4

4. On diversion

[From personal experience Montaigne learnt that grief and pain cannot always be cured but can often be diverted into less anguished channels. In this the body plays a major part. The soul has to be watched: human beings are so made that they can be moved to ecstasies of anger by insubstantial dreams and raving lunacies. Quintilian’s teaching that an orator first rouses an emotion in himself and then transfers it to his audience is accepted as proof of the power of wilful self-deception – a useful quality for a man who would divert his thoughts from pain, but also proof of the nothingness of Man.]

[B] Once I was charged with consoling a lady who was feeling distress – genuinely (mostly their mourning is affected and ritualistic):

Uberibus semper lachrimis, semperque paratis In statione sua, atque expectantibus illam, Quo jubeat manare modo.

[A woman has a reserve of abundant tears ever ready to flow, ever awaiting her decision to make them do so.]1

To oppose such suffering is the wrong way to proceed, for opposition goads the women on and involves them more deeply in their sadness; zeal for argument makes a bad condition worse. (We can see that from commonplace discussions: if anyone challenges some casual statement of mine I become all formal and wedded to it; more so if It is a matter of concern to me.) And then, by acting that way you set about your cure in a rough manner, whereas the first greetings which a doctor makes to his patient must be cheerful, pleasing and full of grace: nothing was ever achieved by an ugly uncouth doctor. So from the outset you must, on the contrary, encourage women’s lamentations and show that they are justified and have your approval. This understanding between you will earn you the trust needed to proceed further; then you can glide down an easy and imperceptible slope to the more steadfast arguments appropriate for curing them. Personally, since my main desire was to escape from the bystanders who all kept their eyes on me, I decided in this difficult case to plaster over the cracks. And so I found out by experience that when it came to persuasion I was unsuccessful and heavy-handed: I either offer my arguments too pointedly and drily or else too brusquely, showing too little concern. After I had sympathized with her anguish for a while, I made no assay at curing it by powerful vigorous arguments (because I never had any, or perhaps because I thought I could achieve my effect better by another way); [C] and I did not start choosing any of the various methods which philosophy prescribes for consoling grief,2 saying like Cleanthes for example that what we are lamenting is not an evil; nor did I say like the Peripatetics that it is but a light one; nor like Chrysippus that such plaints are neither just nor laudable; nor did I follow Epicurus’ remedy (which is close neighbour to my own), that of shifting her mind away from painful thoughts to pleasant ones; nor did I attack her grief with the weight of all those arguments put together, dispensing them as required like Cicero: [B] but by gently deflecting our conversation and gradually leading it on to the nearest subject, and then on to slightly more remote ones depending on how she answered me, I imperceptibly stole her from her painful thoughts; and as long as I remained with her I kept her composed and totally calm.

I made use of a diversion. But those who came to help her after me found no improvement in her, since I had not set my axe to the root of the trouble.

[C] I have doubtless touched elsewhere on the kind of diversion used in politics.3 And the practice of military diversions (such as those used by Pericles in the Peloponnesian Wars and by hundreds of others in order to tempt the enemy forces from their lands) is very common in the history books.

[B] It was an ingenious diversion by which the Sieur de Himbercourt saved himself and others in the town of Liège, which the Duke of Burgundy, who was besieging it, had obliged him to enter so as to draw up agreed terms of surrender. The citizens assembled for this purpose by night but began to rebel against what had previously been agreed; several decided to fall upon the negotiators whom they had in their power. He heard the rumble of the first wave of citizens who were coming to break into his apartments, so he at once dispatched two of the inhabitants – there were several with him – bearing new and milder conditions to put before their town council; he had made them up for the occasion, then and there. These two men calmed the original storm and led that excited mob to the Hôtel de Ville to hear the terms they were charged with and to deliberate upon them. The deliberation was brief; whereupon a second storm was unleashed, as animated as the first; so he dispatched four new mediators similar to the first two, protesting that he now wanted to announce much more tempting conditions which would entirely please and satisfy them; by this means he drove the citizens back to their conclave. In short, by managing to waste their time that way he diverted their frenzy, dissipated it in vain deliberations and eventually lulled it to sleep until daybreak – which had been his main concern.4

