The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [B] This shaking of the foundations stimulated me rather than flattened me, thanks to my sense of right and wrong which acted not merely peaceably but proudly, and I found nothing to reproach myself with. And since God never sends us pure evils any more than pure blessings, my own health held out better than usual throughout this period: and just as without health I can achieve nothing, with health there are few things which I cannot achieve. It provided me with the means of quickening my store of wisdom and of stretching forth my hand to parry blows which would readily have wounded more deeply. And in bearing my afflictions I found some means of withstanding Fortune and found that it would take some great shock to throw me from the saddle. (I do not say that to provoke her into making a more vigorous attack on me! I am her ‘most obedient servant’: my hands are raised in supplication: let her be satisfied, for God’s sake!)

  Do I feel her assaults? Of course I do. As39 those who are overwhelmed and obsessed by grief yet allow some pleasure to fondle them from time to time and to release a smile, so too I have enough hold over myself to make my usual state a peaceful one, free from the burden of painful reflections; yet I can allow myself occasionally to be surprised by those biting and unpleasant thoughts which, while I am arming myself to drive them off or struggle against them, come along and batter me.

  Following hard upon the others a worse calamity befell me: the plague, of unique virulence, raged both inside my home and around it; for, just as healthy bodies fall prey only to the most serious of illnesses, which alone can get a hold on them, similarly the air around my estates (which in human memory had never given a foothold to contagion, even when it came very close) once it was corrupted produced strange effects40 indeed:

  Mista senum et juvenum densantur funera, nullum

  Sœva caput Proserpina fugit.

  [Young and old come in crowds to be buried: cruel Proserpine spares no one’s head.]

  I had to put up with a fine state of affairs: the very sight of my house was terrifying. Everything inside lay unprotected, left to anyone who wanted it. I, who am so hospitable myself, had to go in painful quest of a refuge for my family – a family of castaways, a source of fear to those who loved us and to itself, and of terror wherever it sought to settle, having to change quarters as soon as one of us got a slightly sore finger. All illnesses are then taken to be the plague: no time is allowed to probe them. And (best of all!) according to the rules of the Art, every time you are exposed to risk, you spend your quarantine in an ecstatic dread of that illness; your imagination meanwhile has its own way of agitating you, making your very health sweat with fever.

  All of which would have touched me far less if I did not have to worry about others, spending six wretched months acting as guide for that caravan: for I myself bear within me my own prophylactics, namely determination and long-suffering. I am not much bothered by dread (which is particularly to be feared in this illness): and so, if I alone had sought to make an escape, it would have been a merrier and more distant one. It is not, I think, the worst of deaths: it is normally short, marked by numbness and lack of pain, comforted by being shared by many, without ritual and without a crowd of mourners.

  As for those who dwelt around us, not one in a hundred escaped:

  videos desertaque regna

  Pastorum, et longe saltus lateque vacantes.

  [you may see the abandoned realms of the shepherds and, far and wide, the deserted pastures.]41

  Down here my income is mainly from farm-labour; now, the land which once had a hundred men on it working for me has long lain fallow. At that time what exemplary resignation did we see among all those simple folk. In general each one gave up worrying about his life. The grapes, the principal produce of the region, remained hanging on the vines, since everybody without exception was ready, awaiting death that night or next morning with voices and faces so little terrified that it seemed they had all made a pact with that unavoidable evil, and that the sentence upon them was universal and inevitable. That sentence always is! Yet our resolution in death hangs on so little: its being delayed by a few hours, or the mere factor of our having companions, make us [C] conceive of death [B] differently.42 But just look at these folk: they are no longer amazed that, babes, children and old men, they are all to die the same month: they no longer weep for themselves. I saw some who were afraid that they would be left behind as in some ghastly wilderness; the only worry that I know they had concerned their burial: it disturbed them to see corpses scattered over the fields at the mercy of the beasts, which at once started to thrive there. [C] (How incompatible human notions are! The Neorites, a people subjugated by Alexander, abandon the bodies of their dead deep in their forests, there to be eaten – for them it is the only blessed form of sepulture.)43 [B] One man, in good health, was already digging his grave: others would lie down in theirs while there was still life in them. And one of my day-labourers pulled the earth over himself as he lay dying, using his hands and feet. Was he not donning his own shroud so as to lay himself more comfortably at rest – [C] a deed in some ways as sublime as that of those Roman soldiers who, after the Battle of Cannae, were discovered to have dug holes in the ground, thrust in their heads, drawn in the soil and suffocated themselves?44

