How to Live Read online

  How to Live

  Sarah Bakewell

  Published: 2010

  * * *

  In a wide-ranging intellectual career, Michel de Montaigne found no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well.

  By casting her biography of the writer as 20 chapters, each focused on a different answer to the question How to live? Bakewell limns Montaigne’s ceaseless pursuit of this most elusive knowledge. Embedded in the 20 life-knowledge responses, readers will find essential facts—when and where Montaigne was born, how and whom he married, how he became mayor of Bordeaux, how he managed a public life in a time of lethal religious and political passions.

  But Bakewell keeps the focus on the inner evolution of the acute mind informing Montaigne’s charmingly digressive and tolerantly skeptical essays. Flexible and curious, this was a mind at home contemplating the morality of cannibals, the meaning of his own near-death experience, and the puzzlingly human behavior of animals.

  And though Montaigne has identified his own personality as his overarching topic, Bakewell marvels at the way Montaigne’s prose has enchanted diverse readers—Hazlitt and Sterne, Woolf and Gide—with their own reflections. Because Montaigne’s capacious mirror still captivates many, this insightful life study will win high praise from both scholars and general readers. --Bryce Christensen

  Named one of Library Journal’s Top Ten Best Books of 2010

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Smart

  The English Dane

  Copyright © 2010 Sarah Bakewell

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of

  Random House UK

  Other Press edition 2010

  Quotations from The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters translated by Donald Frame copyright © 1943 by Donald M. Frame, renewed 1971;

  © 1948, 1957, 1958 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Bakewell, Sarah.

  How to live, or, A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer / Sarah Bakewell. — Other Press ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: London : Chatto & Windus, 2010.

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-426-9

  1. Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592. 2. Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592— Philosophy. 3. Authors, French—16th century—Biography. I. Title. II.

  Title: How to live. III. Title: Life of Montaigne in one

  question and twenty attempts at an answer.

  PQ1643.B34 2010B

  848.3—dc22 2010026896

  [B]

  v3.1

  For Simo

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Book by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Q. How to live?

  Michel de Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

  1. Q. How to live? A. Don’t worry about death

  Hanging by the tip of his lips

  2. Q. How to live? A. Pay attention

  Starting to write

  Stream of consciousness

  3. Q. How to live? A. Be born

  Micheau

  The experiment

  4. Q. How to live? A. Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted

  Reading

  Montaigne the slow and forgetful

  The young Montaigne in troubled times

  5. Q. How to live? A. Survive love and loss

  La Boétie: love and tyranny

  La Boétie: death and mourning

  6. Q. How to live? A. Use little tricks

  Little tricks and the art of living

  Montaigne in slavery

  7. Q. How to live? A. Question everything

  All I know is that I know nothing, and I’m not even sure about that

  Animals and demons

  A prodigious seduction machine

  8. Q. How to live? A. Keep a private room behind the shop

  Going to it with only one buttock

  Practical responsibilities

  9. Q. How to live? A. Be convivial: live with others

  A gay and sociable wisdom

  Openness, mercy, and cruelty

  10. Q. How to live? A. Wake from the sleep of habit

  It all depends on your point of view

  Noble savages

  11. Q. How to live? A. Live temperately

  Raising and lowering the temperature

  12. Q. How to live? A. Guard your humanity

  Terror

  Hero

  13. Q. How to live? A. Do something no one has done before

  Baroque best seller

  14. Q. How to live? A. See the world

  Travels

  15. Q. How to live? A. Do a good job, but not too good a job

  Mayor

  Moral objections

  Missions and assassinations

  16. Q. How to live? A. Philosophize only by accident

  Fifteen Englishmen and an Irishman

  17. Q. How to live? A. Reflect on everything; regret nothing

  Je ne regrette rien

  18. Q. How to live? A. Give up control

  Daughter and disciple

  The editing wars

  Montaigne remixed and embabooned

  19. Q. How to live? A. Be ordinary and imperfect

  Be ordinary

  Be imperfect

  20. Q. How to live? A. Let life be its own answer

  Not the end

  Acknowledgments

  Chronology

  Notes

  Sources

  List of Illustrations

  Q. How to live?

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE IN ONE QUESTION AND TWENTY ATTEMPTS

