How to Live by S. Bakewell notes

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tricks Little tricks and

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He weathered the disorder, oversaw his estate, assessed court cases as a magistrate, and administered Bordeaux as the most easygoing mayor in its history. All the time, he wrote exploratory, free-floating pieces to which he gave simple titles:

We can live steady, satisfying lives

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This is not the same as the ethical question, “How should one live?” Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. He wanted to know how to live a good life—meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one. This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present. He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself.

Use writing to watch life, yours and others

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A down-to-earth question, “How to live?” splintered into a myriad other pragmatic questions. Like everyone else, Montaigne ran up against the major perplexities of existence: how to cope with the fear of death, how to get over losing a child or a beloved friend, how to reconcile yourself to failures, how to make the most of every moment so that life does not drain away unappreciated.

We all face basic questions and Viorst's "Necessary Losses"

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But there were smaller puzzles, too. How do you avoid getting drawn into a pointless argument with your wife, or a servant? How can you reassure a friend who thinks a witch has cast a spell on him? How do you cheer up a weeping neighbor? How do you guard your home? What is the best strategy if you are held up by armed robbers who seem to be uncertain whether to kill you or hold you to ransom? If you overhear your daughter’s governess teaching her something you think is wrong, is it wise to intervene? How do you deal with a bully? What do you say to your dog when he wants to go out and play, while you want to stay at your desk writing your book?

Then, there are the momentary issues

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He tells us, for no particular reason, that the only fruit he likes is melon, that he prefers to have sex lying down rather than standing up, that he cannot sing, and that he loves vivacious company and often gets carried away by the spark of repartee. But he also describes sensations that are harder to capture in words, or even to be aware of: what it feels like to be lazy, or courageous, or indecisive; or to indulge a moment of vanity, or to try to shake off an obsessive fear. He even writes about the sheer feeling of being alive.

Sounds like me

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He can say surprising things: a lot has changed since Montaigne was born, almost half a millennium ago, and neither manners nor beliefs are always still recognizable. Yet to read Montaigne is to experience a series of shocks of familiarity, which make the centuries between him and the twenty-first-century reader collapse to nothing.

We now are not so different

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Amid the festivities, he was thinking about some frightening true tale he had recently heard—perhaps one about a young man who, having left a similar feast a few days earlier complaining of a touch of mild fever, had died of that fever almost before his fellow party-goers had got over their hangovers. If death could play such tricks, then only the flimsiest membrane separated Montaigne himself from the void at every moment. He became so afraid of losing his life that he could no longer enjoy it while he had it.

Sometimes it is hard to enjoy life while you still can

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In his twenties, Montaigne suffered this morbid obsession because he had spent too much time reading classical philosophers. Death was a topic of which the ancients never tired.

Don't read those ancients too much

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In dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there. You die in the same way that you fall asleep: by drifting away.

Sarah Bakewell reads Montaigne to us

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One might expect pleasure in a death like that of Marcellinus. But Montaigne had learned something

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And it now seemed to him that the only people who regularly died as bravely as philosophers should were those who knew no philosophy at all: the uneducated peasants in his local estates and villages.

Is philosophy a help?

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If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.

Many others have tweeted this, too

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But life is more difficult than death; instead of passive surrender, it takes attention and management. It can also be more painful. Montaigne’s pleasurable drift on the currents of oblivion did not last. When he revived fully, after two or three hours, it was to find himself assailed with aches, his limbs “battered and bruised.” He suffered for several nights afterwards, and there were longer-term consequences. “I still feel the effect of the shock of that collision,” he wrote, at least three years later.

Life is more of a challenge than death.

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Pyrrhonian Skepticism was almost impossible to fight. Any attempt to quarrel with it only strengthened its claim that everything was open to dispute, while if you remained neutral this confirmed the view that it was good to suspend judgment.

want to talk ?

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Yet few of us find it possible to maintain such thoughts for long. We get distracted; the mind drifts back to concrete and personal matters. Pascal found this infuriating: “What does the world think about? Never about that! But about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring …”

we are not that pure and it's a good thing

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Montaigne liked asking big questions too, but he preferred to explore life through his reading, the animals in his household, incidents he had witnessed on his travels, or a neighbor’s problems with his children.

look around you for evidence

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This comfortable acceptance of life as it is, and of one’s own self as it is, drove Pascal to a greater fury than Pyrrhonian Skepticism itself.

Other people can be irritating

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Montaigne seems, in general, to have been attractive to women. At least some of the appeal must have been physical: he makes ironic remarks about women who claim to love men only for their minds.

I love your mind

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It is depressing to be rejected, he said, but even worse to be accepted out of pity. And he hated to be troublesome to someone who did not want him.

But you are a dear

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“Sometimes they go to it with only one buttock.”

Don't be half-assed

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He does not mention Françoise often in the Essays; when he does, he makes her sound like Antoinette, only louder.

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“Wives always have a proclivity for disagreeing with their husbands,” he wrote. “They seize with both hands every pretext to go contrary to them.”

Wow! Back then, too

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France did have a feminist movement in the sixteenth century. It formed one side of the “querelle des femmes,” a fashionable quarrel among intellectual men who formulated arguments for and against women: were they, in general, a good thing?

Yeah, are they?

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He did write, “Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them.” And he believed that, by nature, “males and females are cast in the same mold.”

No rules without representation

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He loves to mingle. Conversation is something he enjoys more than any other pleasure. He depends on it so much that he would

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I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself. We become habituated to anything strange by use and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself.

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Other stories show, just as clearly, the dangers of submission. Montaigne vividly remembered the case of Tristan

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To a striking extent, modern critics seem to remix and remake a Montaigne who resembles themselves, who would guess?