The Complete Essays (66 page)

[A] The poets had imaginary gods favourable to the deliverance of such who thus dragged out a lingering death:

hunc ego Diti
Sacrum jussa fero, teque isto corpore solvo
.

[to Dis I bear, as he decreed, this lock of hair, and free thee from thy body.]
⁷

Even such brief words and incoherent replies as we extort from the dying by yelling in their ears and storming about, even the gestures which seem to bear some relation to the questions we put to them, are, for all that, no testimony to their being alive, at least not fully alive. The same thing happens to us when we are hesitantly drifting off to sleep, before sleep has taken us over completely: we are aware of what is going on about us as in a dream, and we follow any words spoken with a cloudy uncertain sense of hearing which seems to touch only the edges of our soul; and, to the last words spoken to us which we could follow, we make replies more marked by chance than by sense.

Now that I have actually experienced it I have no doubt whatsoever that I have been right all the time. First of all, when I was unconscious I strove to rip my doublet half-open with my nails – I was not wearing armour – and I know that in my mind I felt none of the wounds: for many of our movements do not arise from any command of ours:

[B]
Semianimesque micant digili ferrumque retractant
.

[Half-dead fingers twitch and grasp the sword again.]
⁸

[A] By some natural impulse, when we trip over we throw out our arms
before
we fall, which shows that our limbs spontaneously come to each other’s aid [B] and have movements independent of our reasoning:

Falciferos memorant currus abscindere membra,
Ut tremere in terra videatur ab artubus id quod
Decidit abscissum, cum mens tamen atque hominis vis
Mobilitate mali non quit sentire dolorem
.

[They tell how chariots with scythes on their wheels can cut so quickly that severed limbs are writhing on the ground before the mind has the power to feel the pain.]
⁹

[A] My stomach was swollen with clotted blood; my hands rushed to it of their own accord, as they often do against the counsel of our will to a part which is itching. There are many animals, and men too, who are seen to contract their muscles and move after they are dead. Every man knows from his own experience that he has a part of his body which often stirs, erects and lies down again without his leave. Now such passive movements, which only touch our outsides, cannot be called ours. For them to be ours the whole man must be involved: any pain which our foot or our hand feels while we are asleep does not belong to us.

As I was nearing my home, to which news of my fall had already run quickly, and after members of my family had greeted me with the cries usual in such circumstances, not only did I answer a word or two to their questions but they say that I was determined to order a horse to be provided for my wife whom I saw struggling and stumbling along the road, which is difficult and steep. It might appear that such thoughts must have arisen from a soul which is awake: nevertheless I played no part in them: they were empty acts of apparent thinking provoked by sensations in my eyes and ears: they did not arise from within me. I had no idea where I was coming from nor where I was going to; nor could I weigh attentively what I was asked. My reactions were trivial ones, produced by my senses themselves, doubtless from habit. Any contribution from my soul, which was only very lightly involved and as though licked by the dew of some light impression of the senses, came only in a dream. Meanwhile my
condition was truly most agreeable and peaceful: I felt no affliction either for myself or for others; it was a kind of lassitude and utter weakness, without any pain. I saw my house but I did not recognize it. When they got me into bed, I experienced a feeling of infinite rest and comfort, for I had been dreadfully pulled about by those poor fellows who had taken the trouble to carry me in their arms over a long and very poor road and who, one after another, had tired themselves out two or three times.

I was offered several medicines: I would not take any of them, being convinced that I was fatally wounded in the head. It would have been – no lying – a very happy way to die, for the feebleness of my reasoning powers kept me from judging anything, and that of my body from feeling anything. I felt myself oozing away so gently, in so gentle and pleasing a fashion, that I can think of hardly any action [C] less grievous than [A] that was.
¹⁰

When I began to come back to life and regained my strength,

[B]
Ut tandem sensus convaluere mei
,
[As my senses at last regained their health,]
¹¹

[A] which was two or three hours later, only then did I feel myself all at once linked with pain again, having all my limbs bruised and battered by my fall; and I felt so ill two or three nights later that I nearly died a second time, but of a livelier death! And I can still feel the effects of that battering.

I must not overlook the following: the last thing I could recover was my memory of the accident itself; before I could grasp it, I got them to repeat several times where I was going to, where I was coming from, what time it happened. As for the manner of my fall, they hid it from me for the sake of the man who had caused it and made up other explanations. But some time later the following day when my memory happened to open up and recall to me the circumstances which I found myself in on that instant when I was aware of that horse coming at me (for I had seen it at my heels and already thought I was dead, but that perception had been so sudden that fear had no time to be engendered by it), it appeared to me that lightning had struck my soul with a jolt and that I was coming back from the other world.

