The ubiquity of suffering heightened Montaigne’s attentiveness to the complexity of human experience.
Here and elsewhere, Montaigne’s musings on mortality, his gripes about illness and aging, his love-hate relationship with the natural order, not to mention his fervent epistemological stocktaking, make for a stubborn blueprint for life in the red zone, an operative action plan for how to wring futility’s neck. They achieve that mimetic, nearly miraculous work of performing the very action they describe. Propelled by verbs- perceive, arrest, grasp, make, try, try-the sentences wheel and wrestle across the page, resisting stasis at every turn, refusing to wait around. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it. Especially at this moment, when I perceive that mine is so brief in time, I try to increase it in weight I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it, and to compensate for the haste of its ebb by my vigor in using it. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it. Take, for instance, the following passage, as translated by Donald Frame in The Complete Essays of Montaigne: Given the subject matter, “Of Experience” has about it a remarkably buoyant magnitude. Because life as we’ve known it is on hold at the moment, because sickness and confusion are everywhere, and because one of the things books are good for is reminding us that we aren’t alone in history or consciousness, reading “Of Experience” right now feels like an analogue to experience not a cold study of a distant artist’s late style so much as wisdom lit for wary souls unresigned, as of yet, to world-weariness. “Of Experience” is about how to live when life itself comes under attack. Part evolving treatise, part prismatic self-portrait, the essai, in Montaigne’s conception, was the antidote to self-isolation, a recurring conference in the midst of quarantine, perhaps even a kind of textual necromancy-his best friend and intellectual sparring partner, the poet Étienne de La Boétie, had died of plague in 1563. From a tower on his family’s estate in southwestern France, he’d innovated a leisurely yet commodious literary mode that mirrored-while also helping to manufacture-the unpredictable movements of his racing mind. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.īy the time Michel de Montaigne wrote “Of Experience,” the last entry in his third and final book of essays, the French statesman and author had weathered numerous outbreaks of plague (in 1585, while he was mayor of Bordeaux, a third of the population perished), political uprisings, the death of five daughters, and an onslaught of physical ailments, from rotting teeth to debilitating kidney stones.Īll the while, Montaigne was writing.
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