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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A selection of Michel de Montaigne's most profound, searching essays, in a new translation and stunning hardback edition featuring an introduction by Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose 'I myself am the subject of my book'. So wrote Montaigne in the introductory note to his Essays, the book that marked the birth of the modern essay form. In works of probing intelligence and idiosyncratic observation, Montaigne moved from intimate personal reflection to roving theories of the conduct of kings and cannibals, the effects of sorrow and fear, and the fallibility of human memory and judgement. This new selection of Montaigne's most ingenious essays appears in a lucid new translation by the prize-winning David Coward. What Do I Know?? offers the modern reader profound insight into a great Renaissance mind.
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MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
WHAT DO I KNOW?
ESSENTIAL ESSAYS
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY DAVID COWARD
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY YIYUN LI
PUSHKIN PRESS
contents
Introduction
I became a dedicated reader of Montaigne in 2005. I was new to writing then, and relatively new to motherhood, with a three-year-old and a newborn, and about to publish my first book. For the next ten years or so, I would be reading Montaigne every day, sometimes only for ten minutes, and later, when my children were older, for thirty minutes to an hour in the afternoon, before I picked them up from school. I might not have understood the significance of this routine at the time, other than that it was a brief reprieve from a life overcrowded with the responsibilities of being a mother, a wife, a writer, and a professor.
I found Montaigne among the best conversational partners one could dream of: always available, often entertaining, never predictable. That he was knowledgeable meant that I learned something new anytime I opened his book; that his thinking meandered but with an innate logic demanded that I read with an active mind instead of being a passive recipient; and best of all, he was not writing to converse with me (or any reader) but with himself. About himself. ‘Reader, I myself am the subject of my book,’ stated Montaigne in his introduction to his work. ‘There is no reason why you should devote your leisure time on so trivial and unprofitable a topic.’
Rightly so! And there is no reason why one should not defect from the pressing (and sometimes profitable) tasks of everyday life and dwell on a more pressing (and definitely less profitable) subject: selfhood. There are many ways to elaborate on Montaigne’s work. For me, his work serves as a reminder, a prompt, even, a mandate: a regular meditation on selfhood, like daily yoga, is a healthy habit.
But what is selfhood? The question requires one to ponder over a few related questions. What is the opposite of selfhood: unselfhood or otherhood? Where is the boundary of selfhood: is it defined by time or space? And what is the right amount of attention one should pay to selfhood—that is, if there is a way to measure—without running into the risk of straying into the quagmire of egohood?
I’ve been pondering over these questions while reading this sleek volume of Montaigne, newly translated by David Coward and published under the title: What Do I Know? Essential Essays. What do I know—Que sçay-je or Que sais-je in modern French—was a sentiment known to Montaigne, which these days people use jestingly and colloquially. I do often wish for two things: that people would ask themselves the question, what do I know, before opining, and that people would give a thoughtful answer, instead of using it as a witty remark.
What do I know about Montaigne? A little, as a lay reader of his work. It was nearly three years into a global pandemic, and seven years since I last read Montaigne. My immediate reaction, while immersing myself in the familiar words rendered anew by this translation, was happiness; bliss, even. If this sounds preposterous, it’s the preposterousness for which one is willing to endure misunderstanding and ridicule.
Writers worth rereading are those whose minds both sustain and surprise us. What a great moment, when, a few pages in, I encountered this line: ‘the places I see again and books I reread smile on me by seeming fresh and new.’ (On Liars, p. 31)
The longer one lives, the more places one has accumulated which one will never revisit. For instance, the army camp in central China where I spent a year between age eighteen and nineteen: there, once, during a night exercise, I hid in an abandoned ditch, shooting blank ammunitions at my comrades who played my enemies, while around me thousands of fireflies twinkled. Or, a hospital corridor leading to the morgue in Beijing, where the crowd, murmuring with curiosity and sympathy, parted as I followed my father on a gurney, which was elaborately adorned for afterlife.
