The Complete Essays (140 page)

[C] It is on the third storey of a tower. The first constitutes my chapel; the second, a bed-chamber with a dressing-room, where I often sleep when I want to be alone. Above that there is a large drawing-room. It was formerly the most useless place in my house: I spend most days of my life there, and most hours of each day, but I am never there at night. It leads on to quite an elegant little chamber which can take a fire in winter and agreeably lets in the light. If I feared the bother as little as the expense – and the bother drives me away from any task – I could erect a level gallery on either side, a hundred yards long and twelve yards wide, having found all the walls built (for some other purpose) at the required height. Every place of retreat needs an ambulatory. My thoughts doze off if I squat them down. My wit will not budge if my legs are not moving – which applies to all who study without books.

My library is round in shape, squared off only for the needs of my table and chair; as it curves round it offers me at a glance every one of my books ranged on five shelves all the way along. It has three splendid and unhampered views and a circle of free space sixteen yards in diameter. I am less continuously there in winter since my house is perched on a hill (hence its name) and no part of it is more exposed to the wind than that one. By being rather hard to get at and a bit out of the way it pleases me, partly for the sake of the exercise and partly because it keeps the crowd from me. There I have my seat. I assay making my dominion over it absolutely pure, withdrawing this one corner from all intercourse, filial, conjugal and civic. Everywhere else I have but a verbal authority, one essentially impure. Wretched the man (to my taste) who has nowhere in his house where he can be by himself, pay court to himself in private and hide away! Ambition well rewards its courtiers by keeping them always on display like a statue in the market-place:
‘Magna servitus est magna fortuna.’
[A great destiny is great slavery.]
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They cannot even find privacy on their privy! I have never considered any of the austerities of life which our monks delight in to be harsher than the rule that I have noted in some of their foundations:
to be perpetually with somebody else and to be surrounded by a crowd of people no matter what they are doing. And I find that it is somewhat more tolerable to be always alone than never able to be so.

[B] If anyone says to me that to use the Muses as mere playthings and pastimes is to debase them, then he does not know as I do the value of pleasure, [C] plaything or pastime. [B] I could almost say that any other end is laughable. I live from day to day; and, saving your reverence, I live only for myself. My plans stop there. In youth I studied in order to show off; later, a little, to make myself wiser; now I do it for amusement, never for profit. A silly spendthrift humour that once I had for furnishing myself with books, [C] not to provide for my needs but three paces beyond that, [B] so as to paper my walls with them as decorations, I gave up long ago.

Books have plenty of pleasant qualities for those who know how to select them. But there is no good without ill. The pleasure we take in them is no purer or untarnished than any other. Reading has its disadvantages – and they are weighty ones: it exercises the soul, but during that time the body (my care for which I have not forgotten) remains inactive and grows earth-bound and sad. I know of no excess more harmful to me in my declining years, nor more to be avoided.

There you have my three favourite private occupations. I make no mention of the ones I owe to the world through my obligations to the state.

4. On diversion

[From personal experience Montaigne learnt that grief and pain cannot always be cured but can often be diverted into less anguished channels. In this the body plays a major part. The soul has to be watched: human beings are so made that they can be moved to ecstasies of anger by insubstantial dreams and raving lunacies. Quintilian’s teaching that an orator first rouses an emotion in himself and then transfers it to his audience is accepted as proof of the power of wilful self-deception – a useful quality for a man who would divert his thoughts from pain, but also proof of the nothingness of Man.]

[B] Once I was charged with consoling a lady who was feeling distress – genuinely (mostly their mourning is affected and ritualistic):

Uberibus semper lachrimis, semperque paratis
In statione sua, atque expectantibus illam,
Quo jubeat manare modo
.

