IV

Consolation for Inadequacy

1.

After centuries of neglect, at times hostility, after being scattered

and burnt and surviving only in partial forms in the vaults and

libraries of monasteries, the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome

returned triumphantly to favour in the sixteenth century. Among

the intellectual elites of Europe, a consensus emerged that the

finest thinking the world had yet known had occurred in the minds

of a handful of geniuses in the city states of Greece and the Italian

peninsula between the construction of the Parthenon and the sack

of Rome - and that there was no greater imperative for the edu-

cated than to familiarize themselves with the richness cf these

works. Major new editions were prepared of among others Plato,

Lucretius, Seneca, Aristotle, Catullus, Longinus and Cicero, and

selections from the classics - Erasmus's Apophthegm-ata and Adages,

Stobeus's Sententiae, Antonio de Guevara's Golden Epistles and

Petrus Crinitus^s Honorable Learning - spread into libraries across

Europe.

In south-western France, on the summit of a wooded hill 30 miles

east of Bordeaux, sat a handsome castle made of yellow stone with

dark-red roofs.

It was Home to a middle-aged nobleman, his wife Francoise,

his daughter Leonor, their staff and their animals (chickens, goats,

dogs and horses). Michel de Montaigne's grandfather had bought

the property in 1477 from the proceeds of the family salt-fish busi-

ness, his father had added some wings and extended the land under

cultivation, and the son had been looking after it since the age of

thirty-five, though he had little interest in household management

and knew almost nothing about farming (I can scarcely tell my

cabbages from my lettuces').

He preferred to pass his time in a circular library on the third

floor of a tower at one comer of the castle: 'I spend most days of

my life there, and most hours of each day.'

The library had three windows (with what Montaigne described as

'splendid and unhampered views'), a desk, a chair and, arranged

on five tiers of shelves in a semicircle, about a thousand volumes

of philosophy, history, poetry and religion. It was here that

Montaigne read Socrates' ('the wisest man that ever was') steadfast

address to the impatient jurors of Athens in a Latin edition of Plato

translated by Marsilio Ficino; here that he read Epicurus's vision of

Happiness in Diogenes Laerrius's Lives and Lucretius's De Reru-m

Nature edited by Denys Lambin in 1563; and here that he read and

re-read Seneca (an author 'strikingly suited to my humour') in a

new set of his works printed in Basle in 1557.

He had been initiated in the classics at an early age. He had been

taught Latin as a first language. By seven or eight, he had read

Ovid's Metamorphoses. Before he was sixteen, he had bought a set of

Virgil and knew intimately the Aencid, as well as Terence, Plautus

and the Commentaries of Caesar. And such was his devotion to

books that, after working as a counsellor in the Parlement of

Bordeaux for thirteen years, he retired with the idea of devoting

himself entirely to them. Reading was the solace of his life:

It consoles me in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of

distressing idleness and, at any time. can rid me of boring company-

It blunts the stabs of pain whenever pain is not too overpowering

and extreme. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need

to have recourse to books.

But the library shelves, with their implication of an unbounded

admiration for the life of the mind, did not tell the full story. One

had to look more closely around the library, stand in the middle

of the room and tilt onc's-head to the ceiling; in the mid-1570s

Montaigne had a set of fifty-seven short inscriptions culled from the

Bible and the classics painted across the wooden beams, and these

suggested some profound reservations about the benefits of having

a mind:

The happiest life is to be without thought. — Sophocles

Have you seen a man who thinks he is wise? You have more to

hope for from a madman than from him. - Proverbs

There is nothing certain but uncertainly, nothing more miserable

and more proud than man. - Pliny

Everything is too complicated for men to be able to understand. -

Ecclesiastes

Ancient philosophers had believed that our powers of reason could

afford us a Happiness, and greatness denied to other creatures.

