kind of philosophy that would lead to a state of constant disappointment and repentance, for every attempt to stretch beyond the physical and biological parameters of the human species is doomed to fail.
Rather than setting himself up for failure or regretting his insufficiencies, Montaigne is interested in a philosophy that will make his life more able to be lived. To read Montaigne’s Essays is to meet somebody who has achieved ease with his own self, who can nonchalantly dismiss a precept with a shrug and relax within his own skin. This is not however a thoughtless version of nonchalance, much here depends on tone, for it is as though tone is the almost unconscious physical accompaniment to what is thought.
In his essay ‘On Vanity’ – also in Book III – Montaigne deviates from his central theme to discuss his travels around France. His physical freedom of movement corresponds with his mental mobility and provides in this passage a model or template of a particularly sane kind of non-linear progress that is itself explicitly against preset templates. Montaigne’s Essays offer a model of healthy thinking, even while existing as they do in defiant opposition to the possibility of universally applicable templates for living:
I, who most often travel for my own pleasure, am not all that bad a guide. If it looks nasty to the left I turn off to the right; if I find myself unfit to mount the saddle, I stop where I am. By acting thus I really do see nothing which is not as pleasant and agreeable to me as my home. It is true that I always do find superfluity superfluous and that I am embarrassed by delicacy, even, and by profusion. Have I overlooked anything which I ought to have seen back there? Then I go back to it: it is still on my road. I follow no predetermined route, neither straight nor crooked.16
Montaigne is not constrained by straight lines or preset routes; if there is danger ahead, he simply turns off in a different direction. There is no obligation to follow a certain path, he is guided by an internal compass which serves him. There is no need to endure and maintain a damaging straight route. The flexibility required to change direction is something to be nurtured.
Montaigne has no difficulty in looping back to repeat or remake his path, hence his revisions of the Essays. He goes back again and again to build up layers of experience just as in the Essays he loops back into earlier attempts at writing to consider again something he may have overlooked at first or not explored to its full depth. But importantly, he also gives himself the time to move away from certain places – often for many years – before returning again to add new layers of thought. As he declared in the essay ‘On Vanity’, ‘I make additions not corrections.’17 Montaigne’s natural changeability contains within it something subtly constant and is all the more constant for not being under fixed mental control.
The additions made to the essay ‘On Friendship’ – Montaigne’s ode to Etienne de La Boétie in Book I – show this process in action. In the Bordeaux copy of the Essays, which Montaigne was working on up until his death, he returned to one passage in the twenty-eighth essay of Book I and added the following words in italics to the original text:
In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found. If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: ‘Because it was him: because it was me.’ Mediating this union there was, beyond all my reasoning, beyond all that I can say specifically about it some inexplicable force of destiny.18
It was at least eight years after the publication of the first edition of the Essays and over twenty-five years after La Boétie’s death that Montaigne was able to complete his sentence and answer the question of ‘Why I loved him’. Saul Frampton goes further in his examination of Montaigne’s final manuscript when he notes that ‘each part of the addition [was] written in a different pen’.19 Frampton breaks down what at first appears to be one addition into its three component parts. From the initial full stop after ‘I feel that it cannot be expressed’ Montaigne first of all makes an opening for himself, deleting the full stop and reigniting the thought by inserting ‘except’. He writes ‘except by replying’ in one colour ink, ‘because it was him’ in another and ‘because it was me’ in a third shade, indicating that each small segment was written at a different time as the thought continued to germinate mid-articulation. The bursts of clarity within these short sentences are the closest that Montaigne gets to some kind of end point or realisation, but the process of revision that he follows in writing, namely his constant looping back into the text, mean that these moments of crystallisation are scattered throughout the Essays. The clarity, when it surfaces, is not an answer to the question of ‘Why I loved him’, but an acceptance of the felt unknowable that existed between the two friends, as the two words, ‘specifically’ and ‘inexplicable’ themselves add.
An important feature of Montaigne’s sanity is his capacity and willingness to go backwards and to think again by making additions to old thoughts. In order to do this he needs a language which will allow him to return to, re-open and re-energise old thoughts. In ‘On Repentance’ he writes about the value of the specific terms which allow him to do this important work of revision:
You make me hate things probable when you thrust them on me as things infallible. I love terms which soften and tone down the rashness of what we put forward, terms such as ‘perhaps’, ‘somewhat’, ‘some’, ‘they say’, ‘I think’ and so on. And if I had had any sons to bring up I would have trained their lips to answer with inquiring and undecided expressions such as, ‘What does this mean?’, ‘I do not understand that’, ‘It might be so’, ‘Is that true?’ so that they would have been more likely to retain the manners of an apprentice at sixty than, as boys do, to act as learned doctors at ten.20
Montaigne avoids the false language of certainty by using a set of terms that instead introduces a helpful uncertainty and flexibility into his thought process. These words are a set of tools for developing a healthier way of thinking, ‘softening’ rigid straight lines, ‘toning down’ black-and-white absolutism and instead creating space for contradiction, compromise and indecision in the very midst of the route. This is a vocabulary for changing the way of thinking that must be learned and practised. Having a syntactic language enabling the expression of doubt or contradiction – not a set of nouns but a series of functional route-seeking adverbs and conjunctions – makes it possible to have doubts and to be contradictory. Without a linguistic mechanism to help call forward these layers of feeling from the unconscious or implicit mind, it is impossible for them to exist in the conscious world. Montaigne was engaged in a lifelong apprenticeship, and part of the sanity of the Essays is due to the fact that he never stopped being willing to rethink and rework his ideas and thus he never reached – or even tried to reach – a conclusion. That is his creative and buoyant scepticism.
Montaigne’s Model of Self-Help
The programme of exercises typically contained within self-help books lead readers – theoretically – in a straight line from sickness to health. The imperative, instructive tone that they adopt establishes a sense of the counsellor–patient dynamic within the mind of the solitary reader and helps to impose a particular therapeutic framework. Warren Boutcher writes in The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe that the Essays have ‘recently been re-discovered as a kind of self-help book that is relevant to our time’.21 Yet, in his Essays Montaigne refuses to be explicitly instructive or to comply with any kind of permanently set framework. His tone is instead wryly comical, and it is this humour