My next story is in the same category. Atalanta was a maiden of outstanding beauty and wonderfully fleet of foot; to rid herself of a crowd of a thousand suitors all seeking to wed her, she decreed that she would accept the one who could run a race as fast as she could, provided that all those who failed should lose their lives. There were found plenty who reckoned the prize worth the hazard and who incurred the penalty of that cruel bargain. Hippomenes’ turn to make an assay came after the others; he besought the goddess who protects all amorous passion to come to his aid. She answered his prayer by furnishing him with three golden apples and instructing him in their use. As the race was being run, when Hippomenes felt his lady pressing hard on his heels he dropped one of the apples as though inadvertently. The maiden was arrested by its beauty and did not fail to turn aside to pick it up.

Obstupuit virgo, nitidique cupidine pomi Delinat cursus, aurumque volubile tollit.

[The maiden was seized by ecstasy and desire for the smooth apple: she turns from the race and picks up the golden ball as it rolls along.]

At the right moment he did the same with the second and the third apples, finally winning the race because of those distractions and diversions.5

When our doctors cannot purge a catarrh they divert it towards another part of us where it can do less harm. I have noticed that to be also the most usual prescription for illnesses of our soul: [C] ‘Abducendus etiam non-nunquam animus est ad alia studia, solicitudines, curas, negotia; loci denique mutatione, tanquam ægroti non convalescentes, sæpe curandus est.’ [The mind is often to be deflected towards other anxieties, worries, cares and occupations; and finally it is often cured (like the sick when slow to recover) by a change of place.]6 [B] Doctors can rarely get the soul to mount a direct attack on her illness: they make her neither withstand the attack nor beat it off, parrying it rather and diverting it.

The next example is too grand and too difficult; only the highest category of men can stop to take a pure look at the phenomenon itself, reflecting on it and judging it. It behoves none but Socrates to greet death with a normal countenance, training himself for it and sporting with it. He seeks no consolation not inherent to the deed: dying seems to him a natural and neutral event; he justly fixes his gaze upon it and, without looking elsewhere, is resolved to accept it. Whereas the disciples of Hegesias (who were excited by his beautiful discourses during his lectures and who starved themselves to death [C] in such quantities that King Ptolemy forbade him to defend such murderous doctrines in his School) [B] were not considering the dying as such and were definitely not making a judgement about it; it was not on dying that they fixed their thoughts: they had a new existence in view and were dashing to it.7 Those poor wretches to be seen on our scaffolds, filled with a burning zeal to which they devote, as far as they are able, all their senses – their ears drinking in the exhortations they receive, while their arms and their eyes are lifted up to Heaven and their voices raised in loud prayer full of fierce and sustained emotion – are certainly performing a deed worthy of praise and proper to such an hour of need. We must praise them for their faith but not strictly for their constancy. They flee the struggle; they divert their thoughts from it (just as we occupy our children’s attention when we want to use a lancet on them). Some I have seen occasionally lowering their gaze on to the horrifying preparations for their death which are all about them: then they fall into a trance and cast their frenzied thoughts elsewhere.

Those who have to cross over some terrifyingly deep abyss are told to close their eyes or to avert them.

[C] On Nero’s orders Subrius Flavius was condemned to be put to death at the hands of Niger. Both were military commanders. When he was escorted to the field of execution he saw that the grave which Niger had ordered to be dug for him was uneven and shoddily made; turning to the soldiers about him he snapped, ‘You could not do even this according to your military training!’ And when Niger urged him to keep his head straight, he retorted, ‘I hope you can strike as straight!’ And he guessed right: Niger’s arms were all a-tremble and he needed several blows to chop his head off. Now there was a man who did fix his attention directly on the object.8

[B] A soldier who dies in the melee, his weapons in his hand, is not contemplating death: he neither thinks of it nor dwells on it; he is carried away by the heat of battle. An honourable man that I know was struck to the ground after entering the lists to do battle; while he was down he felt his enemy stab him nine or ten times with a dagger. Everybody present yelled at him to make peace with his conscience, but he told me later that although their words touched his ears they did not get through to him; he had no thought but of struggling loose and avenging himself; and he did kill his man in that very fight.

