The Complete Essays (171 page)

[B] Such a rough and violent desire is more of a hindrance than a help in carrying out our projects; it fills us with exasperation in the face of results which are slow to come or which turn against us, and with bitterness and suspicion towards those with whom we are negotiating. We can never control well any business which obsesses and controls us:

[C]
male cuncta ministrat
Impetus
.

[violent impulses serve everything badly.]
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[B] Anyone who brings only his judgement and talents to the task sets about it more joyfully; totally at his ease, he feints, parries or plays for time as need arises; he can fail to strike home without torment or affliction, ready and intact for a fresh encounter; when he walks he always retains the bridle in his hands. In a man who is bemused by violent and tyrannical strain there can, of necessity, be seen a great deal of unwisdom and injudiciousness. The impetus of his desire carries him along: such a motion is rash and (unless Fortune contributes much) is hardly fruitful. When we
punish any injuries which we have received, philosophy wants us to avoid choler, not so as to diminish our revenge but (on the contrary) so that its blows may be weightier and better aimed: philosophy considers violent emotion to be an impediment to that.
¹⁵
[C] Choler does not simply confuse: of itself it tires the arms of those who inflict chastisement; its flames confound and exhaust their strength. [B] When you are in a dashing hurry,
‘festinatio tarda est’
[haste causes delay].
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Haste trips over its own feet, tangles itself up and comes to a halt. [C]
‘Ipsa se velocitas implicat.’
[The very haste ties you in knots.] [B] For example, from what I can see to be usually the case, covetousness knows no greater hindrance than itself: the more tense and vigorous it is, the less productive it is. It commonly snaps up riches more quickly when masked by some semblance of generosity.

A gentleman, an excellent fellow and one of my friends, nearly drove himself out of his mind by too much strain and passionate concern for the affairs of a prince, his master: yet that self-same master
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described himself to me as one who can see the weight of a setback as well as anyone else but who resolves to put up with it whenever there is no remedy; in other cases he orders all the necessary measures to be taken (which he can do promptly because of his quick intelligence) then quietly waits for the outcome. And indeed I have seen him doing it, remaining very cool in his actions and relaxed in his expression throughout some important and ticklish engagements. I find him greater and more able in ill fortune than in good; [C] his defeats are more glorious to him than his victories: his mortifications more glorious than his triumphs.

[B] Consider how even in vain and trivial pursuits such as chess or tennis matches, the keen and burning involvement of a rash desire at once throws your mind into a lack of discernment and your limbs into confusion: you daze yourself and tangle yourself up. A man who reacts with greater moderation towards winning or losing is always ‘at home’: the less he goads himself on, and the less passionate he is about the game, the more surely and successfully he plays it.

Moreover we impede our soul’s grip and her grasp by giving her too much to embrace. Some things should be merely shown to her; some
affixed to her and others incorporated into her. The soul can see and know all things, but she should feed only on herself; she should be taught what properly concerns her, what goods and substances are properly hers. The Laws of Nature teach us what our just needs are. The wise first tell us that no man is poor by Nature’s standards and that, by opinion’s standards, every man is; they then finely distinguish between desires coming from Nature and those coming from the unruliness of our thoughts: those whose limits we can see are hers; those which flee before us and whose end we can never reach are our own. To cure poverty of possessions is easy: poverty of soul, impossible.
¹⁸

[C]
Nam si, quod satis est homini, id satis esse potesset,
Hoc sat erat: nunc, cum hoc non est, qui credimus porro
Divitias ullas animum mi explere potesse?

[This would be enough, if enough could really be enough for any man. Since it never is, why should we believe that any wealth can glut my mind?]

