Table Of ContentCopyright © 2011 by Saul Frampton
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally
published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited, London.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frampton, Saul.
When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me? : Montaigne and
being in touch with life / Saul Frampton.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-30737959-7
1. Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Montaigne, Michel de,
1533-1592. Essais. I. Title.
PQ1643.F73 2011 844′.3—dc22 2010043642
www.pantheonbooks.com
Jacket illustration and design by Barbara de Wilde
v3.1
We are each of us richer than we think …
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1 Waking to the Sound of a Spinet
2 Because It Was Him, Because It Was Me
3 To Jump or Duck at the Bang of an Arquebus
4 To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die
5 Que sçais-je? – What Do I Know?
6 When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing
with Me?
7 To Rub and Polish Our Brains with Others
8 The Philosopher’s Stone
9 The Exercises of Venus
10 The Touch of a Familiar Hand
11 A Dog, a Horse, a Book, a Glass
12 Of Experience
Select Bibliography
Illustrations
A Note About the Author
Preface
(illustrations credit fm.1)
Sometime towards the end of the sixteenth century, Michel Eyquem,
Seigneur de Montaigne, reached up to the ceiling of his library and
scratched off an inscription he had placed there some years before. His
library was on the third floor of a round tower standing on a corner of
the noble house of Montaigne in Périgord. From his windows he could
see into his garden, his courtyard, his vineyards, and into most parts of
his house. The house stood on a hill a few miles north of the Dordogne,
some thirty miles east of Bordeaux.
Circling Montaigne were his books, a thousand of them, arranged on
five shelves on all sides. Through them he leafed ‘without order, without
plan’, getting up from his chair to stroll around the room, sixteen paces
in diameter, giving him a circular walk of about fifty paces in
circumference. Above his head, classical and biblical quotations curled
across the joists and beams of his ceiling, like vines round the branches
of a tree.
The inscription Montaigne erased was a line from the Roman poet
Lucretius: Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas – There is no new
pleasure to be gained by living longer. It was a sentiment he had
previously held dear to. Like most thinkers of his time, Montaigne
followed a Christian and a Stoic philosophy, where life was seen as
preparation for the afterlife and the task of philosophy was to harden
oneself against the vicissitudes of fortune. And of misfortune, Montaigne
had experience at close hand. His first-born daughter had died at the age
of only two months (the first of five to die in infancy). His younger
brother had been killed, absurdly, tragically, by a blow from a tennis
ball. His best friend, Etienne de La Boétie, had died of the plague in his
early thirties. And his father, whom he adored, had recently suffered a
prolonged and agonizing death from a kidney stone. Moreover, violent
religious warfare was spreading across the country, setting light to
Montaigne’s region, pitting Catholic against Protestant, father against
son, massacre against murder.
And so in a Latin inscription he had made on the wall of his library
after resigning from his job as a magistrate and retiring to his house,
Montaigne had declared his intention to hide himself away, and crawl
unburthened towards death:
In the year of Christ 1571, aged thirty-eight, on the eve of the
beginning of March, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, worn out
with the slavery of the court and of public service, and whilst still
intact, retires to the bosom of the learned Muses, where in peace
and security he hopes, if fate allows him, to pass what may be left of
his life already more than half spent, consecrating this ancestral
dwelling and sweet retreat to his liberty, tranquillity and repose.
The choice of his birthday expressed a melancholy fatalism: that this was
the beginning of his cessation. And so Montaigne, soon to be pained with
the illness that had killed his father, had retired to this round tower, to
this third-floor room, to pass away, undisturbed, the little that ‘may be
left of his life’.
Montaigne is now renowned as the author of the Essays, perhaps,
alongside the plays of Shakespeare and Don Quixote, one of the most
important literary works of the Renaissance. In it he attempts to essayer
or ‘test’ an amazing variety of topics, ranging from warfare to idleness,
from drunkenness to thumbs. Begun a couple of years after Montaigne’s
retirement, yet continually added to over the twenty years up to his
death, the Essays represent an amazing compendium of Renaissance
beliefs and attitudes.
But Montaigne’s erasing of the words of Lucretius from the ceiling of
his library also marks an amazing reversal in Montaigne’s outlook over
the course of his writing – a shift from a philosophy of death to a
philosophy of life.