This account of so unimportant an event is pointless enough but for the
instruction I drew from it for my own purposes: for in truth, to inure yourself to death all you have to do is to draw nigh to it. Now, as Pliny says, each man is an excellent instruction unto himself provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close quarters.
¹²

Here you have not my teaching but my study: the lesson is not for others; it is for me. [C] Yet, for all that, you should not be ungrateful to me for publishing it. What helps me can perhaps help somebody else. Meanwhile I am not spoiling anything: I am only using what is mine. And if I play the fool it is at my own expense and does no harm to anybody. Such foolishness as I am engaged in dies with me: there are no consequences. We have reports of only two or three Ancients who trod this road and we cannot even say if their manner of doing so bore any resemblance to mine since we know only their names.
¹³
Since then nobody has leapt to follow in their traces. It is a thorny undertaking – more than it looks – to follow so roaming a course as that of our mind’s, to penetrate its dark depths and its inner recesses, to pick out and pin down the innumerable characteristics of its emotions. It is a new pastime, outside the common order; it withdraws us from the usual occupations of people – yes, even from the most commendable ones. For many years now the target of my thoughts has been myself alone; I examine nothing, I study nothing, but me; and if I do study anything else, it is so as to apply it at once to myself, or more correctly, within myself. And it does not seem to me to be wrong if (as is done in other branches of learning, incomparably less useful) I share what I have learned in this one, even though I am hardly satisfied with the progress I have made. No description is more difficult than the describing of oneself; and none, certainly, is more useful. To be ready to appear in public you have to brush your hair; you have to arrange things and put them in order. I am therefore ceaselessly making myself ready since I am ceaselessly describing myself.

Custom has made it a vice to talk about oneself and obstinately prohibits it, hating the boasting which always seems to be attached to any testimony about oneself. Instead of wiping the child’s nose you cut it off!

In vitium ducit culpæ fuga
.
[Flying from a fault, we fall into a vice.]
¹⁴

I find more evil than good in that remedy. But even if it should be true that engaging people in talk about oneself is inevitably presumption, still, if I am to carry out my plan I must not put an interdict on an activity which makes that sickly quality public, since it
is
in me and I must not hide that defect; I do not merely practise it: I make a profession of it. Anyway, my belief is that it is wrong to condemn wine because many get drunk on it. You can abuse things only if they are good. I believe that that prohibition applies only to the popular abuse. It is a bridle made to curb calves: it is not used as a bridle by the Saints, who can be heard talking loudly about themselves, nor by philosophers nor by theologians;
¹⁵
nor by me though I am neither one nor the other. If they do not literally write about themselves, when the occasion requires it they do not hesitate to trot right in front to show off their paces. What does Socrates treat more amply than himself? And what does he most often lead his pupils to do, if not to talk about themselves – not about what they have read in their books but about the being and the movement of their souls? We scrupulously talk of ourselves to God and to our confessors, just as our neighbours do before the whole congregation.
¹⁶
‘But,’ somebody will reply, ‘we talk then only of our offences.’ In that case we say it all: for our very virtue is faulty and needs repentance.

My business, my art, is to live my life. If anyone forbids me to talk about it according to my own sense, experience and practice, let him also command an architect to talk about buildings not according to his own standard but his next-door neighbour’s, according to somebody else’s I knowledge not his own. If publishing one’s own worth is pride, why does not Cicero puff the eloquence of Hortensius, and Hortensius that of Cicero?
¹⁷

Perhaps they mean that I should witness to myself by works and deeds not by the naked word alone. But I am chiefly portraying my ways of thinking, a shapeless subject which simply does not become manifest in deeds. I have to struggle to couch it in the flimsy medium of words. Some
of the wisest of men and the most devout have lived their lives avoiding any sign of activity. My activities would tell you more about Fortune than about me. They bear witness to their own role not to mine, unless it be by uncertain conjecture: they are samples and reveal only particulars. I am
all
on display, like a mummy on which at a glance you can see the veins, the muscles and the tendons, each piece in its place. Part of me is revealed – but only ambiguously – by the act of coughing; another by my turning pale or by my palpitations. It is not what I do that I write of, but of me, of what I
am
. I hold that we must show wisdom in judging ourselves, and, equally, good faith in witnessing to ourselves, high and low indifferently. If I seemed to myself to be good or wise – or nearly so – I would sing it out at the top of my voice. To say you are worse than you are is not modest but foolish. According to Aristotle, to prize yourself at less than you are worth is weak and faint-hearted. No virtue is helped by falsehood; and the truth can never go wrong. To say we are better than we are is not always presumption: it is even more often stupidity. In my judgement, the substance of that vice is to be immoderately pleased with yourself and so to fall into an injudicious self-love.

The sovereign remedy to cure self-love is to do the opposite to what those people say who, by forbidding you to talk about yourself, as a consequence even more strongly forbid you to think about yourself. Pride lies in our thoughts: the tongue can only have a very unimportant share in it. They think that to linger over yourself is to be pleased with yourself, to haunt and frequent yourself is to hold yourself too dear. That can happen. But that excess arises only in those who merely finger the surface of themselves; who see themselves only when business is over; who call it madness and idleness to be concerned with yourself; for whom enriching and constructing your character is to build castles in the air; who treat themselves as a third person, a stranger to themselves.

If anyone looks down on others and is drunk on self-knowledge let him turn his gaze upwards to ages past: he will pull his horns in then, discovering many thousands of minds which will trample him underfoot. If he embarks upon some flattering presumption of his own valour let him recall the lives of the two Scipios and all those armies and peoples who leave him so far behind. No one individual quality will make any man swell with pride who will, at the same time, take account of all those other weak and imperfect qualities which are in him and, finally, of the nullity of the human condition.

Because Socrates alone had taken a serious bite at his god’s precept to
‘know himself’ and by such a study had reached the point of despising himself, he alone was judged worthy of being called The Sage.
¹⁸