Reason allowed us to control our passions and to correct the false

notions prompted by our instincts. Reason tempered the wild

demands of our bodies and led us to a balanced relationship with

our appetites for food and sex. Reason was a sophisticated, almost

divine, tool offering us mastery over the world and ourselves.

In the Tusculan Disputations, of which there was a copy in the round

library, Cicero had heaped praise upon the benefits of intellectual

work:

There is no occupation so sweet as scholarship; scholarship is the

means of making known to us, while still in this world, the infinity

of matter, the immense grandeur of Nature, the heavens, the lands

and the seas. Scholarship has taught us picry. moderation, greatness

of heart; it snatches our souls from darkness and shows them all

things, the high and the low, the first, the last and everything in

between; scholarship furnishes us with the means of living well and

happily; it teaches us how to spend our lives without discontent and

without vexation.

Though he owned a thousand books and had benefited from a fine

classical education, this laudation so infuriated Montaigne, it ran so

contrary to the spirit of the library beams, that he expressed his

indignation with uncharacteristic ferocity:

Man is a wretched creature .. . just listen to hm; bragging ... Is this

fellow describing the properties of almighty an-i everlasting God! In

practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more

gentle, more equable and more constant lives than [Cicero].

The Roman philosopher had overlooked how violently unhappy

most scholars were; he had arrogantly disregarded the appalling

troubles for which human beings, alone among all other creatures,

had been singled out - troubles which might in dark moments

leave us regretting that we had not been bom ants or tortoises.

Or goats. I found her in the yard of a farm a few kilometres from

Montaigne's chateau, in the hamlet of Les Gauchers.

She had never read the Tusculan Disputations nor Cicero's On

the Laws. And yet she seemed content, nibbling at stray pieces of

lettuce, occasionally shaking her head like an elderly woman

expressing quiet disagreement. It was not an unenviable existence.

Montaigne was himself struck by, and elaborated upon the

advantages of living as an animal rather than as a reasoning human

with a large library. Animals knew instinctively how to help them-

selves when they were sick: goats could pick out dittany from a

thousand other plants if they were wounded, tortoises automati-

cally looked for origanum when they were bitten by vipers, and

storks could give themselves salt-water enemas. By contrast,

humans were forced to rely on expensive, misguided doctors (med-

icine chests were filled with absurd prescriptions: 'the urine of a

lizard, the droppings of an elephant, the liver of a mole, blood

drawn from under the right wing of a white pigeon, and for those

of us with colic paroxysms, triturated rat shit').

Animals also instinctively understood complex ideas without

suffering long periods of study. Tunny-fish were spontaneous

experts in astrology. Wherever they may be when they are sur-

prised by the winter solstice, there they remain until the following

equinox/ reported Montaigne. They understood geometry and

arithmetic, too, for they swam together in groups in the shape of a

perfect cube: 'If you count one line of them you have the count of

the whole school, since the same figure applies to their depth,

breadth and length' Dogs had an innate grasp of dialectical logic.

Montaigne mentioned one who, looking for his master, came upon

a three-pronged fork in the road. He first looked down one road,

then another, and then ran down the third after concluding that his

master must have chosen it:

Here was pure dialectic: the dog made use of disjunctive and

copulative propositions and adequately enumerated the parts. Does

it matter whether he learned all this from himself or from the

Dialectics of George ofTrebizond?

Animals frequently had the upper hand in love as well. Montaigne

read enviously of an elephant who had fallen in love with a flower-

seller in Alexandria. When being led through the market, he knew

how to slip his wrinkled trunk through her neckband and would

massage her breasts with a dexterity no human could match.

And without trying, the humblest farm animal could exceed the

philosophical detachment of the wisest sages of antiquity. The

Greek philosopher Pyrrho once travelled on a ship which ran into

a fierce storm. All around him passengers began to panic, afraid

that the mutinous waves would shatter their fragile craft. But one

passenger did not lose his composure and sat quietly in a comer,

wearing a tranquil expression. He was a pig:

Dare we conclude that the benefit of reason (which we praise so

highly and on account ofw^ich we esteem ourselves to be lords

and masters of all creation) was placed in us for our torment? What

use is knowledge if, for its sake, we lose the calm and repose which

we should enjoy without it and if it makes our condition worse

than thai ofPyrrho's pig?