And yet the longer one lives, the more reliable is the frame offered by those rereadable writers, whose words anchor our own thinking. Indeed, Montaigne’s words have smiled on me this time, not only by seeming fresh and new after my sojourn from his work, but also by reminding me that by now I’ve known a little better where and how I can locate my selfhood. Dare I say I’ve become a better reader of his work?
‘The mind that has no firm anchor point is lost for, as is commonly said, it is nowhere if it is everywhere.’ (On Idling, p. 27) It occurs to me that the happiness I feel while rereading Montaigne has little to do with any worldly matter but a sense of knowing where I am: I am not at that dreaded place called nowhere, nor am I—nor do I aspire to be—at that illusory place called everywhere.
Nowhere-ness: I don’t think I’m alone in having now and then been trapped by the feeling of being nowhere; the world seems to have experienced a collective version of that during the pandemic. Being nowhere is different from being lost. The latter implies an opposite state of existence, of being unlost, of being found again. Being nowhere, however, feels bleaker: the past and the future merge into an everlasting present, and the present is where time and space, both unchangeable, take on a permanent stillness.
Sometimes the feeling of nowhere-ness calls for the ambition of everywhere-ness. Incidentally, ambition, from its etymology, has a lot to do with everywhere-ness. According to the OED, ambition comes from Latin ambitiōn-, ambitiō, soliciting of votes, canvassing, striving after popularity, desire for advancement, ostentation, pomp; ambit-, past participial stem of ambīre, to go round or about. (Sharing this etymology are two other words: ‘ambient’ and ‘ambience.’) In our contemporary world, this ambition to be everywhere is assisted and exacerbated by technology—faster, more connected, more ubiquitous. People on social media travel to many countries, dine at different restaurants, read three hundred books a year. And yet: ‘He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere,’ wrote Montaigne. (On Idling, p. 27) Perhaps as a collective, we dwellers in today’s world, pressed by the need to be everywhere, easily slip into nowhere.
Between nowhere and everywhere: somewhere. This time, rereading Montaigne, my intense happiness comes from knowing where I am in life. It’s not an ideal or a perfect place, but a place that I accept as mine: I’m a more experienced writer since my first encounter with Montaigne; I’ve known sorrows in many forms, including the loss of a child; I have accumulated a handful of writers to whom I return regularly, just as the roses in my garden return to blossoming every year. I am somewhere.
Montaigne will always be among the writers I reread. His words provide one of the best anchors for one’s everchanging mind. While comparing the new translation with other editions on my shelf, I noticed underlining by a blue ballpoint pen in a 1958 Penguin Classics edition. The book had been brought by a friend who had visited me in a psych ward near New York City where I, entrapped by the bleakest nowhere-ness, stayed for three weeks. (The pens given out to the patients were ballpoint pen fillings wrapped up in paper—cheap, and the least dangerous.) But I see now, rereading the annotations done in the hospital, that even then I was somewhere—I might not have known my own mind, but I trusted Montaigne’s words and saved some of my memories between his lines. There are other editions, read at different times. A 1947 edition, translated by Charles Cotton and selected and illustrated by Salvador Dalí, boasts not only Montaigne’s wisdoms but also Dalí’s whimsies: a cluster of grapes, each a happy skull; naked bodies (or, are they naked souls?) in deep conversation; headless warriors embracing each other. The edition of Complete Essays translated by Donald M. Frame has superscript letters ABC in the text, indicating the work done at different times: Montaigne had returned to the same subjects at several stages of his life. Reading that edition always gives me a concrete sense of how Montaigne’s mind changed over time and yet remained, or became more of, Montaigne’s mind.