When Socrates saw a great quantity of wealth (valuable jewels and ornaments) being borne in procession through the city, he exclaimed: ‘How many things there which I do not want!’ [B] Metrodorus lived on twelve ounces a day Epicurus on less; Metrocles slept among his sheep in the winter and, in summer, in the temple porticos; [C]
‘Sufficit ad id natura, quod poscit.’
[What nature demands, she supplies.] Cleanthes lived by his hands and boasted that ‘Cleanthes, if he so wished, could support another Cleanthes.’
¹⁹

[B] If what Nature precisely and basically requires for the preservation of our being is too little (and how little it is and how cheaply life can be sustained cannot be better expressed than by the following consideration: that it is so little that it escapes the grasp and blows of Fortune) then let us allow ourselves to take a little more: let us still call ‘nature’ the habits and endowments of each one of us; let us appraise ourselves and treat ourselves by that measure:
²⁰
let us stretch our appurtenances and our calculations as
far as that. For as far as that, it does seem that we have a good excuse: custom is a second nature and no less powerful;
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[C] if I lack anything which I have become used to, I hold that I truly lack it. [B] I would just as soon (almost) that you took my life than have you restrict it or lop it much below the state in which I have lived it for so long. I am not suited any more to great changes nor to throwing myself into some new and unaccustomed way of life – not even a richer one. It is no longer the time to become different. And if some great stroke of luck should fall into my hands now, how sorry I would be that it did not come when I could have enjoyed it.

Quo mihi fortuna, si non conceditur uti?
[What is a fortune to me if I am not able to use it?]
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[C] I would similarly regret any new inward attainment. It is almost better never to become a good man at all than to do so tardily, understanding how to live when you have no life ahead. I am on the way out: I would readily leave to one who comes later whatever wisdom I am learning about dealing with the world. I do not want even a good thing when it is too late to use it. Mustard after dinner! What use is knowledge to a man with no brain left? It is an insult and disfavour of Fortune to offer us presents which fill us with just indignation because they were lacking to us in due season. Take me no farther; I can go on no more. Of all the qualities which sufficiency possesses, endurance alone suffices. Try giving the capabilities of an outstanding treble to a chorister whose lungs are diseased, or [B] eloquence to a hermit banished to the deserts of Arabia! No art is required to decline. [C] At the finish of every task the ending makes itself known. My world is over: my mould has been emptied; I belong entirely to the past; I am bound to acknowledge that and to conform my exit to it. This I will say [‘95] to explain what I
mean: [C] the recent suppression of ten days by the Pope has brought me so low that I really cannot wear it:
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I belong to those years when we computed otherwise: so ancient and long-established a custom claims me and summons me back to it. Since I cannot stand novelty even when corrective, I am constrained to be a bit of a heretic in this case. I grit my teeth, but my mind is always ten days ahead or ten days behind; it keeps muttering in my ears: ‘That adjustment concerns those not yet born.’

Although health – oh so sweet! – comes and finds me spasmodically, it is so as to bring me nostalgia, not right of possession. I no longer have anywhere to put it. Time is quitting me: without time there is no right of possession. What little value would I attribute to those great elective offices-of-state which are bestowed only on those who are on the way out! No one is concerned there with whether you will perform them properly but how short a time you have to fill them. From the moment of your entry they are thinking of your exit.

[B] Here, I am in short putting the finishing touches to a particular man, not making another one instead. By long accustoming this form of mine has passed into substance and my fortune into nature. So I maintain that each wretched one of us may be pardoned for reckoning as his whatever is comprised within the measure of custom, and also that, beyond those limits, there is nought but confusion. It is the widest extent that we can allow to our rights: the more we increase our needs and possessions the more we expose ourselves to adversities and to the blows of Fortune. The course run by our desires must be circumscribed and restricted to the narrow limits of the most accessible and contiguous pleasures. Moreover their course should be set not in a straight line terminating somewhere else but in a circle both the start and finish of which remain and terminate within ourselves after a short gallop round: any action carried through without such a return on itself – and I mean a quick and genuine one – is [C] wayward
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[B] and diseased: such are those of covetous and ambitious men and of so many others who dash towards a goal, careering ever on and on.