[A woman has a reserve of abundant tears ever ready to flow, ever awaiting her decision to make them do so.]
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To oppose such suffering is the wrong way to proceed, for opposition goads the women on and involves them more deeply in their sadness; zeal for argument makes a bad condition worse. (We can see that from commonplace discussions: if anyone challenges some casual statement of mine I become all formal and wedded to it; more so if It is a matter of concern to me.) And then, by acting that way you set about your cure in a rough manner, whereas the first greetings which a doctor makes to his patient must be cheerful, pleasing and full of grace: nothing was ever achieved by an ugly uncouth doctor. So from the outset you must, on the contrary, encourage women’s lamentations and show that they are justified and have your approval. This understanding between you will earn you the trust needed to proceed further; then you can glide down an easy and imperceptible slope to the more steadfast arguments appropriate for curing
them. Personally, since my main desire was to escape from the bystanders who all kept their eyes on me, I decided in this difficult case to plaster over the cracks. And so I found out by experience that when it came to persuasion I was unsuccessful and heavy-handed: I either offer my arguments too pointedly and drily or else too brusquely, showing too little concern. After I had sympathized with her anguish for a while, I made no assay at curing it by powerful vigorous arguments (because I never had any, or perhaps because I thought I could achieve my effect better by another way); [C] and I did not start choosing any of the various methods which philosophy prescribes for consoling grief,
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saying like Cleanthes for example that what we are lamenting is not an evil; nor did I say like the Peripatetics that it is but a light one; nor like Chrysippus that such plaints are neither just nor laudable; nor did I follow Epicurus’ remedy (which is close neighbour to my own), that of shifting her mind away from painful thoughts to pleasant ones; nor did I attack her grief with the weight of all those arguments put together, dispensing them as required like Cicero: [B] but by gently deflecting our conversation and gradually leading it on to the nearest subject, and then on to slightly more remote ones depending on how she answered me, I imperceptibly stole her from her painful thoughts; and as long as I remained with her I kept her composed and totally calm.

I made use of a diversion. But those who came to help her after me found no improvement in her, since I had not set my axe to the root of the trouble.

[C] I have doubtless touched elsewhere on the kind of diversion used in politics.
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And the practice of military diversions (such as those used by Pericles in the Peloponnesian Wars and by hundreds of others in order to tempt the enemy forces from their lands) is very common in the history books.

[B] It was an ingenious diversion by which the Sieur de Himbercourt saved himself and others in the town of Liège, which the Duke of Burgundy, who was besieging it, had obliged him to enter so as to draw up agreed terms of surrender. The citizens assembled for this purpose by night but began to rebel against what had previously been agreed; several decided to fall upon the negotiators whom they had in their power. He heard the rumble of the first wave of citizens who were coming to break
into his apartments, so he at once dispatched two of the inhabitants – there were several with him – bearing new and milder conditions to put before their town council; he had made them up for the occasion, then and there. These two men calmed the original storm and led that excited mob to the Hôtel de Ville to hear the terms they were charged with and to deliberate upon them. The deliberation was brief; whereupon a second storm was unleashed, as animated as the first; so he dispatched four new mediators similar to the first two, protesting that he now wanted to announce much more tempting conditions which would entirely please and satisfy them; by this means he drove the citizens back to their conclave. In short, by managing to waste their time that way he diverted their frenzy, dissipated it in vain deliberations and eventually lulled it to sleep until daybreak – which had been his main concern.
⁴

My next story is in the same category. Atalanta was a maiden of outstanding beauty and wonderfully fleet of foot; to rid herself of a crowd of a thousand suitors all seeking to wed her, she decreed that she would accept the one who could run a race as fast as she could, provided that all those who failed should lose their lives. There were found plenty who reckoned the prize worth the hazard and who incurred the penalty of that cruel bargain. Hippomenes’ turn to make an assay came after the others; he besought the goddess who protects all amorous passion to come to his aid. She answered his prayer by furnishing him with three golden apples and instructing him in their use. As the race was being run, when Hippomenes felt his lady pressing hard on his heels he dropped one of the apples as though inadvertently. The maiden was arrested by its beauty and did not fail to turn aside to pick it up.

Obstupuit virgo, nitidique cupidine pomi
Delinat cursus, aurumque volubile tollit
.

[The maiden was seized by ecstasy and desire for the smooth apple: she turns from the race and picks up the golden ball as it rolls along.]

At the right moment he did the same with the second and the third apples, finally winning the race because of those distractions and diversions.
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When our doctors cannot purge a catarrh they divert it towards another part of us where it can do less harm. I have noticed that to be also the most usual prescription for illnesses of our soul: [C]
‘Abducendus etiam non-nunquam animus est ad alia studia, solicitudines, curas, negotia; loci denique
mutatione, tanquam ægroti non convalescentes, sæpe curandus est.’
[The mind is often to be deflected towards other anxieties, worries, cares and occupations; and finally it is often cured (like the sick when slow to recover) by a change of place.]
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[B] Doctors can rarely get the soul to mount a direct attack on her illness: they make her neither withstand the attack nor beat it off, parrying it rather and diverting it.