Deeply influenced by the death of his father and the steadfastly stoical
death of his friend La Boétie, Montaigne had initially retired with death
uppermost on his mind: ‘To Philosophize is to Learn to Die,’ as he
declares in the title of one of his first essays. But over the course of his
writing, Montaigne turns his back on this pessimism and embraces a new
philosophy, in which it is ‘living happily, not … dying happily, that is
the source of human happiness’. Like James Stewart’s character in It’s A
Wonderful Life, Montaigne begins to reject despair and feel the texture of
the simple fabric of existence. And, with this, his essays grow from
simple distractions into a way of replaying, rewinding, and reliving his
life as he lives it: ‘I want to increase it in weight; I want to arrest the
speed of its flight by the speed with which I seize it … The shorter my
possession of life, the more deeply and fully I must make use of it.’
And Montaigne’s writing overflows with life. In over a hundred essays
and around half a million words he records every thought, every taste
and sensation that crosses his mind. He writes essays on sleep and on
sadness, on smells and friendship, on children and sex and death. And,
as a final testament, he writes an essay on experience, in which he
contemplates the wonder of human existence itself.
And in the text of the Essays and his Travel Journal (recounting his trip
to Italy), Montaigne explores the pains, paradoxes and pleasures of
being. He asks whether you should jump or duck at the bang of an
arquebus, or whether to stand still or run at the enemy. He tells how
Plato says you shouldn’t drink before you are eighteen, should drink
moderately until forty, but after then get drunk as often as possible. He
notes the beauty of the prostitutes of Florence (‘nothing special’) and the
Italians’ love of large breasts. He loses his wallet; he pokes himself in the
eye. He goes sledging down Mont Cenis. He goes to Pisa and meets the
learned Doctor Burro, who presents him with a book on the ebb and
flow of the sea.
Yet amidst these infinite interests there remains a heart to Montaigne’s
enquiry: his own experience of himself. For Montaigne stands at the
watershed of the two great intellectual movements of the past
millennium: the darkened vaulting of medieval Christendom and the
monstrous progeny of seventeenth-century science. In both of these,
everyday life is, in a sense, relegated: in science into mechanism and
matter; in religion into transitoriness and sin. Montaigne is like a man
standing on a platform, waiting between these two trains. Yet during this
silence, in the space of perhaps a few decades around the end of the
sixteenth century, life begins to unfurl. For what Montaigne discovers is
the power of the ordinary and the unremarkable, the value of the here-
and-now. And central to this is the idea that each and every one of us –
and he takes himself as the primary example – has a particular way of
viewing the world. He says that he sees himself as ‘a very ordinary
person, except in this regard, that I consider myself so’.
Montaigne’s writing could thus be said to be the first sustained
representation of human consciousness in Western literature. This is not
to say that people had been unconscious in the periods before, or that
accounts of individual lives had not been written, such as by Augustine
or Abelard. But no one had paid such attention to the actual experience
of living, or seen life as providing a moral lesson – in justifying political
and religious tolerance and providing a reason to continue to live. The
Christian Stoicism of the sixteenth century saw the body and the senses
as something to overcome, something which we should become
indifferent to, and life as something that could be easily relinquished,
provided the moral and theological price was right. But Montaigne
rejects this indifference and over the course of his essays finds the reason
for living in the very experience of living itself. He ponders the odour of
his doublet, the itching in his ear. He savours the wine and the water of
the towns he visits (‘smell of sulphur, a little saltiness’). He thinks that
parasols burden the arm more than they relieve his head and notes the
outcome of various enemas – ‘farted endlessly’. He tickles himself. He
dreams that he dreams. He even has himself awoken from sleep, ‘so that
I might gain a glimpse of it’.
For Montaigne, life is to be lived actively and not passively, a vitality
that led even Nietzsche – not one to hand out compliments – to
proclaim: ‘That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living
on this earth … If I were set the task, I could endeavour to make myself
at home in the world with him.’
But there is another reason for listening to this sixteenth-century Gascon
nobleman.
Modern philosophy – and some would say the modern world – starts
some thirty years after Montaigne when Descartes sequesters himself in a
small stove-heated room and asks himself what he considers to be the
most fundamental philosophical question: what can we believe with
certainty? The answer Descartes arrives at – thinking – in the form of the
maxim Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), has been a hobby-horse
for philosophers ever since. And the edifice that Descartes and other
seventeenth-century philosophers build around it – the huge glass-and-
