The Complete Essays (47 page)

39. On solitude

[Montaigne himself had withdrawn in solitude to his estates, as many an ancient philosopher and statesman had done, with leisure to seek after wisdom, goodness and tranquillity of mind. His advice that we should set aside for ourselves a ‘room at the back of the shop’ is a reminder that true solitude is a spiritual withdrawal from the world. Living in solitude did not mean living as a hermit but living with detachment – if possible away from courts and the bustle of the world. Living as though always in the presence of a great and admired figure was a Renaissance practice (Sir Thomas More lived as though always in the company of the elder Pico). Montaigne draws a sharp distinction between the solitude of rare saintly ecstatics and that of ordinary men.]

[A] Let us leave aside those long comparisons between the solitary life and the active one;
¹
and as for that fine adage used as a cloak by greed and ambition, ‘That we are not born for ourselves alone but for the common weal,’
²
let us venture to refer to those who have joined in the dance: let them bare their consciences and confess whether rank, office and all the bustling business of the world are not sought on the contrary to gain private profit from the common weal. The evil methods which men use to get ahead in our century clearly show that their aims cannot be worth much.

Let us retort to ambition that she herself gives us a taste for solitude, for does she shun anything more than fellowship? Does she seek anything more than room to use her elbows?

The means of doing good or evil can be found anywhere, but if that quip of Bias is true, that ‘the evil form the larger part’, or what Ecclesiasticus says, ‘One good man in a thousand have I not found’
³
–

[B] Rari
quippe boni: numero vix sunt totidem, quot
Thebarum portæ, vel divitis ostia Nili
.

[Good men are rare: just about as many as gates in the walls of Thebes or mouths to the fertile Nile.] –

[A] then contagion is particularly dangerous in crowds. Either you must loathe the wicked or imitate them. It is dangerous both to grow like them because they are many, or to loathe many of them because they are different.

[C] Sea-going merchants are right to ensure that dissolute, blasphemous or wicked men do not sail in the same ship with them, believing such company to be unlucky. That is why Bias jested with those who were going through the perils of a great storm with him and calling on the gods for help: ‘Shut up,’ he said, ‘so that they do not realize that you are here with me.’
⁴
And (a more pressing example) when Albuquerque, the Viceroy of India for Emmanuel, King of Portugal, was in peril from a raging tempest, he took a boy on his shoulders for one reason only: so that by linking their fates together the innocence of that boy might serve him as a warrant and intercession for God’s favour and so bring him to safety.

[A] It is not that a wise man cannot live happily anywhere nor be alone in a crowd of courtiers, but Bias says that, if he has the choice, the wise man will avoid the very sight of them. If he has to, he will put up with the former, but if he can he will choose the other. He thinks that he is not totally free of vice if he has to contend with the vices of others. [B] Those who haunted evil-doers were chastised [C] as evil [A] by Charondas.
⁵

[C] There is nothing more unsociable than Man, and nothing more sociable: unsociable by his vice, sociable by his nature. And Antisthenes does not seem to me to have given an adequate reply to the person who reproached him for associating with the wicked, when he retorted that doctors live among the sick: for even if doctors do help the sick to return to health they impair their own by constantly seeing and touching diseases as they treat them.
⁶

[A] Now the end I think is always the same: how to live in leisure at our ease. But people do not always seek the way properly. Often they think they have left their occupations behind when they have merely changed them. There is hardly less torment in running a family than in running a whole country. Whenever our soul finds something to do she is
there in her entirety: domestic tasks may be less important but they are no less importunate. Anyway, by ridding ourselves of Court and market-place we do not rid ourselves of the principal torments of our life:

ratio et prudentia curas,
Non locus effusi late maris arbiter, aufert
.

[it is reason and wisdom which take away cares, not places affording wide views over the sea.]
⁷

Ambition, covetousness, irresolution, fear and desires do not abandon us just because we have changed our landscape.

Et post equitem sedet atra cura
.

[Behind the parting horseman squats black care.]
⁸

They often follow us into the very cloister and the schools of philosophy. Neither deserts nor holes in cliffs nor hair-shirts nor fastings can disentangle us from them:

haerit lateri letalis arundo
.

[in her side still clings that deadly shaft.]
⁹

Socrates was told that some man had not been improved by travel. ‘I am sure he was not,’ he said. ‘He went with himself!’
¹⁰

Quid terras alio calentes
Sole mutamus? patria quis exul
Se quoque fugit?

