V V: Michel Montaigne - In defence of the human

Whether it is a Marxian class analysis or a detailed constituency-wise study, all elections are won or lost because of local factors. For the common man, big national problems don’t matter and if they do, they are so much fodder for ‘timepass’ or tawdry gossip. Every adult has known this for a long time and yet our obsession with politics of ‘who comes, who goes’ kind has grown with every new election. Is this because we don’t understand the games politicians play or we don’t introspect on the everyday happenings around us? Few would agree with this if only because the mass media intrudes into every aspect of our lives and makes sure that we look, listen and (hopefully) learn. Perhaps the answer lies in our lack of interests beyond the immediate that Saul Frampton talks about in When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me? Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life (Faber, Special Indian Price, £11.99) — based on the life and work of the great Renaissance writer who seems to have become a man of our times.

 

Yet, who was Montaigne and why has he recaptured the interest and affection of every generation? Montaigne’s Essays have withstood the test of time as few works of literature have, constantly inspiring re-translation and re-examination. His attractions have led writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf and Andre Gide — Frampton’s Cat is a popular introduction to Montaigne’s Essays that should get the serious common reader to look into them.

Born in 1533, Michel Montaigne came from a minor French nobility near the wine growing area of Bordeaux in France. He retired at the age of 38 and from then till the time of this death he lived primarily among his library of a thousand books he inherited from his friend; he began writing essays shortly thereafter and never stopped. He died in 1592 at the age of 58.

Everything interested Montaigne: deep questions about matters like friendship and human emotion, familiar matters such as coaches and animals, light matters, including the nature of fun itself, and even the nature of his own suffering from kidney stones. These essays are wide-ranging and available in Penguin Classics, which says in its exhaustive Introduction that “there is no such thing as a definitive edition of the Essays. One has to choose and the Essays are a prime example of the expanding book.”

Take some of the essays at random. We reach the same ends by discrepant means that echoes Shakespeare’s advice “from indirections do directions find; Our emotions get carried away beyond us; On Liars; On Prognostications; On Constancy; On Fear; To philosophise is to know how to die; On affectionate relationships; On schoolmasters’ learning; On fleeing from pleasures at the cost of of one’s life; Fortune is often found in reason’s train; How we weep and laugh at the same thing; On Solitude; On the inconstancy of our actions’ ‘Work can wait till tomorrow’; On Conscience; On Drunkenness and so on. You could say just about every gamut of human feelings and emotions that parallels in many ways Shakespeare at the height of his powers.

Reading was the solace of Montaigne’s life. “It consoles me in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and, at any time, can rid me of boring company. It blunts the stabs of pain whenever pain is overpowering and extreme. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need to have recourse to books.”

Montaigne had a set of fifty-seven short inscriptions culled from the Bible and the classics painted across the wooden beams of his castle and these suggested profound reservations about the benefits of having a mind. For instance, everything is too complicated for men to be able to understand… Ecclesiastes

If Montaigne has endured for so long it is not merely because of range of his essays but his style — he is regarded as the first and greatest of essayists — which were distinguished by intimacy and informality. He didn’t have any preconceived notions of order and regularity; it is irregularity like ‘a loose sally of the mind’ is what makes them so attractive. Like daily journalism, he seems to be talking on paper — unconstrained, independent in his tastes, but close to the weave and texture of his own experience. Which is what makes them so readable and authentic; there’s nothing fake about them.

For instance, talking of true wisdom, he says it must involve an accommodation with our baser selves, it must adopt a modest view about the role that intelligence and high culture can play in any life and accept the urgent and at times deeply unmortifying demands of our mortal frame. So, he concludes:

“What is the use of those high philosophical peaks on which no human being can settle and those rules which exceed our practice and our power? It is not very clever to tailor (our) obligations to the standards of a different kind of being.”

Montaigne’s ultimate, liberal humanist approach is exemplified in the open-minded question of the book’s title, which asks who is playing with whom when he is playing a game with his cat.