The Complete Essays (189 page)

The rigours of summer are more inimical to me than those of winter, for (apart from the inconvenience of the heat, less easy to remedy than the cold, and apart from sunstroke from the sun beating down on your head) my eyes are affected by any dazzling light: I could not lunch now facing a bright and flaming fire. At the time when I was more in the habit of reading I used to place a piece of glass over my book to soften the glare of the paper and found it quite a relief. Up till now
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I have no acquaintance with spectacles and can see as well at a distance as ever I did or as anyone can. It is true that towards nightfall I begin to be aware that when reading my vision is weak and hazy: reading has strained my eyes at all times, but especially in the evening. [C] Though barely noticeable, that constitutes one step backwards. I shall take another step back, the second followed by a third, the third by a fourth, so gently that, before I am aware that my ageing sight is failing, I shall have become quite blind – so skilfully do the Fates spin the thread of our lives.

I am similarly unwilling to admit that I am on the point of becoming hard of hearing, and you will find that when I am half-deaf I shall still be blaming it on the voices of those who are speaking to me. If we want our Soul to be aware of how she is draining away we must keep her on the stretch.

[B] My walk is quick and steady and I do not know whether I have found it harder to fix my mind in one place or my body. Any preacher who can hold my attention throughout an entire sermon must be a good friend of mine! In the midst of ceremonial, where everyone else maintains a fixed expression and where I have seen ladies keep their very eyes still, I have never succeeded in stopping at least one of my limbs from jigging about: seated I may be, but sedate, never. [C] Just as the chambermaid said of her master the philosopher Chrysippus that only his legs were drunk
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(for he had this same habit of fidgeting them about, no matter what position he sat in, and she said it of him when the wine was exciting the others while he alone felt none the worse for it), so too people have been able to say of me since boyhood that I have ‘mad’ or ‘quicksilver’ feet: no matter where I put them, they are restless and never still.

[B] To eat ravenously as I do is not only unseemly: it is bad for your health, and indeed for your pleasure. In my haste I often bite my tongue and occasionally bite my fingers. When Diogenes came across a boy who was eating like that he slapped his tutor.
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– [C] There were instructors in Rome who taught how to masticate and perambulate graciously. – [B] By eating thus I lose an occasion for talking, which is such a fine [C] seasoning
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[B] at table – provided that both the meal and the topics are pleasant and brief. There is jealousy and rivalry among our pleasures: they clash and get in each other’s way. Alcibiades was a man who well understood good living: he specifically banished music from his table so that it should not interfere with the conversation, [C] justifying this with the reason which Plato ascribes to him, that it is the practice of commonplace men to invite musicians and singers to their feasts since they lack that good talk and those pleasant discussions with which intelligent men understand how to delight each other.
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[B] The following are Varro’s prescription for a banquet: an assembly of people of handsome presence who are agreeable to frequent and neither dumb nor talkative; clean and delightful food in a clean and delightful place; serene weather.
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[C] An enjoyable dinner is a feast requiring no little skill and affording no little pleasure: neither great war-leaders nor great philosophers have declined to learn how to arrange one. My mind has entrusted to my memory three such feasts: they occurred at different times during the flower of my youth and chanced to give me sovereign pleasure (guests contributing to such sovereign delight according to the degree of good temper of body and soul in which each man chances to be). My present circumstances exclude me from such things.

[B] I who am always down-to-earth in my handling of anything loathe that inhuman wisdom which seeks to render us [C] disdainful and [B] hostile towards the care of our bodies.
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I reckon that it is as injudicious to set our minds against natural pleasures as to allow them to dwell on them. [C] Xerxes was an idiot to offer a reward to anyone who could invent some new pleasure for him when he was already surrounded by every pleasure known to Man:
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but hardly less idiotic is the man who lops back such pleasures as Nature has found for him. [B] We should neither hunt them nor run from them: we should accept them. I do so with a little more zest and gratitude than that, and more readily follow the slope of Nature’s own inclining. [C] There is no need for us to exaggerate their emptiness: that makes itself sufficiently known and sufficiently manifest, thanks to our morbid spoilsport of a mind which causes them all to taste as unpleasant to us as it does itself, treating both itself and everything it absorbs, no matter how minor, according to its own insatiable, roaming and fickle condition:

Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcunquc infundis, acessit
.
[If the jug is not clean, all you pour into it turns sour.]
¹⁴⁶

I who boast that I so sedulously and so individually welcome the pleasures of this life find Montaigne virtually nothing but wind in them when I examine them in detail. But then we too are nothing but wind. And the wind (more wise than we are) delights in its rustling and blowing, and is content with its
own role without yearning for qualities which are nothing to do with it such as immovability or density.

Some say that the greatest pleasures and pains are those which, as was shown by the Balance of Critolaus, belong exclusively to the mind.
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No wonder: the mind fashions them as it wills and tailors them for itself from the whole cloth. Everyday I see noteworthy and doubtless desirable examples of it. But I, whose constitution is composite and coarse, cannot so totally get a bite on such an indivisible single object that I do not tend heavily towards the immediate pleasures of that law of humans and their genus: things are sensed through the understanding, understood through the senses.
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The Cyrenaic philosophers held that the most intense pleasures and pains are those of the body, virtually double and more right.
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[B] There are [C] those who, from an uncouth insensibility hold (as Aristotle says) bodily pleasures in disgust.
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I know some who do it from ambition. [B] Why do they not also give up breathing, so as to live on what is theirs alone,
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[C] rejecting the light of day because it is free and costs them neither ingenuity nor effort? [B] Just to see, let Mars, Pallas or Mercury sustain them instead of Venus, Ceres and Bacchus.
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[C] I suppose they think about squaring the circle while lying with their wives! [B] I hate being told to have our minds above the clouds while our
bodies are at the dinner-table. It is not that I want the mind to be nailed to it or wallowing in it but I do want it to apply itself to it, [C] to sit at table, not to lie on it. Aristippus championed only the body, as though we had no soul: Zeno embraced only the soul, as though we had no body. Both were flawed.
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They say that Pythagoras practised a philosophy which was pure contemplation: Socrates one which was all deeds and morals; between them both Plato found the Mean. But they are pulling our legs. The true Mean is to be found in Socrates; Plato is far more Socratic than Pythagorean, and it better becomes him.
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[B] When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight in being alone there, and to me. Mother-like, Nature has provided that such actions as she has imposed on us as necessities should also be pleasurable, urging us towards them not only by reason but by desire. To corrupt her laws is wrong.

When, in the thick of their great endeavours, I see Caesar and Alexander so fully enjoying pleasures which are
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[C] natural and consequently necessary and right, [B] I do not say that their souls are relaxing but giving themselves new strength, by force of mind compelling their violent pursuits and burdensome thoughts to take second place to the usages of everyday life, [C] wise if they were to believe that to be their normal occupation and the other one abnormal.

What great fools we are! ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I haven’t done a thing today.’ – ‘Why! Have you not lived? That is not only the most basic of your employments, it is the most glorious.’ – ‘I would have shown them what I can do, if they had set me to manage some great affair.’ – If you have been able to examine and manage your own life you have achieved the greatest task of all. Nature, to display and show her powers, needs no great destiny: she reveals herself equally at any level of life, both behind curtains or without them. Our duty is to bring order to our morals not to the materials for a book: not to win provinces in battle but order and tranquillity for the conduct of our life. Our most great and
glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly. Everything else – reigning, building, laying up treasure – are at most tiny props and small accessories. [B] I delight in coming across a general in the field, at the foot of a breach which he means soon to attack, giving himself whole-heartedly to his dinner while chatting freely with his friends, [C] or across Brutus, with heaven and earth conspiring against him and the liberty of Rome, stealing an evening hour from his rounds of duty to jot down notes on his Polybius as he read him with complete composure.
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[B] It is for petty souls overwhelmed by the weight of affairs to be unable to disentangle themselves for them completely, not knowing how to drop them and then take them up again:

O
fortes pejoraque passi
Mecum sæpe viri, nunc vino pellite curas;
Cras ingens iterabimus æquor
.

