Tuesday, August 2, 2011

What I've Been Reading

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer by Sarah Bakewell. The moment I opened this book, I knew, I had a very special book in my hands. This positive bias was preempted by excellent review by Tyler Cowen and others (Montaigne has now been crowned as the first blogger). We living in this century of certainty have so much to learn from him; "though I don't know" has a lifetime of wisdom embedded in it. 

One Death: 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.

Pay Attention: It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable fluttering's that agitate it. 
When I walk alone in the beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling in extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me.

Be Born: Learning should be a pleasure, and children should grow up to imagine wisdom with a smiling face, not a fierce and terrifying one.
If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are little better off - though I don't know.

Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted: He took up as if they were people, and welcomed them into his family. The rebellious, Ovid-reading boy would one day accumulate a library of around a thousand volumes; a good size, but not an indiscriminate assemblage.

Survive love and loss: Our friendship has no other model than itself, and can be compared inly with itself.
If you would live for yourself, you should live for others - above all for your chosen friend.

Use little tricks: If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived.
I let the passion alone and applied myself to making him relish the beauty of a contrary price, the honor, favor, and good will he would acquire by clemency and kindness. I diverted him to ambition. That is how it is done. (Montaigne on how he cured a young price of a dangerous passion of revenge)

Question everything: If you postulate that snow is black, they argue on the contrary that it is white. If you say that is neither one nor the other, it is up to them to maintain that is both. If you maintain with certain judgement that you know nothing about it, they will maintain that you do. Yes, and if by an affirmative axiom you assure them that you are in doubt about it, they will go and argue that you are not, or that you cannot judge and prove that you are in doubt.

Keep a private room behind the shop: Some of his answers to the question of how to live are indeed chilly - mind you own business, preserve your sense of self, stay out of trouble, and keep your room behind the shop.

Be convivial - live with others: My essential pattern is suited to communication and revelation. I am all in open and in full view, born for company and friendship.

Wake up from the sleep of habit: I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any other that exist... As to whether nature did well or ill to break the mold in which I cast, that is something no one can judge until after they have read me.

Live temperately: My excesses do not carry me very far away. There is nothing extreme or strange about them.
The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.

Guard your humanity: Astrologers now warn of "great and imminent alterations and mutations", but they forget the simple fact that, however bad things are, most of life goes on undisturbed. "I do not despair about it."

Do something no one has done before: Montaigne admitted that his titles had little obvious connection with the contents.
I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me; I have no business, but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself... I roll about myself.

See the world: If it looks ugly on the right, I take the left; if i find myself unfit to ride my horse, I stop. "Passive alertness" - it was an extension of his everyday pleasure in letting himself "roll relaxedly with the rolling of the heavens," as he luxuriously put it, but with the added delight that came from seeing everything afresh and with full attention, like a child.

Do a good job, but not too good a job: Montaigne was anxious to forestall any expectations that might have be a copy of his own father, ruining his health with work.
It is not really difficult to get on when caught between two hostile parties, he wrote; all you have to do is to behave with a temperate affection towards both, so neither thinks he owns you. Don't expect too much from them, and don't offer too much either. One could sum up Montaigne's policy by saying the one should do a good job, but not too good a job. By following this rule he kept himself out of trouble and remained fully human.

Philosophize only by accident: In taking up his pen he did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator or moralist, but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his mind, in its naked simplicity and force.

Reflect on everything; regret nothing: We are all patchwork and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.

Give up control: See how Plato is moved and tossed about. Every man, glorying in applying him to himself, sets him on the side he wants. They trot him out and insert him into all new opinions that the world accepts (on who reader interpret Montaigne).

Be ordinary and imperfect: I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff.
Our being is cemented with sickly qualities... whoever should remove the seeds of these qualities from man would destroy the fundamental condition of our life.

Let life be its own answer: Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.

Well, my favorite part.. Montaigne on Biophilia:
"There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that ataches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, and some mutual obligation."

and of-course on dogs..:
"I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks me outside the proper time."

It is often said that one find oneself while reading Montaigne's essay's. Maximus and Me, living an ordinary life found ourselves in this hypothesis and more:
"Perhaps some of the credit for Montaigne's last answer should therefore go to his cat - a specific sixteenth century individual, who had a rather pleasant life on a country estate with a doting master and not to much competition for his attention. She was the one who, by wanting to play with Montaigne at an inconvenient moment, reminded him what what is was to be alive. They looked at each other, and just for moment, he leaped across the gap in order to see himself through her eyes. Out of that moment - and countless others like it - came his whole philosophy." 




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