Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Discussing Yourself)

“By publishing and indicting my imperfections I may teach someone to fear them. The parts that I most esteem in myself derive more honor from self-accusation than from self-commendation. That is why I so often return to self-accusation and linger over it. Yet, when all is said and done, you never talk about yourself without loss. Self-accusations are always believed, self-praise never is.” —French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Essays, Book 3, Chapter 8, “The Art of Discussion,” translated by New Zealand-born philosopher and historian Jonathan Bennett (1930–2024)

Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Humor)

“Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.”— French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Democritus and Heraclitus,” in The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, edited by William Hazlitt, translated by Donald Frame (Everyman Library, 2003)

Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Needing a Good Memory Before Lying)

“It is not without good reason said ‘that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.’ I know very well that the grammarians distinguish betwixt an untruth and a lie, and say that to tell an untruth is to tell a thing that is false, but that we ourselves believe to be true; and that the definition of the word to lie in Latin, from which our French is taken, is to tell a thing which we know in our conscience to be untrue; and it is of this last sort of liars only that I now speak. Now, these do either wholly contrive and invent the untruths they utter, or so alter and disguise a true story that it ends in a lie. When they disguise and often alter the same story, according to their own fancy, ’tis very hard for them, at one time or another, to escape being trapped, by reason that the real truth of the thing, having first taken possession of the memory, and being there lodged impressed by the medium of knowledge and science, it will be difficult that it should not represent itself to the imagination, and shoulder out falsehood, which cannot there have so sure and settled footing as the other; and the circumstances of the first true knowledge evermore running in their minds, will be apt to make them forget those that are illegitimate, and only, forged by their own fancy. In what they, wholly invent, forasmuch as there is no contrary impression to jostle their invention there seems to be less danger of tripping; and yet even this by reason it is a vain body and without any hold, is very apt to escape the memory, if it be not well assured.”—French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Lying,” in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton and edited by William Carew Hazlitt (1877)

Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Occupations and Leisure)

“Now the end I think is always the same: how to live in leisure at our ease. But people do not always seek the way properly. Often they think they have left their occupations behind when they have merely changed them. There is hardly less torment in running a family than in running a whole country. Whenever our soul finds something to do she is there in her entirety: domestic tasks may be less important but they are no less importunate. Anyway, by ridding ourselves of Court and market-place we do not rid ourselves of the principal torments of our life.”—French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), The Complete Essays, edited by M.A. Screech (1987)

Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on His Books)

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”—French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), from The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne, translated and edited by Marvin Lowenthal (1999)

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you happy except when you have a book in your hands,” the perceptive nun who served as principal of my elementary school once told me. Had Michel de Montaigne—born on this date in 1533—been around, I imagine, he might have reassured her that it would all work out for me in the end.

Any blogger—indeed, any writer in the genre known as the personal or “familiar” essay—owes a debt of gratitude to this 16^th century provincial Frenchman. No subject was beyond his ken—especially himself. Countless writers, fearing embarrassment resulting from their own excessive candor, have gathered their courage anew by seeing how much Montaigne dared to disclose about himself.

But books—roughly 1,000 in his library, a considerable number for that time—were the well from which he sustained himself. If you read his essays, just with an eye for their literary allusions, you could compile a curriculum for yourself in the Greek and Roman classics. In fact, he quotes these writers so liberally that you would be well launched toward understanding the substance of these soaring minds of antiquity. 

Great literature helped him realize that self-knowledge was tentative. That is how he came to view the genre he pioneered. (Essai is French for “trial” or “attempt.”)

Quote of the Day (Montaigne, on the Limits of His Opinions)

“I speak my mind freely on all things, even on those which perhaps exceed my capacity and which I by no means hold to be within my jurisdiction. And so the opinion I give of them is to declare the measure of my sight, not the value of things.”—Michel de Montaigne, “Of Books,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame (1958)

What a startling admission that Michel de Montaigne, born in this date in 1533, is making here. Look, people, he is saying, sometimes I talk through my hat. Keep that in mind the next time you hear me spout off.