[O ye strong men who have often undergone worse trials with me, banish care now with wine: tomorrow we will sail again over the vast seas.]
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Whether as a joke or in earnest, ‘theological wine’ and [C] ‘Sorbonne [B] wine’ have become proverbial, as have their gaudies;
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but I find that the fellows are right to dine all the more indulgently and enjoyably in that they have seriously and usefully used their mornings for the concerns of their college: the shared awareness of having used those other hours well is a proper and piquant condiment for their table. That is how the sages lived. Thus too did the inimitable eager striving towards virtue which amazes us in both the Catos, as well as their severity of humour to the point of rudeness, mildly and happily submit to the laws of our human condition, to Venus and to Bacchus,
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[C] following the precepts of their School which required the perfect sage to be as experienced and knowledgeable about the use of the natural pleasures as about all the rest of life’s duties:
‘Cui cor sapiat, ei et sapiat palatus’
[To a discriminating mind let him ally a discriminating palate.]
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[B] In a strong and great-souled man it is, it seems to me, wondrously honourable to be relaxed and approachable, and it is most befitting.
Epaminondas never thought that to join in the dance with the young men of his city, [C] to sing and strum with them, [B] and to bother to do it properly, in any way detracted from the honour of his glorious victories nor from the [C] perfect [B] reformation of morals [C] which was within him.
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[B] And among all the remarkable actions of Scipio [C] – the grandfather, that great man worthy of having been thought to descend from the gods
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– [B] none is more gracious than his having been seen idling along, unperturbed, choosing and collecting shells like a schoolboy, playing
Quick! Quick! Pick up sticks
with Laelius along the seashore and, when the weather was bad, passing his time enjoyably by writing comedies about the most plebeian and realistic activities of men;
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[C] and, while his mind was full of that marvellous African campaign of his against Hannibal, visiting the philosophy schools in Sicily and attending the lectures, so providing his enemies at Rome with something to snap at in their blind envy.
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[B] Nor is there anything more striking about Socrates than his finding the time when he was old to learn how to dance and to play instruments, maintaining that it was time well spent. He was seen standing in an ecstatic trance for a day and a night in view of all the Grecian army, surprised and caught up by some deep thought. He was seen [C] to be the first of many brave men in that army to dash to the help of Alcibiades when he was overwhelmed by the enemy, shielding him with his body and pulling him out from under the weight of their numbers by the sheer force of his arms; and of all the people of Athens (outraged like him by such a shameful sight) he was the first to stand forth to rescue Theramenes from the Thirty Tyrants, whose henchmen were escorting him to his death and, although he was seconded by only two men, he did not give up that valiant attempt until Theramenes himself urged him to do so. When wooed by a person whose beauty had enthralled him, he was
seen to maintain, as was necessary, the strictest continence; he was seen helping up Xenophon at the battle of Delium, saving him when his horse had given him a tumble. He was seen [B] striding undeviatingly to war [C] trampling over the ice [B] in his bare feet; wearing the same gown in winter as in summer; surpassing all his comrades in his endurance of hardships and, at feasts, eating no differently from usual. [C] He was seen, unmoved in countenance, putting up for twenty-seven years with hunger and poverty, with loutish sons, with a cantankerous wife and finally with calumny, tyranny, imprisonment, leg-irons and poison. [B] Yet that very man, when the dictates of courtesy made him a guest at a drinking-match, was, from the entire army, the man who best acquitted himself. Nor did he refuse to play five-stones with the boys nor to run about with them astride a hobby-horse. And he did it with good grace: for Philosophy says that all activities are equally becoming in a wise man, all equally honour him. We have the wherewithal, so we should never tire of comparing the ideal of that great man against all patterns and forms of perfection.
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[C] There are very few pure and complete exemplars of how to live; those who instruct us do wrong to set before us weak and faulty ones with scarcely a single good habitual quality, ones which are more likely to pull us backwards, corrupting us rather than correcting us.