Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation! Every Friday at Noon EST (Register here), Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for Reading & the Good Life (a space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living).
***This Friday, we wrap up a brief exploration we’re calling The Wisdom of Montaigne with selected passages of Montaigne: A Very Short Introduction. Check out the bookshelf below for upcoming (and previous) reading!
Who is Montaigne?
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) described his philosophy this way, “My art and profession is to live.” He believed there is no knowledge so hard to acquire as knowing how to live this life well and naturally. Today, Montaigne is best known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre and describing his goal in The Essays to describe himself with utter frankness and honesty.
William M. Hamlin writes in Montaigne: A Very Short Introduction,
Near the end of the Essays, Montaigne alleges that “there are more books about books than about any other subject; we do nothing but write glosses about each other.” The likely truth of this complaint puts me in a rather awkward position, since as the author of a book on Montaigne I have no choice but to plead guilty to his charge. I will say nonetheless that there is no work I would prefer writing about than the Essays, and I feel fortunate to have been able to spend the past few years doing so—not least because my ongoing inclination to read and contemplate Montaigne suddenly coincided with a professional commitment to do precisely that.
Some of our longtime readers may remember the five-part Mondays with Montaigne series we did a few months back.
Selected Passages
Doubt, indeed, is a crucial element in Montaigne’s educational outlook, and he never strays far from his view that acknowledging uncertainty is one of the surest signs of superior judgment. “Many abuses are engendered in the world,” he insists, “by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance and our being bound to accept everything that we cannot refute”
“If I had had to train children,” says Montaigne, “I would have filled their mouths with this way of answering, inquiring, not decisive—‘What does that mean?’ ‘I do not understand it.’ ‘That might be.’ ‘Is it true?’—so that they would be more likely to have kept the manner of learners at sixty than to represent learned doctors at ten.”
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“We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place”
“Let us make our contentment depend on ourselves; let us cut loose from all the ties that bind us to others; let us win from ourselves the power to live really alone and to live that way at our ease.”
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Just as doubt, for Montaigne, is inseparable from effective, responsible thinking, a steady consideration of death forms part of any life worth living. Montaigne is surprisingly optimistic in his earlier essays about the liberatory effects of inspecting and accepting mortality; later, less confident that we can detach ourselves from the constraints of earthly existence, he remains adamant that death is inextricably bound up with life—indeed that we rub shoulders with death every day.
If you are available on a Friday (at Noon EST), feel free to drop into one of our Reading & the Good Life meetups (Register here). It’s a highly casual space for connection and conversations on the art of living.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
P.S. As always, feel free to comment, ask questions, or suggest future reads!