  [B] In short, an entire people, at a stroke and pragmatically, were brought to a state which yielded nothing in firmness of purpose to any studied philosophical steadfastness. Most of the teachings which schooling supplies us with to give us courage have more ostentation than fortitude, and are cultivated more for decoration than for profit. We have abandoned Nature and want to teach her own lessons to her who used to guide us so happily and surely. And yet such traces of her teachings and whatever little of her image remain by favour of ignorance stamped on the life of that crowd of uncultured country-folk, Erudition is compelled to go and beg from them, day in, day out, in order to supply patterns of constancy, simplicity and tranquillity for its own pupils. Fine it is to see the latter, full as they are of fair learning, having to imitate that untutored simplicity – imitating it moreover in the most basic acts of virtue; fine too that our wisdom must learn from the very beasts the lessons most useful for the greatest and most necessary aspects of our life: how we should live and die, manage our goods, love and educate our offspring and maintain justice. That is a singular witness that humanity is sick and that our reason (which we mould as we will, ever finding some novelty or some different approach) leaves behind in us no manifest trace of Nature. Men have done to Nature what makers of perfume have done to their essential oil: they have adulterated her with so many arguments and extraneous reasonings that she has become varied, different for each man,45 having lost her own unchanging universal visage and so making us seek her testimony from the beasts, which are not subject to bias, corruption or diversity of opinion. For while it is indeed true that even they do not always exactly follow the path of Nature, yet they stray so little from it that you can always see Nature’s rut. It is as with horses: when you lead them along they jump about, making little rebellions which extend no further than their leading-reins, meanwhile always following the steps of the man who is guiding them; and like the hawk which takes to flight, but always under the control of its string.

  [C] ‘Exilia, tormenta, bella, morbos, naufragia meditate, ut nullo sis mala tiro.’ [Practise banishments, torments, wars, diseases and shipwrecks, so that you may not be a tyro in any misfortune.]46 – [B] What is the use of that curious desire to anticipate all the ills that can befall human nature and to prepare ourselves even against those which may perhaps never touch us? [C] ‘Parent passis tristiam facit, pati posse’ [The possibility of suffering makes one as sad as actual suffering]:47 we are hit not only by the bullet but by its bang and its wind! [B] Or why, like the most fevered minds (for fever it is) do we ask to be whipped right now, just because it may be that Fortune will, perhaps, make you suffer a whipping some day? [C] Or why do you not don your fur coat on Midsummer’s Day, because you will need it at Christmas!

/>   [B] ‘Cast yourself into experiencing such ills as may befall you, [C] especially [B] the more extreme ones:48 test yourself against them,’ men say, ‘make absolutely certain.’

  On the contrary; it would be more easy and more natural to free your very thoughts of such a burden. They will not come quick enough! Their true essence does not last long enough for us! And so, as though they did not weigh sufficiently upon our senses, our minds must go and extend them and prolong them, incorporating them within us beforehand. [C] ‘They will weigh on us enough once they are there,’ said one of the leaders, not of the tenderest school but the toughest. ‘Meanwhile decide in your own favour: believe what suits you best. What use is it to you to go welcoming and anticipating your ill fortune, losing the present because of fear of the future, and being miserable now because you must be so eventually?’49 Those are his very words.

  [B] ‘Learning certainly does us a good service by instructing us very precisely about the dimensions of all evils’:

  Curis acuens mortalia corda.

  [Sharpening with cares the minds of men.]50

  What a pity if a little of their size should escape our sensations and our knowledge! It is certain that most preparations for death have caused more torment than undergoing it. [C] It was said in former times, most freely, by a most judicious author, ‘minus afficit sensus fatigatio quam cogitatio.’ [Our senses are less affected by hardships than by hard thinking.]51

  The feeling that death is present is, of itself, sometimes enough to stir us to a quick resolve no longer to seek to avoid the inevitable. Several gladiators in former times were seen, after putting up a cowardly fight, to accept death most courageously, offering their throats to their opponents’ swords and welcoming them; but contemplating a future death requires a more leisurely steadfastness, one more difficult therefore to supply.52

  [B] If you do not know how to die, never mind. Nature will tell you how to do it on the spot, plainly and adequately. She will do this job for you most punctiliously: do not worry about it:

  Incertain frustra, mortales, funeris horam

  Quœrtis, et qua sit mors aditura via.

  [In vain, O mortals, do you strive to know the uncertain hour of your death and by which road it will come.]53

  Pœna minor certam subito perferre ruinant,

  Quod timeas gravius sustinuisse diu.

  [It is less painful to have to undergo sudden and sure destruction than long to anticipate what you fear the most.]

  We confuse life with worries about death, and death with worries about life. [C] One torments us: the other terrifies us. [B] We are not preparing ourselves to die: that is too momentary a matter. [C] A quarter of an hour of pain, without after-effects, without annoyance, has no need of precepts of its own. [B] To speak truly, we prepare ourselves against our preparations for death! Philosophy first commands us to have death ever before our eyes, to anticipate it and to consider it beforehand, and then she gives us rules and caveats in order to forestall our being hurt by our reflections and our foresight! Thus do doctors tip us into illnesses in order that they may have the means of employing their drugs and their Art.

