Like many who strive to write nonfiction I think often of Montaigne who I encountered first as a teenager–a solitary teen–one who spent considerable time alone with books. In this I am hardly unique for reading and the lives of readers are both wrapped in intensity and privation and that’s a beautiful thing. One night when I was roughly 19 or so, I asked my father why young people needed colleges and universities in order to acquire an education and he said “because they lack the fervor and loneliness to read on their own.” Accordingly I understood Montaigne’s art and his habitation as representing a lonesome man’s curriculum though there’s ample evidence he bothered to mingle. Of mingling Montaigne might have written a fine essay but he didn’t. I imagine him saying its a military art rather than something finer. But I digress.
I was thinking of Montaigne today because I have melancholy, know its older than modernity, a good deal older than philosophy itself and rather of little use. I don’t think of it as a foundation for art or a template for self-knowledge. This is one of the baseless ideas of the past two hundred years (approximately)–namely that despair, hopelessness, alienation, (call it what you will) represent the philosopher’s stone. In our time creative writing programs tend to ennoble suffering as a catalyst for art and I’ve even heard poets and fiction writers at conferences discoursing at some length about the merits of sadness as an incitement premium for art. But this is real bullshit and I know Montaigne would agree–know this because I read him long ago when I was in a cocoon of misery.
“The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness” he wrote. 16th century cheer was of course different from our own as it owed less to ideas and more to industry. People in Montaigne’s time had yet to abandon the idea of life as action. Even writing would have been understood as framing an entrance into both a house of ideas and a serviceable architecture of emotional stamina. And the latter was and is happiness.
I was translating a short poem from Finnish the other day. It goes like this:
lots of frozen lines, telephone wires, birch branches,
willows, the shore
and the sea wall, lashed by water, wind,
children walking the road in yellow rain suits
making the whole thing feel sad
Its safe to say that in our time we are reactionary readers of signs–that even the static clothing of children can ruin our romance with stormy nature. Montaigne would believe our condition preposterous, and that the loss of stoicism is a choice rather than a matter of inevitability. I like the essayist’s honor and his lack of sentiment far more than his early modernist efforts to construct a house or an ironic psyche. “Not being able to govern events I govern myself.”
Planet of the Blind 