[C] The soldier who brought news of his sentence to Lucius Silanus did him a great service; having heard Silanus reply that he was prepared to die but not at such wicked hands, the man rushed at him with his soldiers to take him by force, while he, all unarmed as he was, stoutly resisted with fists and feet. They killed him in the struggle. By his quick and stormy anger he destroyed the pain he would have felt from the long-drawn-out death awaiting him to which he had been destined.9

[B] Our thoughts are always elsewhere. The hope of a better life arrests us and comforts us; or else it is the valour of our sons or the future glory of our family-name, or an escape from the evils of this life or from the vengeance menacing those who are causing our death:

Spero equidem mediis, si quid pia numina possunt, Supplicia hausurum scopulis, et nomine Dido Sæpe vocaturum… Audiam, et hæc manes veniet mihi fama sub imos.

[I hope that if the righteous deities can prevail you will drink the cup of my vengeance, driven on the rocks in the midst of the sea, constantly crying out the name of Dido… I shall hear it, and its fame will reach me in the deepest Underworld.]10

[C] Crowned in the victor’s garland Xenophon was performing his sacrificial rites when he was told of the death of Gryllus his son at the battle of Mantinea. His first reaction to this news was to throw down his garland; but then, when he heard of the very valorous style of his son’s death, he picked it up from the ground and placed it back on his head.

[B] When he was dying, even Epicurus found consolation in the eternity and moral usefulness of his writings:11 [C] ‘Omnes clari et nobilitati labores fiunt tolerabiles’ [All labours are bearable which bring fame and glory]; and (says Xenophon) the identical wound and travail do not grieve a General as much as an Other Rank. Epaminondas accepted death much more cheerfully for being told that his side was victorious. ‘Haec sunt solatia, haec fomenta summorum dolorum.’ [Such things bring solace and comfort to the greatest of sufferings.]

[B] Other similar circumstances can divert and distract us from considering the thing in itself. [C] In fact the arguments of philosophy are constantly skirting the matter and dodging it, scarcely grazing the outer surface with its fingertips. The great Zeno, the leading figure in the leading school of philosophy which dominates all the others,12 says this concerning death: ‘No evil is to be honoured; death is honoured: therefore death is no evil’; and he says of drunkenness, ‘No one confides his secrets to a drunkard; each man trusts the wise man: therefore the wise man will not be a drunkard.’ Do you call that hitting the bull’s-eye! I delight in seeing those first-rate minds unable to free themselves from fellowship with the likes of us! Perfect men though they may be, they always remain grossly human.

[B] Vengeance is a sweet passion deeply ingrained in us by our nature; I can see that clearly, even though I have done never experienced it. Recently, having to draw a young prince away from it, I did not start by saying that when anyone strikes you on one cheek you must, as a work of charity, turn the other,13 nor did I draw a picture of the tragic results which poets attribute to that passion. I left vengeance aside and spent my time making him savour the beauty of the opposite picture: the honour, acclaim and goodwill he would acquire from clemency and bounty.

I diverted him towards ambition. That is how we get things done.

If when in love your passion is too powerful, dissipate it, they say. And they say truly: I have often usefully made the assay. Break it down into a variety of desires, one of which may rule as master if you like, but enfeeble it and delay it by subdividing it and diverting it, lest it dominate you and tyrannize over you:

Cum morosa vago singultiet inguine vena, Conjicito humorem collectum in corpora quæque.

[When the peevish vein gurgles in your vagrant groin, ejaculate the gathered fluid into any bodies whatever.]14

And see to it quickly, lest you find yourself in trouble once it has seized hold of you,

Si non prima novis conturbes vulnera plagis, Volgivagaque vagus venere ante recentia cures

[unless you befuddle those first wounds by new ones, effacing the first by roaming as a rover through vagrant Venus.]

Once upon a time I was touched by a grief, powerful on account of my complexion and as justified as it was powerful. I might well have died from it if I had merely trusted to my own strength. I needed a mind-departing distraction to divert it; so by art and effort I made myself fall in love, helped in that by my youth. Love comforted me and took me away from the illness brought on by that loving-friendship. The same applies everywhere: some painful idea gets hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it. If I cannot substitute an opposite one for it, I can at least find a different one. Change always solaces it, dissolves it and dispels it. If I cannot fight it, I flee it; and by my flight I made a diversion and use craft; by changing place, occupation and company I escape from it into the crowd of other pastimes and cogitations, in which it loses all track of me and cannot find me.

