The Last Word On Nothing

For reasons I didn’t fully understand myself (marriage? the cat? surely someone or something else was to blame), I was feeling more than usually lazy, or maybe just unwilling to tolerate the discomfort of writing. It felt like a dangerous malaise, and the only remedy I could think of was to try to soak up some other people’s bravery. So a couple of months ago, I asked our Ann for her recommendations of favorite essayists.

She recommended Montaigne: “I haven’t read him in a while but I loved him,” she wrote. “He was so smart and funny and open.” I trundled off to a used bookstore and picked up a copy of The Essays: A Selection, translated by M.A. Screech. I’m only about three quarters of the way through the book, but I’ve been taking notes and sending them to Ann as I go. She suggested they might make a decent post, strung together. So, in the provisional spirit of Montaigne, I share them with you, dear LWON readers.

10.29.23

To philosophize is to learn how to die

I read this essay while waiting for a big vegetable lasagna to bake. I was in the middle of Montaigne’s exhaustive list of ways to die (killed by a bump from a pig!) and his instructions to continuously keep death at the forefront of our minds, when the timer beeped.

I went to pull the lasagna out and dumped the whole thing upside down onto the oven door, barely missing my feet. After screaming for help, then scooping the charred noodles back into the dish, I went back to the couch and read the following: “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.” The lasagna looked terrible but tasted great.

…

I like how Montaigne identifies virtue as a source of “profound delight and an exceeding happiness” rather than drudgery: “Such pleasure is no less seriously pleasurable for being more lively, taut, robust, and virile…”

It reminds me of that line attributed to Colette: “Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.” Now, to distinguish between the kind of vigorous joy Montaigne is talking about, and complacency. Which, as I read on, he does, in galvanizing terms. 

We reach the same end by discrepant means

Montaigne’s ideas about courage are quite demanding, aren’t they? I was taken aback by the first essay in the collection, which kicks off with a story about three French noblemen who stayed to defend Limoges from an invasion by the Prince of Wales when everyone else had fled.

The idea that courage is the ability to laugh in death’s face and flagrantly defy it is hard for me to swallow and keep down for long — one moment it strikes me as romantic and silly, and the next, undeniably right. But Montaigne’s own inconsistency gives me room to feel both ways about it. I suspect that by the time I finish this book, my own ideas of what courage looks like will have developed into something I can use.

On educating children

I read this one under the stars, at a campground in northern California. I was alone, and the stars were dense and brilliant, and it was cold enough to see my breath. I love how Montaigne takes the seed of an essay, like a letter to a friend, and then lets it unfurl in all directions, from a bit of practical advice to a treatise on what it means to learn and think. 

 “Bees ransack flowers here and there: but then they make their own honey, which is entirely theirs and no longer thyme or marjoram.” How exquisite!

I was alone at the campground because I was waiting for Pete and about twenty of our friends to join us the next day. It was Pete’s 40th birthday, and he’d wanted to celebrate next to the Pit River, where people gather once a year to propel themselves in plastic boats off a massive waterfall, just as the leaves turn gold. The camp host, Warren, owns a pet ferret named Tim. This year he dressed up like Sasquatch and dangled donuts and beer off a bridge for the boaters to catch.

Pete and I had been circling the question of having kids for at least a year, equally oscillating for and against. We had finally decided to “not not try” in August. On the river, I had an unusual feeling of wobbliness —the rapids were steep and fast and I kept having to pull over to the bank to catch my breath. When we got to the waterfall, I knew I couldn’t do it, and asked my friend to take my boat over instead. And that is when I realized I’m pregnant! Six to eight weeks, so very early. But it explains why I’ve been needing constant naps. Anyhow, it is a very good time to be reading Montaigne and thinking about how to live. 

11.15.23
Dear Ann,

The reason I leapt out of bed this morning to grab my laptop and write you back this instant is I have another Montaigne report. I’m on the chapter about Seneca and Plutarch. It’s full of horrific descriptions of torture and what poor Spartan boys went through (starved, burned with hot coals, innards eaten by fox cubs). But this passage — as do all Montaigne’s thoughts about women — made me scream-laugh. 

“I have known hundreds and hundreds of women… whom you would have more easily made to bite a red-hot iron than made to let go of an opinion conceived in a fit of choler once they have got their teeth into it. Women are rendered intractable by blows and constraint. That man who forged the tale of the goodwife who would not stop calling her husband lice-ridden however much she suffered correction by threats and cudgeling, who was thrown into a pond and, even while she was drowning, thrust her hands out of the water high above her head and made the sign for squashing lice, forged indeed a tale the express image of which we can see every day in the stubbornness of women. And stubbornness is the sister of constancy, vigour and inflexibility at least.”

