Hold a Montaigne Zoom (or Dinner!)

 By Jay Heinrichs

While Montaigne really is food for the soul—I honestly feel better whenever I read him—he’s actually a terrible model for writing a college essay. I once taught an adult education course at Dartmouth titled “Montaigne and the Art of the Veer”; his essays almost never end up where they started. They’re almost rendered in stream-of-consciousness.

That being said, my favorite of all his essays is “That to philosophize is to learn to die.” The title might scare off young people, but it’s the most coherent summaries of his own Enlightenment philosophy, and a manual for how to live. 

But instead of assigning reading, I have a thought. One evening last year, our grown children were home with their significant others. My wife’s twin sister came as well. Our son, George was in love with a woman who’d come to America at age 12 with a family of Kurdish refugees from Iraq, and she wanted to meet our family to see whether marrying our son was a good idea. (They were married by an imam in Seattle last December.) Wanting to give a good impression, I had bought a ridiculously expensive bottle of Chateau d’Yquem, made in Montaigne’s estate.

(Don’t worry, this post has a point!)

I had George and daughter Dorothy Jr., both talented cooks, prepare a meal fit for this noble sauterne, and during the dinner I asked each of them to read passages from Montaigne’s essays. I read the parts in italic, introducing the passages and explaining a bit about Montaigne’s life. Each time, we drank to the man. (I imagine you’ll want to skip that part.) The dinner was a smashing success; we’re all still talking about it. 

So: what if instead of assigning Montaigne as homework, you hold a Zoom (or whatever) conference following a similar script? You can skip the wine, of course, though that definitely greased the wheels of our dinner.

Here’s the script.

The host (or MC if you like) reads the words are in italics; I wrote them. The words in roman, read by other readers, were written by Montaigne. Feel free to substitute your own passages. (Remember, I wrote the script for a party where we were actually drinking the man’s wine!)

TIP: Encourage students to read loudly and not too fast! They should try to sound like they’re performing at a crowded dinner party.

READER A

In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.

HOST

Montaigne wrote those words to describe himself, and he had them inscribed on his bookshelves. He retired to his library in a tower of his chateau in the Dordogne (between the Loire and the Pyrenees, formerly in the Aquitaine). 

Montaigne’s formal name was Michel Eyquem, Lord of Montaigne. His chateau made a famous sauterne, Chateau d’Yquem. And it still does. The tower where he wrote still stands, and, 500 years later, those words can still be seen, faded, on the walls, along with his favorite Latin quotations. This is where one of the most famous, and influential, writers worked to describe himself—and through describing himself, attempted to describe all of humanity.

READER B

At home I slip off to my library a little more often; it is easy for me to oversee my household from there. I am above my gateway and have a view of my garden, my chicken-run, my backyard and most parts of my house. There I can turn over the leaves of this book or that, a bit at a time without order or design. Sometimes my mind wanders off, at others I walk to and fro, noting down and dictating thee whims of mine….

My library is round in shape, squared off only for the needs of my table and chair…By being rather hard to get at and a bit out of the way it pleases me, partly for the sake of the exercise and partly because it keeps the crowd from me. There I have my seat. I assay making my dominion over it absolutely pure, withdrawing this one corner from all intercourse, filial, conjugal and civic. Everywhere else I have but a verbal authority, one essentially impure. Wretched the man (to my taste) who has nowhere in his house where he can be by himself, pay court to himself in private and hide away! Ambitions well rewards its courtiers by keeping them always on display like a statue in the market-place: Magna servitus est magna fortuna. [A great destiny is great slavery.] They cannot even find privacy on their privy!

Host

He was obsessed with ancient philosophy and rhetoric, and wanted to use the material in a series of personal experiments that changed literature for all time and helped usher in the modern era.

