[B] Vidimus et toto quamvis in corpore cæso
Nil animæ letale datum, moremque nefandæ
Durum sævitiæ pereuntis parcere morti.
[We saw his body all covered with wounds, but no lethal one was allowed it, by a custom of atrocious cruelty which kept death from the dying.]10
[A] It is not at all difficult to say when you are quite well and quite calm that you have decided to kill yourself: it is easy to act the formidable fighter before you come to grips; so Heliogabalus,11 the most unmanly man in the world, in the midst of his vile debaucheries planned to end his life [C] daintily [A] whenever circumstances should force him to; and so that his death should not belie the rest of his life, he had caused to be built a gorgeous tower, the base and façade of which were enriched with gold and jewels, expressly to throw himself down from it. He made ropes of gold, and of crimson silk as well, to strangle himself with, and a sword of beaten gold to run himself through with; and he kept potions in vessels of emerald and topaz to poison himself with, so that he could choose one or other of these ways of dying as his fancy moved him:
[B] Impiger et fortis virtute coacta
[Ready to die and strong – by an enforced valour.]12
[A] However in his case the delicacy of his preparations renders it likely that when it came to the crunch he would have started snivelling blood!
Yet even in those more vigorous men who had made up their minds to carry it out, we must (I insist) look to see if it was to be by a blow which removed any possibility of their feeling its effect; for if they were to see their life dripping away drop by drop, with their body’s awareness mingling with that of their soul and offering them the means for a change of heart, it is a matter of conjecture whether we would find them stubborn and constant in so perilous an intent.
During Caesar’s civil wars, Lucius Domitius was captured in Abruzzi, poisoned himself and then changed his mind.13 In our own days there was the case of a man who had decided to die but with his first assay at it he did not go deep enough since his quivering flesh made his arm flinch; he did give himself two or three wounds afterwards, but could never bring himself to thrust his blows right home.
[C] When Plantius Sylvanus was on trial his grandmother Urgulania sent him a dagger; he could not manage to kill himself with it but got his servants to slash his veins.14 [B] In the time of Tiberius, Albucilla tried to kill herself but the blow was too light; she thus gave her enemies the means of taking her prisoner and killing her their own way.15 Much the same happened to Demothenes (the captain) after his defeat in Sicily.16 [C] Caius Fimbria also struck himself too weak a blow and got his manservant to finish him off.17 On the other hand Ostorius, who was unable to use his own arm, disdained to use that of his servant except for holding the dagger straight and firm: he ran on to it, offering his throat and stabbing it through.18
[A] Meat such as this must, in truth, be swallowed unchewed, unless you have a gizzard paved with frost-nails! The Emperor Hadrian got his doctor to mark with a circle the exact spot round his tit where a blow would prove fatal; the man he made responsible for killing him had to aim at that target.19 Which explains why Caesar, when asked what kind of death he found most desirable, replied, ‘The least anticipated and the quickest.’20 [B] If Caesar dared to say it I can no longer be a coward for thinking the same.
[A] ‘A quick death,’ says Pliny, ‘is the sovereign blessing of human life.’21 People hate reconnoitring death. No man can be said to be resolute in death who refuses to haggle with it and who cannot look at it with his eyes open. Those men at the gallows whom we see running to their end, hastening and hurrying towards it, are not doing so because they are resolute: they want to deprive themselves of time to think about it:
Emori nolo, sed me esse mortuum nihili aestimo.
[I think nothing of being dead: it is the dying that I dislike.]22
I know from experience that I could attain to that degree of steadfastness, like men who dive into dangers as into the sea – with their eyes closed.
[C] According to my standards there is nothing more glorious in the life of Socrates than his having had thirty whole days to chew over his death and his having digested it, all that time, with a most certain hope, without fuss, without alteration and with a line of conduct and conversation subdued and relaxed by the weight of that thought rather than heightened and tensed.
[A] When he was ill, Pomponius Atticus (to whom Cicero addressed his epistles)23 summoned his son-in-law Agrippa and two or three other friends and told them that he had essayed it and knew that he had nothing to gain from wanting to be cured: everything he was doing to prolong his life was both prolonging and increasing his suffering; so he had decided to end them both. He begged them to approve of his decision, or at least not to waste their efforts on trying to dissuade him. Whereupon, having chosen to die by starvation, by accident his illness was cured! The remedy he had chosen to end his life restored him to health. His doctors and his friends feasted such a happy outcome and were rejoicing in his presence but they were much mistaken: for all that, they did not find it possible to make him go back on his decision: he said that he had to go through with it some time or other and that, having got thus far, he wanted to rid himself of the trouble of starting all over again on another occasion. That man, having had leisure to make a reconnaissance of death, not only was not disheartened at joining battle with it, he was keen to do so; once he had been satisfied by his reasons for entering the fight, he spurred himself on bravely to see the end of it.24
It is to go far beyond having no fear of death actually to want to taste it, to savour it.