[Why do we leave for lands warmed by a foreign sun? What fugitive from his own land can flee from himself?]
¹¹

If you do not first lighten yourself and your soul of the weight of your burdens, moving about will only increase their pressure on you, as a ship’s cargo is less troublesome when lashed in place. You do more harm than good to a patient by moving him about: you shake his illness down into the sack, [Al] just as you drive stakes in by pulling and waggling them about. [A] That is why it is not enough to withdraw from the mob,
not enough to go to another place: we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession.

[B]
Rupi jam vincula dicas:
Nam luctata canis nodum arripit; attamen illi,
Cum fugit, a collo trahitur pars longa catenæ
.

[‘I have broken my chains,’ you say. But a struggling cur may snap its chain, only to escape with a great length of it fixed to its collar.]
¹²

We take our fetters with us; our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind; our imagination is full of them.

     Nisi purgatum est pectus, quæ prælia nobis
Atque pericula tunc ingratis insinuandum?
Quantæ conscindunt hominem cuppedinis acres
Sollicitant curæ, quantique perinde timores?
Quidve superbia, spurcitia, ac petulantia, quantas
Efficiunt clades? quid luxus desidiesque?

[But if our breast remains unpurged, what unprofitable battles and tempests we must face, what bitter cares must tear a man apart, and then what fears, what pride, what sordid thoughts, what tempers and what clashes; what gross gratifications; what sloth!]
¹³

[A] It is in our soul that evil grips us: and she cannot escape from herself:

In culpa est animus qui se non effugit unquam
.

[That mind is at fault which never escapes from itself.]
¹⁴

So we must bring her back, haul her back, into our self. That is true solitude. It can be enjoyed in towns and in kings’ courts, but more conveniently apart.

Now since we are undertaking to live, without companions, by ourselves, let us make our happiness depend on ourselves; let us loose ourselves from the bonds which tie us to others; let us gain power over ourselves to live really and truly alone – and of doing so in contentment.

Stilpo had escaped from the great conflagration of his city in which he had lost wife, children and goods; when Demetrius Poliorcetes saw him in the midst of so great a destruction of his homeland, yet with his face
undismayed, he asked him if he had suffered no harm. He said, No. Thank God he had lost nothing of his.
¹⁵
[C] The philosopher Antisthenes put the same thing amusingly when he said that a man ought to provide himself with unsinkable goods, which could float out of a shipwreck with him.
¹⁶

[A] Certainly, if he still has himself, a man of understanding has lost nothing.

When the city of Nola was sacked by the Barbarians, the local Bishop Paulinus lost everything and was thrown into prison; yet this was his prayer: ‘Keep me O Lord from feeling this loss. Thou knowest that the Barbarians have so far touched nothing of mine.’ Those riches which did enrich him and those good things which made him good were still intact.
¹⁷

There you see what it means to choose treasures which no harm can corrupt and to hide them in a place which no one can enter, no one betray, save we ourselves. We should have wives, children, property and, above all, good health… if we can: but we should not become so attached to them that our happiness depends on them. We should set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum. Within it our normal conversation should be of ourselves, with ourselves, so privy that no commerce or communication with the outside world should find a place there; there we should talk and laugh as though we had no wife, no children, no possessions, no followers, no menservants, so that when the occasion arises that we must lose them it should not be a new experience to do without them. We have a soul able able to turn in on herself; she can keep herself company; she has the wherewithal to attack, to defend, to receive and to give. Let us not fear that in such a solitude as that we shall be crouching in painful idleness:

[B]
in solis sis tibi turba locis
.

[in lonely places, be a crowd unto yourself.]
¹⁸

[C] ‘Virtue,’ says Antisthenes, ‘contents herself, without regulations, words or actions.’ [A] Not even one in a thousand of our usual activities has anything to do with our self.

That man you can see over there, furiously beside himself, scrambling high up on the ruins of that battlement, the target of so many volleys from harquebuses; and that other man, all covered with scars, wan, pale with hunger, determined to burst rather than open the gate to him: do you think they are in it for themselves? It could well be for someone they have never seen, someone plunged meanwhile in idleness and delights, who takes no interest in what they are doing. And this man over here, rheumy, filthy and blear-eyed, whom you can see coming out of his work-room at midnight! Do you think he is looking in his books for ways to be better, happier, wiser? Not a bit. He will teach posterity how to scan a verse of Plautus and how to spell a Latin word, or else die in the attempt.

Is there anyone not willing to barter health, leisure and life itself against reputation and glory, the most useless, vain and counterfeit coinage in circulation? Our own deaths have never frightened us enough, so let us burden ourselves with fears for the deaths of our wives, children and servants. Our own affairs have never caused us worry enough, so let us start cudgelling and tormenting our brains over those of our neighbours and of those whom we love.

Vah! quemquamne hominem in animum instituere, aut
Parare, quod sit charius quant ipse est sibi?