That is Nature’s way when it grants us inconstancy; for Time, which she has given us as the sovereign doctor of our griefs,15 above all achieves its ends by furnishing our power of thought with ever more different concerns, so dissolving and breaking up the original concept however strong it may be. A wise man can see his dying friend scarcely less clearly after five-and-twenty years than after the first year, [C] and according to Epicurus not a jot less, for he attributed no lessening of our sufferings either to our anticipating them or to their growing old.16 [B] But so many other thoughts cut across the first one that in the end it grows tired and weary.

To change the direction of current gossip Alcibiades lopped off the ears and tail of his beautiful dog and then chased it out into the square, so that by giving the populace something else to chatter about they would leave his other activities in peace.17 I have known women too who have hidden their true affections under pretended ones, in order to divert people’s opinions and conjectures and to mislead the gossips. But one I knew got well and truly caught: by feigning a passion, she quitted her original one for the feigned one. From her I learned that lovers who are well received ought not to consent to such mummery: since overt greetings and meetings are reserved for that decoy of a suitor, believe you me he will not be very clever if he does not eventually take your place and give you his. [C] That really is cobbling and stitching a shoe for another to wear.

[B] We can be distracted and diverted by small things, since small things are capable of holding us. We hardly ever look at great objects in isolation: it is the trivial circumstances, the surface images, which strike us – the useless skins which objects slough off,

Folliculos ut nunc teretes æstate cicadæ Linquunt.

[such as those smooth eggshells which the cicadas cast off in summer.]18

Even Plutarch laments his daughter by recalling her babyish tricks as a child.19 We can be afflicted by the memory of a farewell, of a gesture of some special charm or a last request. Caesar’s toga threw all Rome into turmoil – something which his death did not achieve. Take the forms of address which stay ringing in our ears – ‘My poor Master’; or ‘My dear friend’; or ‘Dear papa’ or ‘My darling daughter’: if I examine them closely when their repetition grips me, I discover that the grief lies in grammar and phonetics! What affects me are the words and the intonation (just as it is not the preacher’s arguments which most often move a congregation but his interjections – like the pitiful cry of a beast being slaughtered for our use); during that time I cannot weigh the mass of my subject or penetrate to its real essence:

His se stimulis dolor ipse lacessit; [With goads such as these grief wounds its own self;]20

yet they are the foundations of our grief.

[C] The stubborn nature of my stones, especially when in my prick, has sometimes forced me into prolonged suppressions of urine during three or four days; they bring me so far into death that, given the cruelty of the strain which that condition entails, it would have been madness to hope to avoid dying or even to want to do so. (Oh what a past master of the art of torment was that fair Emperor who used to bind his criminals’ pricks and make them die for want of pissing!)21 Having got that far I would consider how light were the stimuli and the objects of my thought which could nurse a regret for life in me, and what minutiae served to construct in my soul the weight and difficulty of her departure; I would consider how frivolous are the images we find room for in so great a matter – a hound, a horse, a book, a wine-glass and what-not had their role in my loss. Others have their ambitious hopes, their money-bags or their erudition, which to my taste are no less silly. When I looked upon death as the end of my life, universally, then I looked upon it with indifference. Wholesale, I could master it: retail, it savaged me; the tears of a manservant, the distributing of my wardrobe, the known touch of a hand, a routine word of comfort discomforted me and made me weep.

[B] In the same way we disturb our souls with fictional laments; the plaints of Dido and Ariadne in Virgil and Catullus arouse the feelings of the very people who do not believe in them. [C] To experience no emotion from them is to be like Polemon (of whom that is told as a miracle) and to serve as an example of a hard and inflexible heart – but Polemon of course did not even blench when a mad dog chewed off his calf!22

[B] By inquiry no wisdom can draw so close towards understanding the condition of a living, total grief but that it will be drawn closer still by physical presence, when ears and eyes (organs which can be stirred by inessentials only) can play their part.