[C] The account of what happened to Cleanthes the philosopher is a close parallel. His gums were swollen and rotting; the doctors advised extreme abstinence. After two days of fasting he made such a good recovery that they pronounced him cured and allowed him to return to his usual way of life. He on the other hand already savouring a kind of sweetness in his failing powers, determined not to retreat and crossed that boundary towards which he had so firmly advanced.25
[A] Tullius Marcellinus, a Roman youth, wishing to forestall his fatal hour so as to rid himself of an illness which was battering him more than he was prepared to put up with even though his doctors promised him a certain, but not a quick, cure, called his friends together to consider the matter. ‘Some,’ says Seneca, ‘gave him the advice which they would have cowardly chosen for themselves; others, out of flattery, the advice which they thought would be most pleasing to him; but a Stoic said the following: “Do not toil over it, Marcellinus, as if you were considering anything important: it is no great thing to be alive: your servants and the animals are; the great thing is to die honourably, wisely and with constancy. Think how long you have been doing the same things – eating, drinking and sleeping: drinking, sleeping and eating. We are for ever going round in that circle; not only bad and intolerable mishaps but merely being sated with living gives us a desire for death.” ’
Marcellinus – he went on – did not need anyone to advise him: he wanted someone who could help him. His servants were frightened of getting mixed up with it; but that Stoic philosopher made them understand that a man’s domestic servants fall under suspicion only when there is reason to doubt that their master’s death was deliberate; therefore they would set as bad an example by hindering him as by murdering him, since
Invitum qui servat idem facit occidenti.
[To save a man against his will is the same as murdering him.]26
He then suggested to Marcellinus that, just as when we have finished our dinners we leave what is left on the tables for those who have waited on us, so too, having finished his life, it would not be inappropriate to distribute something among those who were to help him. Now Marcellinus was of a frank and generous mind; he caused a certain sum to be shared among his servants and comforted them. For the rest, he needed neither blade nor bloodshed: he undertook not to run away from this life but to take leave of it; not to escape from
this life but to assay death. And to give himself leisure to haggle with it, he gave up all food; three days later he had himself sprinkled with warm water; he failed away gradually, not, judging from what he said, without a feeling of pleasure. Indeed those who have experienced such failings away of the mind brought on by weakness say that they felt no pain but rather indeed a certain kind of pleasure, like dropping off to sleep and resting.27
There you have deaths which have been carefully prepared for and digested. But so that Cato alone should furnish a complete model of virtue it seems that his good Destiny gave him some trouble in the arm with which he dealt himself the blow, in order to afford him leisure to confront Death and to fall about its neck, strengthening his courage in that peril not weakening it. And if it had been up to me to portray him in his most exalted posture, it would have shown him all covered with blood and tearing out his entrails, rather than sword in hand as did the sculptors of his time. For that second murder was more ecstatic than the first.28
14. How our mind tangles itself up
[Stoic philosophers were in a quandary about adiaphora, (that is) things which are ‘indifferent’ – neither good nor bad in themselves. How can the wise man possibly choose between them? Montaigne is led to conclude this short chapter with a lesson about human pride and the weakness of reason.]
[A] It is a pleasant thought to imagine a mind exactly poised between two parallel desires, for it would indubitably never reach a decision, since making a choice implies that there is an inequality of value; if anyone were to place us between a bottle and a ham when we had an equal appetite for drink and for food there would certainly be no remedy but to die of thirst and of hunger!1
In order to provide against this difficulty the Stoics, when you ask them how our souls manage to choose between two things which are indifferent and how we come to take one coin rather than another from a large number of crowns when they are all alike and there is no reason which can sway our preference, reply that this motion in our souls is extraordinary and not subject to rules, coming into us from some outside impulse, incidental and fortuitous.
It seems to me that we could say that nothing ever presents itself to us in which there is not some difference, however slight: either to sight or to touch there is always an additional something which attracts us even though we may not perceive it.
Similarly if anyone would postulate a cord, equally strong throughout its length, it is impossible, quite impossible, that it should break. For where would you want it to start to fray? And it is not in nature for it all to break at once.
Then if anyone were to follow that up with those geometrical propositions which demonstrate by convincing demonstrations that the container is greater than the thing contained and that the centre is as great as the circumference, and which can find two lines which ever approach each other but can never meet,2 and then with the philosopher’s stone and the squaring of the circle, where reason and practice are so opposed, he would perhaps draw from them arguments to support the bold saying of Pliny: ‘Solum certum nihil esse certi, et homine nihil miserius aut superbius.’ [There is nothing certain except that nothing is certain, and nothing more wretched than Man nor more arrogant.]3
15. That difficulty increases desire
[The opening words of this chapter are a Pyrrhonist saying inscribed in Montaigne’s library. Montaigne sees the principle of contrariness working in all things, in virtue as in vice, in politics as in God’s Church. We are shown also that, in a matter of the greatest importance, Montaigne lived in accordance with his principles. The area around his estates at Montaigne was fiercely fought over and often controlled by his opponents, but he never fortified his manor-house nor hid his spoons.]