  AT AN ANSWER

  THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY is full of people who are full of themselves. A half-hour’s trawl through the online ocean of blogs, tweets, tubes, spaces, faces, pages, and pods brings up thousands of individuals fascinated by their own personalities and shouting for attention. They go on about themselves; they diarize, and chat, and upload photographs of everything they do. Uninhibitedly extrovert, they also look inward as never before. Even as bloggers and networkers delve into their private experience, they communicate with their fellow humans in a shared festival of the self.

  Some optimists have tried to make this global meeting of minds the basis for a new approach to international relations. The historian Theodore Zeldin has founded a site called “The Oxford Muse,” which encourages people to put together brief self-portraits in words, describing their everyday lives and the things they have learned. They upload these for other people to read and respond to. For Zeldin, shared self-revelation is the best way to develop trust and cooperation around the planet, replacing national stereotypes with real people. The great adventure of our epoch, he says, is “to discover who inhabits the world, one individual at a time.” The “Oxford Muse” is thus full of personal essays or interviews with titles like:

  Why an educated Russian works as a clean
er in Oxford

  Why being a hairdresser satisfies the need for perfection

  How writing a self-portrait shows you are not who you thought you were

  What you can discover if you do not drink or dance

  What a person adds when writing about himself to what he says in conversation

  How to be successful and lazy at the same time

  How a chef expresses his kindness

  (illustration credit i1.1)

  By describing what makes them different from anyone else, the contributors reveal what they share with everyone else: the experience of being human.

  This idea—writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity—has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Périgord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592.

  Montaigne created the idea simply by doing it. Unlike most memoirists of his day, he did not write to record his own great deeds and achievements. Nor did he lay down a straight eyewitness account of historical events, although he could have done; he lived through a religious civil war which almost destroyed his country over the decades he spent incubating and writing his book. A member of a generation robbed of the hopeful idealism enjoyed by his father’s contemporaries, he adjusted to public miseries by focusing his attention on private life. He weathered the disorder, oversaw his estate, assessed court cases as a magistrate, and administered Bordeaux as the most easygoing mayor in its history. All the time, he wrote exploratory, free-floating pieces to which he gave simple titles:

  Of Friendship

  Of Cannibals

  Of the Custom

  Of Wearing Clothes

  How we cry and laugh for the same thing

  Of Names

  Of Smells

  Of Cruelty

  Of Thumbs

  How our mind hinders itself

  Of Diversion

  Of Coaches

  Of Experience

  Altogether, he wrote a hundred and seven such essays. Some occupy a page or two; others are much longer, so that most recent editions of the complete collection run to over a thousand pages. They rarely offer to explain or teach anything. Montaigne presents himself as someone who jotted down whatever was going through his head when he picked up his pen, capturing encounters and states of mind as they happened. He used these experiences as the basis for asking himself questions, above all the big question that fascinated him as it did many of his contemporaries. Although it is not quite grammatical in English, it can be phrased in three simple words: “How to live?”

  (illustration credit i1.2)

  This is not the same as the ethical question, “How should one live?” Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. He wanted to know how to live a good life—meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one. This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present. He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself.

  A down-to-earth question, “How to live?” splintered into a myriad other pragmatic questions. Like everyone else, Montaigne ran up against the major perplexities of existence: how to cope with the fear of death, how to get over losing a child or a beloved friend, how to reconcile yourself to failures, how to make the most of every moment so that life does not drain away unappreciated. But there were smaller puzzles, too. How do you avoid getting drawn into a pointless argument with your wife, or a servant? How can you reassure a friend who thinks a witch has cast a spell on him? How do you cheer up a weeping neighbor? How do you guard your home? What is the best strategy if you are held up by armed robbers who seem to be uncertain whether to kill you or hold you to ransom? If you overhear your daughter’s governess teaching her something you think is wrong, is it wise to intervene? How do you deal with a bully? What do you say to your dog when he wants to go out and play, while you want to stay at your desk writing your book?

