Welcome to The PATH (Monday Meditation): A weekly reflection with insights into daily life. This week’s reflection begins a new series exploring the writing and philosophy of Michel de Montaigne (I’m calling Mondays with Montaigne).
Today’s meditation is intended to provide a brief introduction to the wisdom (and writing) of Michel de Montaigne.
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Mondays with Montaigne
The philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533—1592) described his philosophy this way, “My art and profession is to live.” Not surprisingly, I love his focus on the art of living. Montaigne believed there is no knowledge so hard to acquire as knowing how to live this life well and naturally. Today, he is best known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. Montaigne described his goal in The Essays as to describe himself with utter frankness and honesty.
12 Short Rules for Life — Montaigne
“The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.”
“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books.”
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
“We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.”
“He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.”
“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”
“Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.”
“Saying is one thing, and doing is another.”
“If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.”
“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.”
“Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.”
“Writing does not cause misery; it is born of misery.”
On Learning to Live
Wherever your life ends, observed Montaigne, there all of it ends. The usefulness of living lies not in duration but in what you make of it. “Whether you have lived enough depends not on the count of years but on your will.”
In his Essays, Montaigne wrote,
It is true that, in all things, if Nature does not lend a hand art and industry do not progress very far. I myself am not so much melancholic as an idle dreamer: from the outset, there was no topic I ever concerned myself with more than with the thoughts about death — even in the most unprincipled periods of my life.
Is learning to live and learning to die truly the same?
“We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere.”
— Montaigne
To practice death is a way of practicing freedom, observed Montaigne. Similarly, the Roman statesman Cicero believed that philosophizing is nothing but getting ready to die. “Perhaps it is because all the wisdom and argument in the world… teach us not to be afraid of dying.”
The most significant benefit of realizing life is short could be the increased focus on the present moment. Montaigne stressed,
When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.
Sarah Blakewell writes in How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans, so philosophy must guide your attention repeatedly back to the place where it belongs — here.” Not getting around the fact that life eventually slips through our hands.
Final Thoughts
Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself, stressed Montaigne. His collection of Essays provides a plethora of practical wisdom on various aspects of life — gained through his own rigorous self-observation. As Montaigne observed, “If you fail to grasp life, it will elude you. If you do grasp it, it will elude you anyway.” Therefore, learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection in this way and even to embrace it.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,