This new translation, a fine introduction for readers who are just about to discover Montaigne and a reliable companion for returning readers, will surely move the reader—not to nowhere, not to everywhere—but to somewhere. This somewhere-ness is perhaps the closest as I can define as selfhood.
yiyun li
To the Reader
This, Reader, is a book written entirely in honest good faith. From the start, it forewarns you that in it I have no purpose other than to interest kin and self. I have not set out to flatter your notion of things and have given no thought to my reputation. Such ambitions are beyond my powers. I dedicate my book to the particular use of my family and friends so that, having lost me (as they shall in the near future), they will be able to recover some few evidences of my character and moods, and that in this way they might acquire a fuller and clearer understanding of me. If my purpose had been to seek the world’s favour, I should have appeared in borrowed plumes and followed a more orderly scheme of exposition. But I wish to be seen in my simple, natural and ordinary character, with no axe to grind and without artifice: for here I paint myself. My faults will show up bright in these pages as will my artless nature, insofar as respect for social conventions allows. Had I lived my life among the nations which are said still to enjoy the freedom of nature’s primitive laws, I assure you that I should readily have drawn myself, whole and bare naked.
Therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book. This being so, there is no reason why you should devote your leisure time to so trivial and unprofitable a topic.
And so farewell.
At Montaigne, this first day of March, one thousand five hundred and eighty.
PART ONE
Montaigne on Montaigne
Montaigne declared himself to be the subject of his book, his main purpose being to follow the injunction inscribed over the entrance to the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi: ‘Know Thyself ’. His thoughts were rooted in this clear-sighted estimate of the strengths and limitations of his mind and emotions. While his personality permeates his ideas, there are times when he slipped into self-examination by providing more direct ‘evidences’ of his characters and moods, revealing more clearly his engaging personality.
1
On Sorrow
I am one of those people who are little affected by an emotion for which I have little patience or regard, although most people, apparently by some common accord, have chosen to honour it by presenting it in a most favourable light. They dress it up as inner strength, courage and tender conscience—such a foolish, monstrous idea! More fittingly, the Italians have found another word for it: tristezza, a kind of heaviness of heart. For it is always a harmful state of mind, invariably irrational and unfailingly cowardly and base—an emotion in which the Stoics consistently forbid their faithful to indulge.
But when, so the story goes, Psammenitus, King of Egypt, having been defeated and made prisoner by Cambyses, King of Persia, saw his daughter walk by dressed as a serving-girl sent to fetch water from the well, and all his friends began weeping and lamenting around him, he sat quietly by, saying not a word, with his eyes fixed upon the ground. And when by and by he saw his son being led away to his death, he maintained the same composure. But on observing one of his household being led away among the captives, he began to beat his breast and fell into a state of deep grief.
This could well be said to resemble what was lately observed in one of our Princes who, being then in Trento, received word of the death of his older brother, who was the prop and honour of all his family and, then, soon after, of the demise of a younger brother, his second great hope. Having borne both these blows with exemplary fortitude, it so happened that a few days later one of his courtiers died, upon which new misfortune he was quite overcome and, abandoning his self-possession, surrendered to grief and sorrow in such a manner that those around him could only conclude that he had been affected by this final blow alone. But in truth it was because he was full to overflowing with grief that the final drop burst the dam of his self-possession.
Now it could be (say I) that we might explain the story that way if it did not go on to tell how Cambyses asked Psammenitus why he had not been moved by the fate of his son and daughter but had reacted so violently to that of one of his household.
‘Because,’ said he, ‘only the final blow could be conveyed by tears, the first two having run so deep they were beyond expression.’
Pertinent here, perhaps, is the discovery of a painter of old who was charged with depicting Iphigenia sacrificed and, one by one, the grief of those present according to the reactions of each to the death of that beautiful young woman. By the time he came to her father, having exhausted all the expedients of his art, he painted him with features hidden as if to say that there was no visage capable of portraying grief so deep. That is why poets make believe that the wretched Niobe, having first lost seven sons and then as many daughters, being weighed down with her losses, was finally turned to stone, ‘being overcome with misery’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses VI, 304), this being their best way of rendering that bleak, unspoken, unheeding stupor which numbs our senses when the accidents of life strike with a force that exceeds the limits of what we can bear.
Such is the impact of these blows which, when they are extreme, overwhelm the mind and rob it of its freedom of expression. When we too are shaken to the core by some truly dreadful piece of news, we are stunned, numb, as if impeded in all our motions so that when afterwards the mind finds release in tears and weeping, it seems to become detached or disconnected and allows itself greater room for action and, now at its ease, ‘its pain allows utterance to its voice’ (Virgil, Æneid, XI, 151).