Obviously, this loose kind of talk would never do on certain cable news shows, whether of the right or the left, where, if you are mistaken—even if you have not the slightest shred of authority to make a claim—the trick is to yell louder. In other words, it’s worse to be quietly right than loudly wrong. (If you say loud and obnoxious things often enough, people will lose count and eventually stop caring, anyway.)

No, Montaigne would never rake in the bucks in today’s media environment. But the principle of the uncertain self that he’s confessing here created an earthquake in philosophy and, even centuries later, psychology and science (the "measure of my sight" sounds like an early portent of relativity). That same principle underlay his creation of the essay genre. Maybe by writing it all down—puzzling it out—he could begin to solidify that uncertainty.

If you want a guide to the life of Montaigne—and a good-humored explanation of why he matters—you can start with Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. (French writers, I notice, inspire special kinds of such devotion. Another book along the same lines is How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton.)        

Better yet, take one of his books down from the shelves and start reading at random. In his chapter on the great late-Renaissance Frenchman in Representative Men, Ralph Waldo Emerson labeled him “The Skeptic.” I prefer “The Charmer.” Anyone who freely owns up to the fact that he’s not always right—and tells you why—is liable to be much easier company than someone speaking at the highest decibel level while getting into your face.          

Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Himself, ‘The Matter of My Book’)

“I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed. Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.

“Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.”—Michel de Montaigne, “To the Reader,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame (1958)

If you want to know whom to credit (or blame!) for the blog you are reading, look past the most obvious suspect—moi!—to a French nobleman, government official, and winegrower of the late Renaissance: Michel de Montaigne, who died on this date in 1592 at age 59. Not just every blogger, but every essayist of the last four centuries stands in his giant shadow.

George Orwell, before becoming famous as the author of Animal Farm and 1984, wrote a weekly column called “I Write As I Please.” That declarative title could also stand as the heart of Montaigne’s writing. It is, first, personal and individual: I write as I please.

But it is also the mark of Montaigne’s discursive intelligence: I write as I please, where my interests and impulses take me. Whatever strikes his fancy will be what he discusses: lying, cruelty, sleep, names, friends—whatever.

Montaigne called his particular art form essais, the French word for “attempts.” The word speaks to the limits of the knowable—and, in the history of philosophy, the writer has become a kind of forerunner, not just of the Enlightenment but also of our own age, where Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle holds sway.

At the same time, the genre that Montaigne created singlehandedly, the essay, takes on a form of solidity simply by sifting through experience and taking on the mold of the author’s sensibility. By putting down on paper one’s own thoughts, the essayist, in effect, declares a position, finds a place to stand. Suddenly, the ground no longer moves so convulsively beneath one’s feet.

But we can’t simply leave off describing the difference that Montaigne made to literature and the life of the mind at that. Nobody like him had really written these kinds of personal ruminations before—they had previously been life histories written for didactic purposes by members of the Church (the lives of the saints) and State (the autobiographies of monarchs and generals). But, instead of being a Caesar expounding on his Gallic Wars, Montaigne was armed only with his own formidable library (his pieces can, at a far different level from how they were originally intended, be read simply as a guide to the ancient Greek and Roman classics) and an incisive, questioning intelligence.

Montaigne had known the worlds of war, law and politics intimately in his first four decades, but the 107 essays he produced in his “retirement” to the family estate in his last two decades come from a private citizen. In moving personal meditations out of the realm of official figures, the nobleman inadvertently advanced the democratization of literature.

Earlier today, I bought one of the more unlikely bestsellers of recent years, a full-blown, affectionate consideration of the life and work of Montaigne called How to Live, by Sarah Bakewell. I’m looking forward to this rather unconventional biography, but I doubt, for all the value I’ve discovered even in a short perusal so far, if I’ll discover the same sense of surprised (re)discovery that I did in returning to Montaigne’s essays, nearly 35 years after I was first exposed to them in college. That voice continues to resound even now across the centuries, as if he were our contemporary.