“This is, and that is, and not that other.”

An attempt at an essay about Montaigne’s essays, and other signs that my brain is circling the drain

Hi everyone. I’m about to board a flight, so what follows is written in some haste.

1.

The day before he hits his Jack Benny, Montaigne has his men haul a table and him in his chair up to the room at the top of the courtyard tower.

The room has been scrubbed and painted but it still stinks of the salt herring that — first sold by the louche at his grandparents’ market stall, then by the demijohn by his father in Bordeaux, then, under Michel’s direction, in tonneau shipments to Toulouse, Lyon, and Paris — paid for the Montaigne chateau and its farms, its famous Sauterne vines, and his family’s noble status.

The men put his chair in front of the table and go back down the stone steps. His secretary, the son of his accountant, stays behind to take dictation.

In the first letter, Montaigne tells his bosses to shove it. In the second, he tells his wife that he will be home for dinner.

The house — the castle — is just across the courtyard.

He hasn’t met his daughter yet.

2.

Ticking all the write boxes: They’ll tell you that what the Ancients did doesn’t count, that he was the first, up there in his backyard tower, speaking to the paper just as he would to me or you or a Tupi chieftain from Brazil, with his pen the same as his mouth, succulent and sinewy, brief and compressed, each of us his bestest, LOL.

But what do I know?

Myself, it seems. Parts, at least. That was his take at any rate. Bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal.

St Augustine wrote about himself, as a sinner and penitent. But not like this.

A week before those same men, his servants, thinking him dead, had taken him up in their arms and struggled back with him to the house, which was about an hour away, after he fell from his horse; and one of them, not the amanuensis but a big strong fellow whose name he forgets or never knew, was responsible for his broken state; for on that day, barely a week ago, while riding on an undemanding but not very reliable horse a league away from his home, which at the time was at the hub of the civil war and its disturbances, and thinking he was finally safe, despite harquebuses firing off volleys all around him, until this man, a colossus, wanting to show off and get ahead of the others, rode full pelt into his horse, and came down upon him, a little man on a little horse, striking him like a thunderbolt with all his roughness and weight, knocking him over with his legs in the air. So there he was, his horse thrown down and lying stunned, and he, Montaigne the magistrate, a man of letters conversant in Latin, ancient Greek, and Spanish, lying ten or twelve yards beyond, stretched out dead on his back, his face all bruised and cut about, the sword he had been holding lying more than ten yards beyond that, his belt and doublet torn to shreds; and he with no more movement or sensation than a stump.

This is the only time in his life he ever lost consciousness, which, I think we all agree, is the worst state for a man.

3.

“Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.”

Many do it standing up. Others, me included, do it best in bed. But bed is bad for some, especially for proper prose, and for upstanding amateurs even worse for verse. So find your own voice in your own form and in your proper spot and slot — “sur le plus beau trône du monde, on n'est jamais assis que sur son cul” is how Montaigne put it, and all the how-toers ever since — and let it flourish there, far from where the sun’s rays shine, with head down or chin up, whatever is most conducive, if not comfortable, until something — anything, really — is also there, because that something will really be something, and that there will definitely be there, even if it is in Oakland, where Gertrude Stein once experienced it, and then, therefore, there, never experienced it again.

Back to my strange bedfellows: William Wordsworth (in the dark!), Edith Wharton (with her ghosts!), Marcel Proust (in a room with cork-lined walls!), Mark Twain (with a cigar!), James Joyce (to a Barnacle stuck!), George Orwell (down and out!), Winston Churchill (with a jeroboam of Pol Roger!), Truman Capote (in cold blood!), and Woody Allen (with his stepdaughter!).

Gertrude Stein, like Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, did it in a chair at a table. They were both Jewish. Gertrude admired Pétain, even after the war. Michel did not know what he thought of his king. Except what the Ancients told him, that to follow another is to follow nothing:

Non sumus sub rege: sibi quisque se vindicet.

[‘We are under no king: let each man act freely.’]

And he would say this, or rather, write this, and the Church censors would read it, and the magistrates would read it, even the King himself and all his court would read it, and let them, he said, for I have nothing to hide here. And they let it slide. As shall we. And we shall let him also at least know what he does know, that a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. Truth and reason are common to all: they no more belong to the man who first put them into words than to him who last did so. Bees ransack flowers here and flowers there: but then they make their own honey, which is entirely theirs and no longer thyme or marjoram. Similarly, the boy, his secretary, will transform his borrowings; he will confound their forms so that the result is entirely his: namely, his judgment, the forming of which is the only aim of his toil, his study, and his education.

4.

His men got him on his feet, and he threw up a bucketful of pure clotted blood, and did so again and again several times on the way back to the house. He could see his torn doublet covered with blood. I have been shot, he thought, shot in the head by a harquebus; for he had seen and heard several fired around him.