During the war which King Ferdinand waged against the widow of John, King of Hungary, in the environs of Buda, Raïsciac, a German captain, seeing the body being brought back of a knight who all had observed acquitting himself with great gallantry in the thick of battle, offered the conventional condolences. As curious as the others to know the identity of the man, he discovered after the armour was removed that the man was his son. But alone among the general weeping and wailing, he stood ramrod straight, speaking not a word, shedding not a tear, his eyes unwaveringly fixed upon him, until the intensity of his distress congealed his vital spirits and he fell stone dead upon the ground.
And yet, though
whoever says he burns with love scarce burns at all,
—Petrarch,Canzoniere, 170
lovers who seek to portray a love too great to bear will say:
I am lost! My senses are all stripped from me!
Lesbia! I see you and my soul, my voice do both flee away,
My body burns with an insubstantial flame,
My ears are full of their own clangour
And upon my eyes twice-fold night falls.
—Catullus, LI, 5
Thus it is not in the heat of the moment of intense ardour that we are capable of giving voice to our amorous complaints and feelings; at that moment, our whole being is given over to deep purposes and our body overwhelmed and aching with desire.
Yet at times from that high pitch may proceed that accidental, untimely failure of performance which so disconcerts lovers, and a loosening of the powerful grip of intense potency on the very brink of enjoyment (an accident not unknown to me). Passions which can be savoured and digested are not true passions at all.
Small grief s can speak but an aching heart is dumb.
—Seneca, Hippolytus, II, iii
An unexpected pleasure may come upon us in the same way.
When she saw me and the armaments of Troy all around, she panicked and, terror-struck, eyes staring and bloodless-cheeked, she fainted away; her voice did not return to her until long after.
—Virgil, Æneid, III, 306
In addition to the Roman woman who died surprised by joy on seeing her son return along the road from the battle at Cannæ, Sophocles and Dionysius of Syracuse who both expired rejoicing, and Talva who died in Corsica as he read the honours which the Senate in Rome had conferred upon him, we have in our own century Pope Leo X who, having been informed of the taking of Milan which he had devoutly wished for, was overcome by such excess of delight that he fell prey to a fever to which he promptly succumbed. And for a more notable example still of the follies of human nature, it is recorded by the ancients that Diodorus the Dialectician dropped dead, laid low by an extreme fit of mortification because in his academy and in front of his public, he had failed to find a way of countering an argument that had been put up against him.
I myself am not at all given to such extravagant combustibility for I am naturally hard-headed and, by the daily use and discourse of reason, make my head harder every day.
2
On How Our Actions Are to Be Judged by the Intention
It is said that death cancels all obligations. I know of some who have put a very different interpretation on this notion. Henry VII, King of England, came to an agreement with Don Philip, son of Maximilian the emperor or, to present him more honourably, father of the emperor Charles V: that the said Phillip should give into his keeping his enemy the Duke of Suffolk (of the White Rose, who had escaped and fled to the Low Countries) against an undertaking that Henry would make no attempt on the duke’s life. Yet on his deathbed, in his will, the king ordered his son to have the duke killed immediately after he himself was dead.
More recently in Brussels, the tragedy of the execution of Counts Egmont and Horn staged for us by the Duke of Alba was remarkable for a number of extraordinary particulars. Among them was the fact that the said Count of Egmont (on whose word and assurance Count Horn had come to give himself up to the Duke of Alba) requested most insistently that he should be put to death first, for that way his dying would free him of the obligation to Count Horn.
Now it seems to me that death did not cancel the word Henry had given, but that even before he met his end, Count Egmont was fully released from his pledge.