Is it right for the arts to serve our natural weakness and to let them profit from our inborn animal-stupidity? The orator (says Rhetoric) when acting out his case will be moved by the sound of his own voice and by his own feigned indignation; he will allow himself to be taken in by the emotion he is portraying. By acting out his part as in a play he will stamp on himself the essence of true grief and then transmit it to the judges (who are even less involved in the case than he is); it is like those mourners who are rented for funerals and who sell their tears and grief by weight and measure: for even though they only borrow their signs of grief, it is nevertheless certain that by habitually adopting the right countenance they often get carried away and find room inside themselves for real melancholy.

With several other of his friends I once had to escort the body of the Sieur de Gramont from La Fère, where he was killed in the siege, to Soissons.23 I reflected that wherever we passed it was by the sheer display of the pomp of our procession that we filled the populace with tears and lamentations, since they had never even heard of his name!

[C] Quintilian says that he had known actors to be so involved in playing the part of a mourner that they were still shedding tears after they had returned home; and of himself he says that, having accepted to arouse grief in somebody else, he had so wedded himself to that emotion that he found himself surprised not only by tears but by pallor of face and by the stoop of a man truly weighed down by grief.24

[B] In a country place hard by our mountains the women play both priest and clerk, like Father Martin. They magnify their grief for their lost husbands by recalling their good and agreeable qualities but at the same time (to counterbalance this, it seems, and to divert their pitiful feelings towards contempt) they also list and proclaim all their failings – [C] with far better grace than we have when we lose a mere acquaintance and pride ourselves on bestowing on him novel and fictitious praises, turning him, once he is lost to sight, into something quite different from what he appeared to be when we used to see him – as though regret taught us something new and tears could lave our minds and bring enlightenment to them. Here and now I renounce any flattering eulogies you may wish to make of me, not because I shall not have deserved them but because I shall then be dead!

[B] If you ask that man over there, ‘How does this siege concern you?’ he will reply: ‘I am concerned to give an example of routine obedience to my Prince; I do not expect to gain any benefit from it. And as for glory, I know what a small share of it can concern a private individual like me. I feel no passion; I make no claims.’ Yet look at him the following morning; there he is, ready for the assault in his place in the ranks; he is entirely changed, boiling, flushed with yellow bile. What has sent this new determination and hatred coursing through his veins is the glint of so much steel, the flashes of our cannon and the din of our kettle-drums.

‘A frivolous cause,’ you will say. What do you mean, cause? To excite our souls we need no causes: they can be controlled and excited by some raving disembodied fancy based on nothing. When I throw myself into building castles in the air my imagination forges me pleasures and comforts which give real delight and joy to my soul. How often do we encumber our spirits with yellow bile or sadness by means of such shadows? And we put ourselves into fantastical rages, deleterious to our souls and bodies! [C] What confused, ecstatic, madly laughing grimaces can be brought to our faces by such ravings! What jerkings of our limbs and trembling of our voices! That man over there is on his own, but does he not seem to be deceived by visions of a crowd of other men whom he has to deal with, or else to be persecuted by some devil within him?25

[B] Ask yourself where is the object which produced such an alteration: apart from us men, is there anything in nature which is sustained by inanities or over which they have such power? Cambyses dreamt in his sleep that his brother was to become King of Persia; so he killed him – a beloved brother whom he had always relied on! Aristodemus, King of the Messenians, on account of an idea put into his head of some ill omen read into the howling of his dogs, killed himself. King Midas did the same, disturbed and worried by some unpleasant dream he had had.26

Abandoning your life for a dream is to value it for exactly what it is worth.27 Listen [C] though [B] to our soul triumphing over her wretched body and its frailty, as the butt of all indispositions and degradations. A fat lot of reason she has to talk!

O prima infælix fingenti terra Prometheo! Ille parum cauti pectoris egit opus.Corpora disponens, mentem non vidit in arte; Recta animi primum debuit esse via.

[O wretched clay which Prometheus first moulded! How unwisely he wrought! By his art he arranged the body but saw not the mind. The right way would have been to start off with the soul.]28