  In place of abstract answers, Montaigne tells us what he did in each case, and what it felt like when he was doing it. He provides all the details we need to make it real, and sometimes more than we need. He tells us, for no particular reason, that the only fruit he likes is melon, that he prefers to have sex lying down rather than standing up, that he cannot sing, and that he loves vivacious company and often gets carried away by the spark of repartee. But he also describes sensations that are harder to capture in words, or even to be aware of: what it feels like to be lazy, or courageous, or indecisive; or to indulge a moment of vanity, or to try to shake off an obsessive fear. He even writes about the sheer feeling of being alive.

  Exploring such phenomena over twenty years, Montaigne questioned himself again and again, and built up a picture of himself—a self-portrait in constant motion, so vivid that it practically gets up off the page and sits down next to you to read over your shoulder. He can say surprising things: a lot has changed since Montaigne was born, almost half a millennium ago, and neither manners nor beliefs are always still recognizable. Yet to read Montaigne is to experience a series of shocks of familiarity, which make the centuries between him and the twenty-first-century reader collapse to nothing. Readers keep seeing themselves in him, just as visitors to the “Oxford Muse” see themselves, or aspects of themselves, in the story of why an educated Russian works as a cleaner or of what it is like to prefer not to dance.

  The journalist Bernard Levin, writing an article on the subject for The Times in 1991, said, “I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: ‘How did he know all that about me?’ ”The answer is, of course, that he knows it by knowing about himself. In turn, people understand him because they too already know “all that” about their own experience. As one of his most obsessive early readers, Blaise Pascal, wrote in the seventeenth century: “It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there.”

  The novelist Virginia Woolf imagined people walking past Montaigne’s self-portrait like visitors in a gallery. As each person passes, he or she pauses in front of the picture and leans forward to peer through the patterns of reflection on the glass. “There is always a crowd before that picture, gazing into its depths, seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the longer they look, never being able to say quite what it is they see.” The portrait’s face and their own merge into one. This, for Woolf, was the way people respond to each other in general:

  As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror … And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue.

  Montaigne was the first writer to create literature that deliberately worked in this way, and to do it using the plentiful material of his own life rather than either pure philosophy or pure invention. He was the most human of writers, and the most sociable. Had he lived in the era of mass networked communication, he would have been astounded at the scale on which such sociability has become possible: not dozens or hundreds in a gallery, but millions of people seeing themselves bounced back from different angles.

  The effect, in Montaigne’s time as in our own, can be intoxicating. A sixteenth-century admirer, Tabourot des Accords, said that anyone reading the Essays felt as if they themselves had written it. Over two hundred and fifty years later, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing in almost the same phrase. “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life.” “So much have I made him my own,” wrote the twentieth-century nov
elist André Gide, “that it seems he is my very self.” And Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer on the verge of suicide after being forced into exile during the Second World War, found in Montaigne his only real friend: “Here is a ‘you’ in which my ‘I’ is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished.” The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead. “Four hundred years disappear like smoke.”

  Enthusiastic buyers on the online bookstore Amazon.com still respond in the same way. One calls the Essays “not so much a book as a companion for life,” and another predicts that it will be “the best friend you’ve ever had.” A reader who keeps a copy always on the bedside table laments the fact that it is too big (in its complete version) to carry around all day too. “There’s a lifetime’s reading in here,” says another. “For such a big fat classic of a book it reads like it was written yesterday, although if it had been written yesterday, he’d’ve been all over Hello! magazine by now.”

  All this can happen because the Essays has no great meaning, no point to make, no argument to advance. It does not have designs on you; you can do as you please with it. Montaigne lets his material pour out, and never worries if he has said one thing on one page and the opposite overleaf, or even in the next sentence. He could have taken as his motto Walt Whitman’s lines:

  Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then I contradict myself,

  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)