Life barely clung to his lips. If he closed his eyes again, he could push it out. Languish pleasantly on the edge of death, and on the soul’s surface slide into sleep, and let himself go.

The feebleness of his reasoning powers kept him from judging anything, and that of his body from feeling anything. And as he neared his home, to which news of his fall had already run quickly, he had no idea where he was coming from, nor where he was going, nor what was being asked of him. He saw his house, but he did not recognize it. When they got him into bed, he experienced a feeling of infinite rest and comfort, for he had been dreadfully pulled about by those poor men who had carried him in their arms over a long and very poor road and who, one after another, had tired themselves out two or three times.

5.

Salted fish stink.

His daughter will survive, the only one of six to make it beyond infancy.

Now what?

Books.

He gets the men to line the tower walls with shelves.

Now what?

He writes two sentences in Latin and finds them pleasing. He calls for more paper. While he waits, he struggles out of the chair. All his limbs were bruised and battered by the fall; and after it, two or three nights later, just two days back from now, he fell so ill that he nearly died a second time, but of a livelier death, and he can still feel the effects of that battering. He dips a pen in ink and limps towards the entrance. His head spins. He sits, calls again for his secretary, and some paint, and a brush.

The boy paints his words on the wall in Latin, the last Latin he will use, everything else from now on will be in the vulgar tongue.

In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the eve of the first day of March, the anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, long since wearied of the servitude of court life and public office, and still in full strength, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in rest and security he would spend the days remaining to him. May destiny allow him to perfect this dwelling, these gentle retreats of his ancestors, which he has consecrated to his freedom, his tranquility, and his leisure.

It looks like shit. Later, he’ll hire someone to redo it, a local artist, a mapmaker probably, and to add a device, carved into the wood, of poised scales with the words Que sgay-je? — What do I know?

The scales of Justice. The evidence weighed, the arguments made. But the scales are balanced. Everything is in doubt. The judge cannot judge. This is why he quit the court.

Carved beneath the scales, the Greek work epokhe: “I abstain, I hold back, I suspend judgment.”

6.

“I don't teach. I tell.”

The left leg of Queen Anne of Brittany was much shorter than her right. The court found her limp uncommonly seductive. Women seeking gallant attention adopted it. This inspired him to write:

“It is said as a common proverb in Italy that he who has not lain with a lame woman does not know Venus in her sweet perfection. Chance, or some particular incident, long ago put that saying on the lips of the common people. It is applied to both males and females, for the Queen of the Amazons retorted to the Scythian who solicited her: ‘The lame man does it best.’ In that Republic of women, to avoid the dominance of the male, they crippled their boys in childhood — arms, legs, and other parts that give men the advantage over women — and exploited men only for such uses as we put women to in our part of the world. Now I would have said that it was the erratic movements of the lame woman that brought some new sensation to the job and some stab of pleasure to those who assayed it: but I have just learned that ancient philosophy itself has decided the matter: it says that the legs and the thighs of lame women cannot receive (being imperfect) the nourishment which is their due, with the result that the genital organs which are sited above them become more developed, better fed, and more vigorous. Alternatively, since this defect discourages exercise, those who are marked by it dissipate their strength less and so come more whole to Venus’ sports, which is also why the Greeks disparaged women who worked at the loom, saying they were lustier than others because of their sedentary occupation, which is without much physical exertion.”

Penelope worked at the loom. All day long, to hold off her suitors. At night, she unraveled.

7.

“The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment, and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation? We are not afraid to utter the words kill, thieve, or betray; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth. Does that mean that the less we breathe a word about sex the more right we must allow it to fill our thoughts?”

Nil sciri quisquis putcit, id quoque nescit 
An scire possit quo se nil scire fatetur.

[‘Any man who thinks that ‘nothing can be known’, does not know whether he can know even that thing by which he asserts that he knows nothing.’]

LMFAO. That whole what do I know vibe, not just what do I know and what do I really know but WTF do I know? A verse bagged from Homer? How many yards long the Pantheon is, or of the rich embroidery on Signora Livia’s knickers? Or the entire human condition revealed in every movement, contained in every bruised bone and kidney stone. But this is not true, either, as there are no truths, only moments mistaken for clarity interrupted by misfortunes that for the most part never happened.

“There is a plague on Man: his opinion that he knows something.”

For him, the Ancients were already there, though that there was no longer there, or just barely, but still enough to teach him to suffer what cannot be avoided, to grin through the stones and run back to the books, rummage about for what pleases. The first thing that popped into his head, riffed off whatever fell off the library shelf.

Quoting others to better express himself.

A life of misfortunes, yes, most of which never happened, yes, but he danced when he danced and slept when he slept, and limped along alone in his orchards and among his vines, rubbing his brain against other people’s and every object, and every beast, and every thought, and then returning to the tower to record them, some his, some others, couched in the flimsy medium of words.

That’s all for today, folks. Thanks for reading and supporting. Have a glorious day. See you next week in Brooklyn.