examined his own ideas critically). You couldn’t imagine a greater contrast.

·       But Montaigne’s essays are a hotchpotch. They vary widely in length, from just over a thousand words (‘On Idleness’) to book-length (‘An Apologie for Raymond Sebonde’, which is nearly 200 pages in the Penguin edition. The title and the length of each essay don’t appear to be related.

·       The title of each essay often seems to be bear little relationship to what is discussed within. Moreover, some of the titles look to have little relevance to a man trying to determine his own views (‘Ceremonial at the meeting of kings’).

·       On first reading, it seems the essays represent many years of rethinking. But the three editions of the essays, which editors by convention label A, B, and C, were written in 1580, 1588, and after his death in 1592 – a period of only twelve years. Nonetheless, it is fascinating to see evidence of a writer changing his mind, or at least his approach. Many writings contain multitudes, as Whitman said, but not always as visibly as here.

·       Most importantly, I can’t help seeing the vast number of quotations, mainly from classical authors. It’s as if Montaigne couldn’t look at the weather without quoting a classical writer on the subject. Now I know the Renaissance was fixated on ancient Greece and Rome, but it’s still a shock to see how frequent Montaigne’s quotes are. Did he never disagree with classical authors? What if their opinions were so cryptic that they offered no guidance, a bit like Vitruvius describing the classical method of architecture, which has remained unintelligible from his time to the present day? Nonetheless, it is certainly true today that an accepted style for non-fiction writing is to state an opinion and to follow it up by an authority who states in writing a confirmation of that opinion. So the pattern still exists today; we just don’t use classical authors so often as our exemplars.

·       Of course, Montaigne uses the classical authors for his own ends. The selection of a quote from a classical author is to an extent the construction of your own ideas. We can’t say that Montaigne had classical attitudes. But we can look in the classics to see if there is a correspondence between Montaigne’s ideas and those of the Classical writers he read most frequently.

·       A fundamental problem of the Essays, a problem shared with all writings of the time, is that they combine formulaic views, which were the accepted opinions of the day, with unconventional and perhaps radical ideas. I’m no expert in Renaissance thought, so I inevitably depend on authorities to point these opinions out. At least initially, then, the commentators are looking at the text with rather different criteria to my own. For a modern reader like me, many of the commonplace views are surprising; I am fascinated (at least initially) by what was probably unexceptional to Montaigne’s contemporaries. I can’t (initially) get excited by Montaigne’s scepticism, as I am so fascinated by his everyday opinions and how different they are to those of the present day.

·       Thus, for example, in ‘To Philosophize is to learn how to die’, Montaigne talks about the importance of being ready for death at any moment: “As far as we possibly can we must always have our boots on, ready to go; above all we should take care to have no outstanding business with anyone else.” What a strange attitude! How different to the present-day, where death is largely suppressed from our thinking. Of course people die, but for the most part we can ensure that death is painless and predictable. Usually, in the modern world, we can ignore death and pretend that it will never happen.

·       What about a present-day Montaigne? What if someone were to read Montaigne and to try to assemble the modern assumptions and expectations, and then to analyse themselves to show which of those assumptions he or she didn’t agree with? That would be a project indeed!