  [C] If we have not known how to live, it is not right to teach us how to die, making the form of the end incongruous with the whole. If we have known how to live steadfastly and calmly we shall know how to die the same way. They may bluster as much as they like, saying that ‘tota philosophorum vita commentatio mortis est’ [the entire life of philosophers is a preparation for death];54 but my opinion is that death is indeed the ending of life, but not therefore its End: it puts an end to it; it is its ultimate point; but it is not its objective. Life must be its own objective, its own purpose. Its right concern is to rule itself, govern itself, put up with itself. Numbered among its other duties included under the general and principal heading, How to live, there is the sub-section, How to die. If our fears did not lend it weight, dying would be one of our lighter duties.

  [B] Judging from their usefulness and naïve truth, the teachings of Simple-mindedness are not much inferior to those contrary ones which are lectured upon by Erudition. Men differ in tastes and fortitude: they must each be brought, by differing routes, to what is good for them, each according to his nature:

  [C] Quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes.

  [Wherever the storm may drive me, there I land and find a welcome.]55

  [B] I have never known even one of my neighbouring peasants embark upon thoughts about what countenance and steadfastness he will show in his final hour. Nature teaches him never to reflect on death except when he lies a–dying. Then he does it with better grace than Aristotle, who is doubly oppressed by death: by death itself and by his long [C] anticipation. [B] That is why Caesar opined that the happiest and least burdensome of deaths was the one least [C] thought about.56‘Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet qu am necesse est.’ [He who suffers before he needs to, suffers more than he needs to.]

  The painfulness of such thoughts is born of our excessive interest. We are always getting in our own way, wishing to forestall and overmaster Nature’s prescriptions. Only dons ought to die more badly when they are well, glowering at the thought of death. Common folk need no remedy nor consolation save when the blow falls; and then they reflect on it all the more justly since they are feeling it. [B] We assert (do we not) that what gives the common folk their power to endure [C] present ills, [B] as well as their profound indifference towards inauspicious future events, is their insensitivity and [C] lack of [B] understanding57 [C] and the fact that their souls, being crass and obtuse, are less open to penetration and disturbance. [B] If that is so, then for God’s sake let us adhere, from now on, to that School of animal stupidity! It leads its pupils to the ultimate profit promised by the sciences; and does it gently. We shall not lack good professors to interpret that natural simplicity. Socrates for one. For, as far as I can recall, he says more or less the following to the judges who were deliberating about his life:

  Gentlemen: I am afraid that if I were to beseech you not to put me to death I should impale myself on the denunciation of my accusers: namely that I claim to know more than everyone else, because I have some more [C] secret [B] knowledge58 of things above us and of things below. I know that I have neither frequented death nor reconnoitred it; nor do I know anyone who, having assayed what it is like, can teach me about it. Those who fear death presuppose that they know it. As for me, I know neither what death is nor what the world to come is like. Death may be something indifferent or something desirable. [C] (We may believe, however, that it is a migration, a crossing from one place to another, and that there is some improvement in going to live among so many great men who have crossed that divide – and to be free from having to deal with wicked and corrupt judges! If death be a reduction of our being to nothingness, it is still an improvement to enter upon a long and peaceful night. We know of nothing in life sweeter than quiet rest and deep dreamless sleep.) [B] That which I know to be wicked, such as harming one’s neighbour and disobeying a superior, be it God or man, I scrupulously avoid. I cannot go in fear of things when I do not know whether they be good or evil.59

  [C] If I go off to my death and leave you here alive, the gods alone know whether you or I will have the better of it. So, as far as it concerns me, you will please give such a sentence as suits yourselves. But following my way of giving just and useful counsel, I do say that, unless you can see more deeply into my case than I can, you would do better for your consciences’ sake to set me free; and also that, having made your judgement in keeping with my past deeds (both public and private), and also in keeping with my intentions and in keeping with the profit which so many of our citizens, both young and old, daily derive from my conversation and the advantages I bring to you, to all of you: you cannot properly release yourselves of your debt towards my merit except by issuing an order that I be maintained in the Prytaneum – at public expense, given my poverty – something which I have often seen you grant, with le
ss reason, to others.

  Do not take it as stubbornness or contempt if I do not follow precedent and become a suppliant moving you to pity.

  Being no more than anyone else ‘engendered by sticks and stones’, as Homer puts it, I have friends and relations well able to appear before you in tears and grief; and I have three weeping children who can move you to pity. But I would bring shame on our city if, at my age, and having that reputation for wisdom (with which I am now charged) I were to sink to such cowardly behaviour. What would people say about the other Athenians! I have always counselled those who listened to me never to ransom their life by a dishonourable deed. And in my country’s wars, at Amphipolis, at Potidaea, at Delium, as well in others in which I played a part, I showed in practice how far I was from ensuring my safety by my shame.