Most of our occupations are farcical:
‘Mundus universus exercet histrionem.’
[Everybody in the entire world is acting a part.]
²⁵
We should play our role
properly, but as the role of a character which we have adopted. We must not turn masks and semblances into essential realities, nor adopted qualities into attributes of our self. We cannot tell our skin from our shimmy! [C] It is enough to plaster flour on our faces without doing it to our minds. [B] I know some who transubstantiate and metamorphose themselves into as many new beings and forms as the dignities which they assume: they are prelates down to their guts and livers and uphold their offices on their lavatory-seat. I cannot make them see the difference between hats doffed to them and those doffed to their commissions, their retinue or their mule.
²⁶
‘Tantum se fortunae permittunt, etiam ut naturam dediscant.’
[They allow so much to their Fortune that they unlearn their own natures.]
²⁷
They puff up their souls and inflate their natural speech to the height of the magistrate’s bench.

The Mayor and Montaigne have always been twain, very clearly distinguished. Just because you are a lawyer or a financier you must not ignore the trickery there is in such vocations: a man of honour is not accountable for the crimes or stupidities of his profession, nor should they make him refuse to practise it; such is the custom of his country: and he gets something from it. We must make our living from the world and use it as it is. Yet even an Emperor’s judgement should be above his imperial sway, seeing it and thinking of it as an extraneous accessory. He should know how to enjoy himself independently of it, talking (at least to himself) as Tom, Dick or Harry.

I cannot get so deeply and totally involved. When my convictions make me devoted to one faction, it is not with so violent a bond that my understanding becomes infected by it. During the present confusion in this State of ours my own interest has not made me fail to recognize laudable qualities in our adversaries nor reprehensible ones among those whom I follow. [C] People worship everything on their own side: for most of what I see on mine I do not even make excuses. A good book does not lose its beauty because it argues against my cause. [B] Apart from the kernel of the controversy, I have remained balanced and utterly indifferent: [C]
‘Neque extra necessitates belli praecipuum odium gero.’
[And I act with no special hatred beyond what war requires.]
²⁸
[B] I congratulate
myself for that: it is usual to fall into the opposite extreme: [C]
‘Utatur motu animi qui uti ratione non potest’
[If he cannot be reasonable, let him indulge his emotions!]

[B] Those who extend their anger and hatred beyond their concerns (as most men do) betray that their emotion arises from something else, from some private cause, just as when a man is cured of his ulcer but still has a fever that shows that it arises from some other and more secret origin. [C] The fact is that they feel no anger at all for the general cause in so far as it inflicts wounds on the interests of all men and on the State: they resent it simply because it bruises their private interest. That is why they goad themselves into a private passion which goes beyond public justice and reason:
‘Nam tarn omnia universi quam ea quae ad quemque pertinent singuli carpebant.’
[They did not carp about the terms as a whole but about how they affected them as individuals.]
²⁹

[B] I want us to win, but I am not driven mad if we do not. [C] I am firmly attached to the sanest of the parties, but I do not desire to be particularly known as an enemy of the others beyond what is generally reasonable. I absolutely condemn such defective arguments as, ‘He belongs to the League because he admires the grace of Monsieur de Guise’; ‘He is. Huguenot: the activity of the King of Navarre sends him into ecstasies’; ‘He finds such-and-such lacking in the manners of the King: at heart he is a traitor.’ I did not concede to the magistrate himself that he was right to condemn a book for having named a heretic among the best poets of the age.
³⁰
Should we be afraid to say that a thief has nice shins! [’95] Must a whore smell horrid? [C] In wiser ages did they revoke Marcus Manlius’ proud title
Capitolinus
, awarded him earlier as saviour of the liberty and religion of the State? Did they smother the memory of his generosity, of his feats of arms and the military honours awarded for his valour, because he subsequently hankered after kingship, to the prejudice of the laws of his land?
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