For we cannot be held to account beyond the limits of what our strength and capacities can perform. It follows that actions and their consequences are not ours to command and that in reality we are in charge of nothing but our will. Therefore, and inescapably, it is in our will that all the rules and the whole duty of man begin and are rooted. This is why Count Egmont, believing both his soul and his will to be bound by the assurance he had given—even though the power to keep his word was not in his hands—was most certainly absolved of his duty and would have been even if he had survived Count Horn. But the King of England, in failing to keep his word by wilful intent, can no more be excused because he deferred the enactment of his treachery until after his death than the mason of whom Herodotus speaks who, having faithfully throughout his life kept the secret of the treasure house of his master, the King of Egypt, revealed all to his children as he lay dying.
In my time, I have known several cases of men who, being quite aware of their guilt in purloining the property of others, have been minded to salve their conscience by making amends in their wills to atone after their deaths. Yet in doing this, they do nothing of practical consequence: they neither set a time by which they should conclude so pressing a matter nor do they seek to right the wrong in a way that would harm them or their interests. Since they owe, they must pay—and feel the payment hurt their pocket. For the more they pay and the more it hurts, the more just and meritorious is the act of restitution. Penitence needs a burden to be carried.
Others sink lower still: those who delay, keeping for their last will and testament some hateful piece of knavery directed against someone of their acquaintance which they have kept concealed during their lifetime. And so they give the offended party cause to remember them without fondness and they also show how little they care about their conscience. For though they might fear death, they have not been able to make their malice die with them and instead extend its life beyond theirs. They are iniquitous judges, for they delay forming a judgement until they are no longer in a position to examine the facts of the case.
If I am able, I will take every care that my death shall say nothing that has not already been said by my life.
3
On Idling
Just as we see that land that is rich and fertile but fallow abounds with countless varieties of wild, unusable plants and, to make it serve a proper purpose, must be schooled and set to work by the sowing of seeds that answer to our requirements; and likewise, as we see that while unattended women may sometimes produce unformed fragments of flesh [an idea found in Plutarch’s Matrimonial Precepts], they must work with seed other than their own in order to obtain sound and natural propagation—so it is with our minds. If they are not directed to and occupied by a specific subject which concentrates and leads them on, they will go their own sweet way, skipping hither and thither in the capricious meadows of our imagination,
as in water in a bowl of bronze the shivering reflections of the light of sun or shining moon send dapples all around and then dart up and strike the coffered ceilings above.
—Virgil,Æneid, VIII, 22
In that agitated state, there is no wild folly, no flight of fancy that they will not entertain,
conjuring vain phantasms, as in sick men’s dreams.
—Horace, Ars Poetica, 7
The mind that has no firm anchor point is lost for, as is commonly said, it is nowhere if it is everywhere:
He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere.
—Martial,Epigrams, VII 73
When I lately retired to my manor and estate, I was resolved to do nothing except spend what remains to me of life at rest, far from the madding crowd. I felt I could not do my mind a greater service than to allow it to idle and let it look after itself, to slow down, stop and settle into its own rhythms. This, I hoped, it would do more easily now that it had become over the years more sedate and more mature. But I find that ‘idleness invariably supplies unreliable thoughts’ (Lucan, Pharsalia, IV, 704) and that on the contrary it gives itself, like a horse that bolts, far more trouble than its thrown rider would have put it to. It starts in me so many half-formed fancies and monstrous fantasies one after the other, in no order and with no thread to them, that when I stepped back to consider how odd and strange they are, I began to make a record of them, hoping thereby, in time, to make my mind blush with the shame of it.
4
On Liars
There is not a man alive less well equipped to speak of memory than I, for I scarce have any at all and firmly believe that there is not another in the whole world that is more distorting and defective than my own. The other usual faculties I have in middling, ordinary measures. But as far as Memory goes, I do believe I must be unusual, rare even, and worthy to be known—famous, even—for it.
In addition to the natural embarrassment it causes me (given how important memory is to us, Plato was surely right to call it a great and powerful goddess), it is a fact that when in my country they say that a man has no memory, what they really mean is that he is a cretin. When I complain of my poor memory, they lecture me and refuse to believe me, as they would if I were trying to make out that I was stupid. They fail to see the difference between memory and understanding, and that makes things harder for me.
