My recent reading consisted of Cervantes' Don Quixote at bedtime and Montaigne's Essays whenever else I had the time.
The similarities between the two books are not lost on Sarah Bakewell, whose own How to Live, or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer came out last year. Written just twenty years apart, the Essays and Don Quixote strike today’s reader as remarkably modern, even if, as I did, he chooses to read them in “period” translations (Cotton (1685-86) for Montaigne and Jarvis (1742) for Cervantes).
While Cervantes has generally always been well received by the critics, Montaigne's standing has gone up and down like a yoyo, not helped by his magnum opus being proscribed in France for more than 150 years for perceived anti-Catholicism.
Montaigne had the misfortune to live through a very turbulent period in France's history, with a succession of sectarian civil wars enervating the country in the second half of the sixteenth century. Although a Catholic himself, his humanism and tolerance were of a type that made him an easy target, especially after his death in 1592, for religious fanatics who set more store by the words of wheeler-dealers in Rome than a humble carpenter from Galilee.
Besides pretty much inventing the essay form, Montaigne also trademarked the trick of giving your piece a title which is totally unrelated to the subject under discussion. This trait was picked up on by contemporary commentators, and acknowledged by the man himself in his essays, with the excuse that if readers looked hard enough they would eventually find a bit that fit the bill.
Some of my personal favourites are "Of cripples" (if I remember right, his hypothesis was that they made great lovers because they could put all their energies into it), "On presumption" and "Of pedantry", but there's also one on cannibals and another on educating children, so there's something for everyone. As he wrote in "Upon some verses of Virgil", "every subject is equally fertile to me: a fly will serve the purpose".
His keen observation of the human condition is evident in the same essay, as he reflects on a fundamental aspect of human psychology, that "we ask most when we bring least":
"I very well understand that love is a commodity hard to recover: by weakness and long experience our taste is become more delicate and nice; we ask most when we bring least, and are harder to choose when we least deserve to be accepted; and knowing ourselves for what we are, we are less confident and more distrustful; nothing can assure us of being beloved, considering our condition and theirs."
And while "he disrelished all dominion", or violent coercion, he understood the need for moderation in all things, including toleration, as he mused on the fate of Messalina, wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, who finally flipped his lid after constant taunting over his wife’s open displays of infidelity:
"... the first difficulty she met with was also the last: this beast suddenly roused; these sleepy, sluggish sort of men are often the most dangerous: I have found by experience that this extreme toleration, when it comes to dissolve, produces the most severe revenge; for taking fire on a sudden, anger and fury being combined in one, discharge their utmost force at the first onset he put her to death, and with her a great number of those with whom she had intelligence, and even one of them who could not help it, and whom she had caused to be forced to her bed with scourges."
Voltaire's epitaph for his countryman says it all: "Montaigne – the least methodical but wisest of philosophers".
The similarities between the two books are not lost on Sarah Bakewell, whose own How to Live, or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer came out last year. Written just twenty years apart, the Essays and Don Quixote strike today’s reader as remarkably modern, even if, as I did, he chooses to read them in “period” translations (Cotton (1685-86) for Montaigne and Jarvis (1742) for Cervantes).
While Cervantes has generally always been well received by the critics, Montaigne's standing has gone up and down like a yoyo, not helped by his magnum opus being proscribed in France for more than 150 years for perceived anti-Catholicism.
Montaigne had the misfortune to live through a very turbulent period in France's history, with a succession of sectarian civil wars enervating the country in the second half of the sixteenth century. Although a Catholic himself, his humanism and tolerance were of a type that made him an easy target, especially after his death in 1592, for religious fanatics who set more store by the words of wheeler-dealers in Rome than a humble carpenter from Galilee.
Besides pretty much inventing the essay form, Montaigne also trademarked the trick of giving your piece a title which is totally unrelated to the subject under discussion. This trait was picked up on by contemporary commentators, and acknowledged by the man himself in his essays, with the excuse that if readers looked hard enough they would eventually find a bit that fit the bill.
Some of my personal favourites are "Of cripples" (if I remember right, his hypothesis was that they made great lovers because they could put all their energies into it), "On presumption" and "Of pedantry", but there's also one on cannibals and another on educating children, so there's something for everyone. As he wrote in "Upon some verses of Virgil", "every subject is equally fertile to me: a fly will serve the purpose".
His keen observation of the human condition is evident in the same essay, as he reflects on a fundamental aspect of human psychology, that "we ask most when we bring least":
"I very well understand that love is a commodity hard to recover: by weakness and long experience our taste is become more delicate and nice; we ask most when we bring least, and are harder to choose when we least deserve to be accepted; and knowing ourselves for what we are, we are less confident and more distrustful; nothing can assure us of being beloved, considering our condition and theirs."
And while "he disrelished all dominion", or violent coercion, he understood the need for moderation in all things, including toleration, as he mused on the fate of Messalina, wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, who finally flipped his lid after constant taunting over his wife’s open displays of infidelity:
"... the first difficulty she met with was also the last: this beast suddenly roused; these sleepy, sluggish sort of men are often the most dangerous: I have found by experience that this extreme toleration, when it comes to dissolve, produces the most severe revenge; for taking fire on a sudden, anger and fury being combined in one, discharge their utmost force at the first onset he put her to death, and with her a great number of those with whom she had intelligence, and even one of them who could not help it, and whom she had caused to be forced to her bed with scourges."
Voltaire's epitaph for his countryman says it all: "Montaigne – the least methodical but wisest of philosophers".
2 comments:
worth reading? I bumped into it in the university bookshop yesterday and wondered if I should get it?
Well, it's long and meandering ... and has had people all round the world for the last four centuries saying, "He could be writing about me!"
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