[A] ‘No reason but has its contrary,’ says the wisest of the Schools of Philosophy.1
I have just been chewing over that other fine saying which one of the Ancient philosophers cites as a reason for holding life in contempt: ‘No good can bring us pleasure except one which we have prepared ourselves to lose’;2 [C] ‘In aequo est dolor amissae rei et timor amittendae;’ [Sorrow for something lost is equal to the fear of losing it;]3 he wanted to show by that that the fruition of life can never be truly pleasing if we go in fear of losing it.4
But we could, on the contrary, say that we clasp that good in an embrace which is all the fonder and all the tighter in that we see it as less surely ours, and fear that it may be taken from us. For we know from evidence that the presence of cold helps fire burn brighter and that our wills are sharpened by flat opposition:
[B] Si nunquam Danaen habuisset ahenea turris,
Non esset Danae de Jove facta parens.
[Danae would never have had a child by Juppiter had she never been shut up in a tower of bronze.]5
[A] We see also that by nature there is nothing so contrary to our tastes than that satiety which comes from ease of access; and nothing which sharpens them more than rareness and difficulty: ‘Omnium rerum voluptas ipso quo debet fugare periculo crescit.’ [In all things pleasure is increased by the very danger which ought to make us flee from them.]6
Galla, nega: satiatur amor, nisi gaudia torquent.
[Say ‘No’ to him, Galla: Love is soon sated unless joys meet torments.]7
To keep love in trim Lycurgus ordained that married couples in Sparta should only have intercourse with each other by stealth, and that it should be as much a disgrace for them to be discovered lying together as lying with others.8 The difficulty of arranging trysts, the danger of being surprised, the embarrassment on the morning after,
et languor, et silentium,
Et latere petitus imo spiritus
[and listlessness and no word spoken and the sigh coming from the depth of our bosom]9
– that is what gives smack to the sauce. [C] How many pleasant and very stimulating verbal frolics arise from the chaste and modest vocabulary we use when talking of sexual intercourse. [A] Pleasure itself seeks stimulation from pain. [A1] It tastes far more sweet when it hurts and takes your skin off. [A] Flora, the courtesan, said that she had never lain with Pompey without making him bear the marks of her teeth:10
Quod petiere premunt arcte, faciuntque dolorem
Corporis, et dentes inlidunt sæpe labellis:
Et stimuli subsunt, qui instigant lædere idipsum,
Quodcunque est, rabies unde illæ germina surgunt.
[The object of their desire they tightly hug, hurting each other’s body; they keep sinking their teeth into each other’s lips; some hidden goads prick them on to give pain to the very thing, whatever it is, from which spring the seeds of their ecstasy.]11
So it is with everything: it is difficulty which makes us prize things.
[B] The people of the Marches of Ancona more readily go to Saint James of Compostela to make their vows: those of Galicia, to Our Lady of Loreto. At Liège they sing the praises of the baths at Lucca: in Tuscany, of those of Spa-by-Liège. You hardly ever see a Roman in the fencing school of Rome: it is full of Frenchmen! Great Cato tired of his wife – just like the rest of us – while she was his: when she belonged to another he yearned for her.12 [C] I had an old stallion which I put out to stud: there was no holding it back when it scented the mares. The ease of it all soon sated it where its own mares were concerned; but with other mares, as soon as one passes by its paddock it returns to its incessant neighings and its frenzied passions just as before.
[A] Our appetite scorns and passes over what it holds in its hand, so as to run after what it does not have:
Transvolat in medio posita, ed fugientia captat.
[He leaps over what lies fixed in his path, to chase after whatever runs away.]13
To forbid us something is to make us want it:
[B] Nisi tu servare puellam
Incipis, incipiet desinere esse mea!
[Unless you start looking after that girl of yours better, I shall soon stop wanting her!]14
[A] To hand it over to us completely is to breed contempt for it in u
s. To Want and Plenty befall identical misfortunes.15
Tibi quod superest, mihi quod defit, dolet.
[You have too much of it, and that pains you: what pains me is that I do not have enough.]16
We are equally troubled by desiring something and by possessing it. [A1] Coldness in mistresses is most painful, but in very truth compliance and availability are even more so; that is because the yearning which is born in us from the high opinion in which we hold the object of our love sharpens our love, and the choler similarly makes it hot: but satiety engenders a feeling of insipidness; our passion then is blunted, hesitant, weary and half-asleep:
[B] Si qua volet regnare diu, contemnat amantem.
[If any mistress wants to go on reigning over her lover, then let her scorn him.]17
Contemnite, amantes,
Sic hodie veniet si qua negavit heri.
[Scorn your mistress, young lovers: then she will come back today for what she denied you yesterday.]18
[C] Why did Poppaea hit on the idea of hiding the beauties of her face behind a mask if not to make them more precious to her lovers?19
The Complete Essays Page 84