The Complete Essays (167 page)

Verum animo satis hæc vestigia parva sagaci
Sunt, per quæ possis cognoscere cætera tute
.

[Those slight traces are enough for a keen mind and will safely lead you to discover the rest.]
¹⁰⁵

About myself nothing is wanting and there is nothing to guess. If you must discuss such things, I want it to be done truly and fairly. I would willingly come back from the next world to refute anyone who, even to do me honour, would fashion me other than I was. I know that people make even the living different when they talk of them. Had I not with all my might come to the defence of a friend whom I had lost, they would have ripped him into hundreds of incompatible little features.
¹⁰⁶

To finish talking of my foibles, I admit that I hardly ever arrive at my lodgings during my travels without the question passing through my mind whether I could be ill and die there comfortably, lodged as I like in a place entirely to my taste – no noise, not filthy, smoky or stuffy. By such trivial amenities I seek to cajole death or (to put it better) to relieve myself of all other impediments to enable me to concentrate on death alone: it will probably weigh heavily enough on me without adding to the burden. I want it to have a share in the comforts and conveniences of my life. Death forms a big chunk of it, an important one: from this day forth I hope it will not belie my past.

Some forms of death are easier than others: death takes on qualities which differ according to each man’s way of thinking. Among natural deaths, pleasant and easy it seems to me is the one which comes from our growing torpid and weak. Among violent ones, I find it far harder to think of a precipice than the collapse of a wall, a slash from a sword than a volley from harquebuses; and I would rather have drunk Socrates’ poison than to have run myself through like Cato. And although it all comes to the same, my imagination can feel a difference as great as life from death between jumping into a fiery furnace and into the stream of a smooth river – [C] so absurdly does our fear look more at the means than the result. [B] It only takes a moment, but I would give several days of my
life to spend that moment in my own fashion. Since each man’s fancy can find greater or less harshness in it, since each has some preference between ways of dying, let us assay going a little further and finding one quite free from unpleasantness. Might we not even make death luxurious like Antony and Cleopatra, those fellows in death? I leave aside as harsh the efforts devised by philosophy, and as ideal those devised by religion; but among lesser men we find a certain Petronius and a certain Tigillinus in Rome, who were required to kill themselves, lulling death to sleep,
¹⁰⁷
so to speak, by their voluptuous preparations. They made death flow gently along, slipping it in among their usual wanton pastimes, between their girls and their drinking-companions: no mention of consolation, no mention of wills, no ambitious show of constancy, no talk of their condition in the life to come, but amidst games and festivities, jokes and common everyday conversation, music and love-poetry. Could we not imitate their resolve, with a more honourable restraint? Since there are deaths good for fools and others for sages, let us find some which are good for people in between. [C] My imagination can present me with a kind of death which is easy and (since we have to die) desirable. The Roman tyrants virtually spared a criminal’s life when they allowed him to choose how he would die.

Yet was not a philosopher as subtle, modest and wise as Theophrastus forced by reason to recite the verse which Cicero put into Latin as:

Vitam regit fortuna, non sapientia
.
[Our life is governed by Fortune not philosophy.]
¹⁰⁸

How Fortune helps me now to rate my life at bargain-price, having reduced it to the point where nobody needs it and nobody is inconvenienced by it! That is a situation which I would have accepted at any period of my existence, but at this time, when I must fold up my garments and pack my bags, I find a special pleasure in causing no one when I die either pleasure or displeasure. By skilfully balancing the accounts, Fortune has made those who have a claim to some material gain from my death also conjoint heirs to some material loss. Death often oppresses us in as much as it weighs on others: we are virtually as concerned for their concerns as for our own – sometimes more or entirely so.

[B] Among the qualities I look for in my lodgings I do not include grandiose spaciousness – I hate it rather – but a simple individual charm more often met in places where there is less artifice and which Nature honours with some loveliness all her own:
‘Non ampliter sed munditer convivium.’ ‘Plus salis quant sumptus.’
[An elegant not a copious feast. More wit than waste.]
¹⁰⁹

Moreover it is for those whose business drags them up over the Grisons in midwinter to be surprised on the highway by their own life’s end. I, who most often travel for my own pleasure, am not all that bad a guide. If it looks nasty to the left I turn off to the right; if I find myself unfit to mount the saddle, I stop where I am. By acting thus I really do see nothing which is not as pleasant and agreeable to me as my home. It is true that I always do find superfluity superfluous and that I am embarrassed by delicacy, even, and by profusion. Have I overlooked anything which I ought to have seen back there? Then I go back to it: it is still on my road. I follow no predetermined route, neither straight nor crooked. Supposing when I do go to some place that I do not find there what I was told to expect: since others’ judgements do not agree with mine (I have more often proved them wrong) I do not regret my exertion; I have learned that something which they told me about is not there!

My physical predisposition is as flexible, and my tastes as catholic, as any man’s in the world. The diversity of custom between one nation and another touches me only by the pleasure of variety; each has its reason. Let the dishes be of pewter, wood or earthenware, consist of boiled meats or roasts, with butter, chestnut oil or olive oil, be hot or cold: it is all the same to me – so much so that, now I am getting old, I condemn such magnanimous facility and shall need discernment and selection to put a stop to my appetite’s lack of discrimination and to look after my stomach occasionally.

