Both characters stem from aspects of Montaigne, and both justify Nietzsche’s savage, permanently disturbing apothegm: “That which we can find words for is something already dead in our hearts; there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”
Emerson, like Nietzsche a professed disciple of Montaigne, famously said of the Essays, “Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.”
What may be least French in Montaigne is the strangeness of his radical originality, yet it was the strangeness that made him canonical, not just for France but for the West. I always return with fresh wonder to this unrealized truth about the Western Canon: works are appropriated by it for their singularity, not because they fit smoothly into an existing order. Like every major canonical author, Montaigne startles the common reader at each fresh encounter, if only because he is unlike any preconception we bring to him. He can be interpreted as skeptic, humanist, Catholic, Stoic, even Epicurean, very nearly what you will.
one way to consider him, though he knew nothing of Shakespeare while Shakespeare knew something of him, is as the largest-scale of all Shakespearean characters, huger than Hamlet as a questing self. Montaigne changes as he rereads and revises his own book; more perhaps than in any other instance, the book is the man is the book. No other writer overhears himself so acutely as Montaigne perpetually does; no other book is so much an ongoing process. I cannot make myself familiar with it, though I reread it constantly, because it is a miracle of mutability. The only equivalent reading experience that I know is to reread endlessly in the notebooks and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American version of Montaigne.
Montaigne’s Essays have scriptural status, competing with the Bible, the Koran, Dante, and Shakespeare. Of all French authors, even Rabelais and Molière, Montaigne seems the least confined by a national culture, though paradoxically he had much to do with forming the mind of France.
whatever kind of writer Montaigne became, it would be grotesque to call him a religious one. There are about a dozen mentions and citations of Socrates for each appearance of Christ in the pages of Montaigne’s book. Even M. A. Screech, the one scholar who insists upon regarding Montaigne as a liberal Catholic religious writer, concludes by emphasizing that, for Montaigne, “The divine never touches human life without upsetting that natural order in which man is most at home.”
Eliot had the embarrassment of introducing Pascal’s Pensées, which is a bad case of indigestion in regard to Montaigne, so bad that it borders on what many would condemn as outright plagiarism. Pascal, some have surmised, wrote his Pensées with his copy of Montaigne’s Essays open before him. Whether or not this was literally true, it was an apt metaphor for Pascal’s resentful and dyspeptic cannibalizing of Montaigne’s work.
Why was Pascal so obsessed with Montaigne? Eliot insists that Pascal studied Montaigne in order to demolish him but could not do so, because it was like flinging hand grenades into a fog. Montaigne, Eliot assures us, was “a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element,” which must surely be the oddest description of Montaigne ever attempted. The intention of Eliot’s invidious metaphor is revealed when the author of Murder in the Cathedral insists that Montaigne “succeeded in giving expression to the skepticism of every human being,” Pascal and Eliot doubtless included.
What contaminates us is not Montaigne’s derivative skepticism but his highly original personality, the first personality ever put forward by a writer as the matter of his work. Walt Whitman and Norman Mailer are indirect descendants of Montaigne, even as Emerson and Nietzsche are his direct progeny.
Montaigne certainly is an original; self-consciousness had never before been expressed so fully and so well. The miracle of Montaigne is that he is almost never “self-conscious” in our current, negative sense. We do not compliment anyone by saying, “She is a self-conscious person.” Montaigne talks about himself for 850 large pages, and we want still more of him, because he represents—not everyman, and certainly no woman, but very nearly every man who has the desire, ability, and opportunity to think and to read.
Melancholy or artistic ambivalence has much to do with the aesthetic anguish at not being self-begotten, as in the case of a great poet and ruined angel, Milton’s Satan, who was Lucifer until he fell.
The Christian or Pauline view of death, which sees it as an abnormality brought on by the Fall, is not Montaigne’s. As Hugo Friedrich observes, Montaigne does not bother to polemicize against the Christian stance but simply ignores it as being irrelevant to him. Despite Montaigne’s devotion to Socrates, he does not share the Socratic sense of the soul’s immortality, let alone the Christian doctrine of survival after death. Nothing could be less Christian (or much funnier) than Montaigne’s advice about preparations for dying, from “Of Physiognomy,” book 3, essay 12: If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you, don’t bother your head about it. We trouble our life by concern about death, and death by concern about life. One torments us, the other frightens us. It is not against death that we prepare ourselves; that is too momentary a thing. A quarter hour of suffering, without consequences, without harm, does not deserve any particular precepts. To tell the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations of death.
Montaigne insists, he does not depict being; he depicts passage, and our bodily health is a story only of passage. Experience is passage; that will become the philosophy of all literature after Montaigne, from Shakespeare and Molière to Proust and Beckett. Montaigne set out to represent his own being, only to uncover the truth that the self is passage or transition, a crossing. If self is motion, then the chronicler of the self cannot always remember what he “had wanted to say.” Wisdom is not knowledge, because knowledge, illusory in itself, falls into the “had wanted to say.” To be wise is to speak the passing, and though Montaigne always possesses a self, self is always passing into self,
We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say? He must know how to use them together and blend them. And so must we do with good and evil, which are consubstantial, with our life. Our existence is impossible without this mixture, and one element is no less necessary for it than the other. To try to kick against natural necessity is to imitate the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook a kicking match with his mule.
I, who boast of embracing the pleasures of life so assiduously and so particularly, find in them, when I look at them minutely, virtually nothing but wind. But what of it? We are all wind. And even the wind, more wisely than we, loves to make a noise and move about, and is content with its own functions, without wishing for stability and solidity, qualities that do not belong to it.
The essay “Of Experience,” wise as it is, matters most because its affirmations are grounded in a cognitive music not to be heard anywhere else: It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump. Pascal must have been reduced to considerable agony by this comic vision, which leaves no latitude for transcendental yearnings, wagers of faith, and the tragedy of a God who hides himself.