The next example is too grand and too difficult; only the highest category of men can stop to take a pure look at the phenomenon itself, reflecting on it and judging it. It behoves none but Socrates to greet death with a normal countenance, training himself for it and sporting with it. He seeks no consolation not inherent to the deed: dying seems to him a natural and neutral event; he justly fixes his gaze upon it and, without looking elsewhere, is resolved to accept it. Whereas the disciples of Hegesias (who were excited by his beautiful discourses during his lectures and who starved themselves to death [C] in such quantities that King Ptolemy forbade him to defend such murderous doctrines in his School) [B] were not considering the dying as such and were definitely not making a judgement about it; it was not on dying that they fixed their thoughts: they had a new existence in view and were dashing to it.
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Those poor wretches to be seen on our scaffolds, filled with a burning zeal to which they devote, as far as they are able, all their senses – their ears drinking in the exhortations they receive, while their arms and their eyes are lifted up to Heaven and their voices raised in loud prayer full of fierce and sustained emotion – are certainly performing a deed worthy of praise and proper to such an hour of need. We must praise them for their faith but not strictly for their constancy. They flee the struggle; they divert their thoughts from it (just as we occupy our children’s attention when we want to use a lancet on them). Some I have seen occasionally lowering their gaze on to the horrifying preparations for their death which are all about them: then they fall into a trance and cast their frenzied thoughts elsewhere.

Those who have to cross over some terrifyingly deep abyss are told to close their eyes or to avert them.

[C] On Nero’s orders Subrius Flavius was condemned to be put to
death at the hands of Niger. Both were military commanders. When he was escorted to the field of execution he saw that the grave which Niger had ordered to be dug for him was uneven and shoddily made; turning to the soldiers about him he snapped, ‘You could not do even this according to your military training!’ And when Niger urged him to keep his head straight, he retorted, ‘I hope you can strike as straight!’ And he guessed right: Niger’s arms were all a-tremble and he needed several blows to chop his head off. Now there was a man who did fix his attention directly on the object.
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[B] A soldier who dies in the melee, his weapons in his hand, is not contemplating death: he neither thinks of it nor dwells on it; he is carried away by the heat of battle. An honourable man that I know was struck to the ground after entering the lists to do battle; while he was down he felt his enemy stab him nine or ten times with a dagger. Everybody present yelled at him to make peace with his conscience, but he told me later that although their words touched his ears they did not get through to him; he had no thought but of struggling loose and avenging himself; and he did kill his man in that very fight.

[C] The soldier who brought news of his sentence to Lucius Silanus did him a great service; having heard Silanus reply that he was prepared to die but not at such wicked hands, the man rushed at him with his soldiers to take him by force, while he, all unarmed as he was, stoutly resisted with fists and feet. They killed him in the struggle. By his quick and stormy anger he destroyed the pain he would have felt from the long-drawn-out death awaiting him to which he had been destined.
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[B] Our thoughts are always elsewhere. The hope of a better life arrests us and comforts us; or else it is the valour of our sons or the future glory of our family-name, or an escape from the evils of this life or from the vengeance menacing those who are causing our death:

Spero equidem mediis, si quid pia numina possunt,
Supplicia hausurum scopulis, et nomine Dido
Sæpe vocaturum…
Audiam, et hæc manes veniet mihi fama sub imos
.

[I hope that if the righteous deities can prevail you will drink the cup of my vengeance, driven on the rocks in the midst of the sea, constantly crying out the
name of Dido… I shall hear it, and its fame will reach me in the deepest Underworld.]
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[C] Crowned in the victor’s garland Xenophon was performing his sacrificial rites when he was told of the death of Gryllus his son at the battle of Mantinea. His first reaction to this news was to throw down his garland; but then, when he heard of the very valorous style of his son’s death, he picked it up from the ground and placed it back on his head.

[B] When he was dying, even Epicurus found consolation in the eternity and moral usefulness of his writings:
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[C]
‘Omnes clari et nobilitati labores fiunt tolerabiles’
[All labours are bearable which bring fame and glory]; and (says Xenophon) the identical wound and travail do not grieve a General as much as an Other Rank. Epaminondas accepted death much more cheerfully for being told that his side was victorious.
‘Haec sunt solatia, haec fomenta summorum dolorum.’
[Such things bring solace and comfort to the greatest of sufferings.]

[B] Other similar circumstances can divert and distract us from considering the thing in itself. [C] In fact the arguments of philosophy are constantly skirting the matter and dodging it, scarcely grazing the outer surface with its fingertips. The great Zeno, the leading figure in the leading school of philosophy which dominates all the others,
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says this concerning death: ‘No evil is to be honoured; death is honoured: therefore death is no evil’; and he says of drunkenness, ‘No one confides his secrets to a drunkard; each man trusts the wise man: therefore the wise man will not be a drunkard.’ Do you call that hitting the bull’s-eye! I delight in seeing those first-rate minds unable to free themselves from fellowship with the likes of us! Perfect men though they may be, they always remain grossly human.