[C] When I have been elsewhere than in France and people have courteously inquired whether I want to eat French cooking, I have always laughed at the idea and hastened straight for the sideboards most crowded with foreigners. [B] I am ashamed at the sight of our Frenchmen befuddled by that stupid humour which shies away from fashions which conflict with their own. Once out of their villages they feel like fish out of water. Wherever they go they cling to their ways and curse foreign ones. If they come across a fellow-coutryman in Hungary, they celebrate the
event: there they are, hobnobbing and sticking together and condemning every custom in sight as barbarous. And why not barbarous since they are not French! And those are the cleverer ones: as they speak ill of those customs, they have at least noticed them. Most go abroad merely to return. With a morose and taciturn prudence they travel about wrapped up in their cloaks and protecting themselves from the contagion of an unknown clime.

What I have said about them recalls something similar which I have noticed at times among some of our young courtiers. They mix only with their own kind, staring at us with disdain and pity as men from some other world. Strip them of their talk about the mysteries of the court and they are outside their hunting-grounds, as raw and awkward to us as we are to them. It is true what men say: a proper gentleman is a man of parts.

I on the contrary, as one who has had his fill of our customs, do not go looking for Gascons in Sicily – I have left enough of them at home. I look for Greeks, rather, or Persians. I make their acquaintance and study them. That is what I devote myself to and work on. And, what is more, I seem hardly ever to have come across any customs which are not worth quite as much as our own. I am not risking much by that assertion: I have hardly been out of sight of my own weathercocks.
¹¹⁰

Meanwhile, most of the companions you chance to meet on the road are more an encumbrance than a pleasure I never latch on to them – even less so nowadays when old age singles me out and sets me somewhat apart from the usual pattern. Either you are putting up with them or they with you. Both awkwardnesses weigh heavy, but the latter seems harsher to me. It is a rare stroke of fortune, but an inestimable pleasure, to have a gentleman who likes to accompany you, a man with manners which conform to your own. I have greatly missed one on all my travels. But such a companion must be selected and secured from the outset. No pleasure has any taste for me when not shared with another: no happy thought occurs to me without my being irritated at bringing it forth alone with no one to offer it to. [C]
‘Si cum hac exceptione detur sapientia ut illam inclusam teneam nec enuntiem, rejiciam.’
[If even wisdom were granted me on condition that I shut it away unspoken, I would reject it.]
¹¹¹
This next author raised that a tone higher: ‘Si
contigerit ea vita
sapienti ut, omnium return affluentibus copiis, quamvis omnia quœ cognitione digna sunt summo otio secum ipse consideret et contempletur, tarnen si solitudo tanta sit ut hominem videre non possit, excedat e vita.’
[Supposing it were granted to a sage to live in every abundance, his time entirely free to study and reflect upon everything worth knowing: yet if his solitude were such that he could never meet another man he would quit this life.]

[B] I agree with the opinion of Archytas that there would be no pleasure in travelling through the heavens among those great immortal celestial bodies without the presence of a companion.
¹¹²
Yet it remains better to be alone than in silly boring company. Aristippus preferred to live as an alien everywhere.

Me si fata meis paterentur ducere vitam
Auspiciis
,

[As for me, if the fates were to allow me to spend my life as I pleased,]
¹¹³

I would choose to spend it with my arse in the saddle,

visere gestiens,
Qua parte debacchentur ignes,
Qua nebulœ pluviique rores
.

[happy to see where the heat rages, or the clouds or the dripping rain.]

‘Do you not have easier ways of spending your time? What do you lack? Is your house not set in a fine healthy climate; is it not adequately furnished and more than adequately spacious? [C] The King’s Majesty in his splendour more than once put up with it!
¹¹⁴
[B] Has your family not left behind many more families whose standards are below it than it has families above it in eminence? Is there something about the place so inordinate and [C] indigestible [B] that it gives you an ulcer,
¹¹⁵

quœ te nunc coquat et vexet sub pectote fixa?
[and which, rooted in your stomach, burns you and distresses you?]

Where do you think you can ever be without fuss and bother?
“Nunquam
simpliciter fortuna indulget.”
[Fortune never sends unmixed blessings.] You really should realize that nobody is in your way but yourself, and that you will be following yourself about everywhere, and moaning to yourself everywhere,
¹¹⁶
for there is no contentment here below except for souls like those of beasts or gods.
¹¹⁷
Where can a man expect to find contentment if he is not content when he has such good cause? How many thousands of men are there whose aspirations do not exceed such circumstances as yours? Simply remould your Form: in such a matter you can do anything, whereas in face of Fortune you have no right but to endure. [C]
“Nulla placida quies est, nisi quam ratio composait.”
[There is no tranquil calm unless soothed by reason.]’
¹¹⁸

[B] I can see the reasonableness of such counsel, see it very well. But it would have been quicker and more apposite simply to say to me one thing: ‘Be wise!’ Such a solution as yours lies the other side of wisdom: wisdom makes it and produces it. It is As though a doctor kept yelling at a wretched, languishing patient to feel merry: he would be prescribing a little less stupidly if he said, ‘Get well!’ As for me, I am merely a man [C] with a base Form.
¹¹⁹

[B] ‘Be content with what is yours’ (that is, ‘with reason’). That is a sound precept, definite and easy to understand; but sages can no more put it into effect than I can. There is a saying – popular, but appalling in its extent (what is not included in it?) – ‘All things are subject to qualification and [C] limitation.’
¹²⁰

[B] I am well aware that, taken literally, this delight in travelling bears witness to restlessness and inconstancy. But those are indeed our dominant master-qualities. Yes. I admit it. Even in my wishes and dreams I can find nothing to which I can hold fast. The only things I find rewarding (if anything is) are variety and the enjoyment of diversity. When on my travels the very fact that I can stop without hindrance and conveniently make a diversion bolsters me up.