He called these experiments essais, or “assays.” Can anyone tell me what an assay is? The testing of a metal to see what it contains. Montaigne was assaying himself by studying himself in writing. His wine, which people can still buy today, is famous for its concentrated sweetness caused by a fungus called the “noble rot.” When many people read his essays, they find the same concentrated sweetness.

Reader C

I have a soul so lazy that I do not measure my fortune by its height; I measure it by its pleasantness. But thought I do not have all that great a mind, I do have one which is correspondingly open, one which orders me to dare to publish its weakness. 

Host

And so Montaigne invented the essay. Very few people had ever written so personally about themselves. The very notion of individuality was just beginning to dawn in people’s brains back then in the 1500s. And yet, Montaigne claimed he was just following good old Plato.

Reader D

‘Do what thou hast to do, and know thyself’ – that great precept is often cited by Plato; each clause of it embraces our entire duty, generally, and similarly embraces its fellow. Whoever would do what he has to do would see that the first thing he must learn is to know what he is and what is properly his. And whoever does know himself never considers external things to be his; above all other things he loves and cultivates himself: he rejects excessive concerns as well as useless thoughts and resolutions.

Host

Keep in mind that Montaigne retired from public life because he was sick of it. He wrote for seven years, and published his first volume of essays, which immediately became a bestseller. Seven years after retiring, though, he hit the road. He had developed kidney stones, and searched all over Europe for a cure. 

He actually was to die of quinsy, a throat infection, at age 59.

READER E

Cicero says that philosophizing is nothing other than getting ready to die. That is because study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it; or perhaps it is because all the wisdom and argument in the world eventually come down to one conclusion; which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying. 

In truth, either reason is joking or her target must be our happiness; all the labour of reason must be to make us live well, and at our ease, as Holy Scripture says…

Even in virtue our ultimate aim—no matter what they say—is pleasure. I enjoy bashing people’s ears with that word which runs so strongly counter to their minds.

HOST

Not long after that, the plague broke out, and the French civil war between Protestants and Catholics just exploded. Even worse for Montaigne were the moments of peace, when out-of-work mercenaries would roam the countryside looking for noblemen to rob. Montaigne refused to hire bodyguards, saying it was better to live free than heavily armed and paranoid. He negotiated between Protestants and Catholic—he himself was a liberal Catholic—and, while on the road, learned he’d been elected mayor of Bordeaux. So much for retirement. 

But Montaigne didn’t shy from argument!

READER F

The ancients recorded that Diodorus the Dialectician ‘fell in the field’, by an extreme sense of shame at being unable to refute arguments put to him in public in the presence of his followers. Violent emotions like these have little hold on me. By nature my sense of feeling has a hard skin, which I daily toughen and thicken by arguments.

HOST

But that’s not the reason readers tend to love Montaigne so much. they love him for what he himself calls “liberality,” an openness to the new, the strange, the other; and a humility, a rare humility that comes from an awareness that he is not the center of the universe.

READER G

The natural, original distemper of Man is presumption. Man is the most blighted and frail of all creatures and, moreover, the most given to pride. This creature knows and sees that he is lodged down here, among the mire and shit of the world, bound and nailed to the deadest, most stagnant part of the universe, in the lowest storey of the building, the farthest from the vault of heaven; his characteristics place him in the third and lowest category of animate creatures, yet, in thought, he sets himself above the circle of the Moon, bringing the very heavens under his feet. The vanity of this same thought makes him equal himself to God; attribute to himself God’s mode of being; pick himself out and set himself apart from the mass of other creatures; and (although they are his fellows and his brothers) carve out for them such helpings of force of faculties as he thinks fit. How can he, from the power of his own understanding, know the hidden, inward motivations of animate creatures? What comparison between us and them leads him to conclude that they have the attributes of senseless brutes?

When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?

HOST

Mostly, though, we can love Montaigne because he is wise—especially when he’s not trying to be wise.

READER H

In youth I studied in order to show off; later, a little, to make myself wiser; now I do it for amusement, never for profit. 

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