It was questionable whether the mind gave us anything to be

grateful for:

We have been allotted inconstancy, hesitation, doubt, pain, super-

stition, worries about what will happen (even after we are dead),

ambition, greed, jealousy, envy, unruly, insane and untameable

appetites, war, lies, disloyalty, backbiting and curiosity. We take pride

in our fair, discursive reason and our capacity to judge and to know,

but we have bought them at a price which is strangely excessive.

If offered a choice, Montaigne would in the end perhaps not have

opted- to live as a goat - but only just. Cicero had presented the

benevolent picture of reason. Sixteen centuries later, it was for

Montaigne to introduce the adverse:

To leam that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing, we

must leam a more ample and important lesson: that we are but

blockheads.

- the biggest blockheads of all being philosophers like Cicero who

had never suspected they might even be such things. Misplaced

confidence in reason was the well-spring of idiocy - and, indirectly,

also of inadequacy.

Beneath his painted beams, Montaigne had outlined a new kind of

philosophy, one which acknowledged how far we were from the

rational, serene creatures whom most of the ancient thinkers had

taken us to be. We were for the most part hysterical and demented,

gross and agitated souls beside whom animals were in many

respects paragons of health and virtue - an unfortunate reality

which philosophy was obliged to reflect, but rarely did:

Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom: whoever

writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than

half of it behind.

And yet if we accepted our frailties, and ceased claiming a mastery

we did not have, we stood to find - in Montaigne's generous,

redemptive philosophy - that we were ultimately still adequate in

our own distinctive half-wise, half-blockheadish way.

2

On Sexual Inadequacy

How problematic to have both a body and a mind, for the former

stands in almost monstrous contrast to the latter's dignity and

intelligence. Our bodies smeli, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age.

They force us ro fart and burp, and ro abandon sensible plans in

order to lie in bed with people, sweating and letting out intense

sounds reminiscent of hyenas calling out to one another across

the barren wastes of the American deserts. Our bodies hold our

minds hostage to their whims and rhythms. Our whole perspec-

tive on life can be altered by the digestion ol" a heavy lunch. f!

feel quite a different person before and after a meal,' concurred

Montaigne:

When good health and a fine sunny day smile at me, I am quite

debonair; give me an ingrowing toe-nail, and I am touchy, bad-

tempered and unapproachable.

Even the greatest philosophers have not been spared bodily humil-

iation. 'Imagine Plato struck down by epilepsy or apoplexy/ pro-

posed Montaigne, 'then challenge him to get any help from all

those noble and splendid faculties of his soul/ Or imagine that

in the middle of a symposium, Plaro had been struck by L-I need to

fart:

That sphincter which serves to discharge our stomachs has dilations

and contractions proper to itself, independent of our wishes or even

opposed to them.

Montaigne heard of a man who knew how to fart at will, and on

occasion arranged a sequence of farts in a metrical accompaniment

to poetry, but such mastery did not contravene his general observa-

tion that our bodies have the upper hand over our minds, and that

the sphincter is 'most indiscreet and disorderly'. Montaigne even

heard a tragic case of one behind 'so stormy and churlish that it has

obliged its master to fart forth wind constantly and unremittingly

for forty years and is thus bringing him to his death.'

No wonder we may be tempted to deny our uncomfortable, insult-

ing coexistence with these vessels. Montaigne met a woman who,

acutely aware of how repulsive her digestive organs were, tried to

live as though^she didn't have any:

[This] lady (amongst the greatest) ... shares rhe opinion that

chewing distorts the face, derogating greatly from women's grace

and beauty; so when hungry, she avoids appearing in public. And I