I mean. There is just so much to think and wonder and enjoy about this passage. Including: what is the sign for squashing lice? 

I can’t say it now, as I am already late for work. I’m trying to regain a semblance of a morning schedule during this first trimester of pregnancy, since if I don’t get my work done in the morning, it isn’t going to happen later. But I am going to think about it more and write back soon.

In the meantime, I will go about my day inspired by this woman’s example, hands bravely held high above the water, making the lice-squashing sign.

11.28.23

Dear Ann,

I took a break from Montaigne over the Thanksgiving holiday – instead I read Mexican Gothic, a lurid Gothic horror novel which a friend recommended. It was clever and scary; by the end I had that suffocating, get-me-the-hell-out-here feeling of being inside a haunted house, but in this case the house was haunted by colonialism and eugenics, which took the form of a mind-altering fungus. Fruiting bodies. Ick. Not the best thing to read with morning sickness.

I was glad to get out of the house and to the beach (we were visiting some friends in San Diego).

I think Montaigne missed a trick when he wrote that “It is reason and wisdom which take away cares, not places affording wide views of the sea.” Montaigne clearly never ate tacos al pastor on the beach. Or rode a boogie board.

I’ve been lucky so far, nausea-wise, but now that I’m at the end of my first trimester things have gotten rockier. A few nights ago I managed to sneeze, pee my pants, and throw up simultaneously!

On the affection of fathers for their children

Now that I’ve picked up Montaigne again, I’ve had some more good laughs – especially during his discussions of pregnant women…

“For those unruly tastes and physical cravings which they experience during pregnancy are ever-present in their souls.”

This, he argues, is why women shouldn’t be entrusted with raising children beyond a certain age: We are too governed by our emotions, too prone to coddle and favor the weak, unreasonably “moved by the skippings and jumpings and babyish tricks of our children than by their activities when they are fully formed, as though we had loved them not as human beings but only as playthings or as pet monkeys.”

Pish posh, I say. Isn’t the whole point of having babies to dress them up in costumes with ears and tails? Also, this from a man who cries whenever he sees someone else crying – even fake crying! “Nothing tempts my tears like tears — not only real ones but tears of any kind, in feint or paint”!

Oh Montaigne! You weepy, sensitive, silly man. Afflicted by gallstones, flatulent, terrified of death. Grasping at, but not quite yet able to glimpse, a world in which even women are capable of courage and reason.

On the inconstancy of our actions

Reading Montaigne makes me wish that everyone — and me especially — kept such a sprawling, unruly record of their minds at work. How else to learn that, as he puts it:

“We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment.”

On the resemblance of children to their fathers

I read the following passage aloud to Pete the other morning, as he brought me my toast in bed. We’ve now established a late first trimester routine: I have to eat an English muffin with butter before I can get up, or else. 

“What a prodigious thing it is that within the drop of semen which brings us forth there are stamped characteristics not only of the bodily form of our forefathers but of their ways of thinking and their slant of mind. Where can that drop of fluid lodge such an infinite number of Forms?”

Where, indeed? I love how gleefully Michel goes about derobing the medical dogmas of the 16^th century — even if he still can’t see the female body as more than an empty vessel for semen.

Steeped as I am now in the modern morass of women’s reproductive healthcare — still suffering from a lack of interest/curiosity about women’s bodies more than 400 years later — I can’t help seeing parallels between Montaignes screed against doctors, and the vast medical-industrial complex that is Kaiser Permanente. (I just fired the male OBGYN who took it upon himself to explain to me, in a deeply patronizing manner, just how old I was, at 39, to be embarking on this project relative to his other patients, median age 26.)

“When anything untoward happens they either disclaim responsibility altogether or else blame it on the patient, finding reasons so vacuous that they need never fear they will every run out of them: “he bared his arm” , he heard the noise of a coach,” somebody opened a window,” “he has been lying on his left side, “he has let painful thoughts run through this head.”

And here he goes again: “When a bad wrestler became a doctor Diogenes said, “That’s the spirit. You are right. Now you can pin to the ground all those who used to do it to you.” But doctors are lucky according to Nicocles: The sun shines on their successes and the earth hides their failures.” 

It sounds a lot like publication bias, doesn’t it? Still, I take my folic acid and my omegas (Pete keeps sneaking my prenatal vitamins, he likes the citrus gummies), shun hot baths and brie, refuse to change the cat litter (yay!) and give thanks that at least, we’re no longer living in the 16^th century when:

“The very constituents selected for their remedies recall mystery and sorcery: the left foot of a tortoise 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 (so contemptuously do they abuse our wretchedness) triturated rat-shit and similar apish trickery which look more like magic spells than solid knowledge.”

To be continued…