2

2. On repenting

[Montaigne does not deal here primarily with the sacrament of repentance but with the act of repenting in domains religious, moral and practical. In this sense repenting consists not in regret but in denying the rightness of what one had formerly willed. Like Rabelais’s good giant Gargantua, Montaigne knows that a man may live as a Christian gentleman: ‘without reproach though not of course without sin’. And Montaigne’s sense of sin is not a matter of wishing in old age that he had not committed the sins (especially the sensual sins) of his youth nor the worse sins of old men; neither is it a matter of wishing that he had been vouchsafed a higher Form than Man (that of an angel) or a better human Form than his own botched one (a Form like Cato’s). In practical affairs, however they turn out, Montaigne sees no cause for repenting of decisions honourably made within Man’s limitations; in his dealings with others in peace and civil war he knows he has acted as an honourable gentleman, far better than most. Where sins against the Christian God are concerned, Montaigne never hid from himself the ugly face which lurks behind their stormy beauty; that is where repentance comes in; real repentance – of the demanding, ultimate kind which alone moves Montaigne – is an agonizing matter: we must see ourselves throughly, as with the eyes of God who searches the reins and the bowels and from whom no secrets are hidden. To do that ‘God must touch our hearts’ – an act of grace which became the superscription of a religious emblem.]

[B] Others form Man; I give an account of Man and sketch a picture of a particular one of them who is very badly formed and whom I would truly make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him afresh. But it is done now. The brush-strokes of my portrait do not go awry even though they do change and vary. The world is but a perennial see-saw. Everything in it – the land, the mountains of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt – all waver with a common motion and their own.1 Constancy itself is nothing but a more languid rocking to and fro. I am unable to stabilize my subject: it staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness. I grasp it as it is now, at this moment when I am lingering over it. I am not portraying being but becoming: not the passage from one age to another (or, as the folk put it, from one seven-year period to the next) but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must adapt this account of myself to the passing hour. I shall perhaps change soon, not accidentally but intentionally. This is a register of varied and changing occurrences, of ideas which are unresolved and, when needs be, contradictory, either because I myself have become different or because I grasp hold of different attributes or aspects of my subjects. So I may happen to contradict myself but, as Demades said, I never contradict truth.2 If my soul could only find a footing I would not be assaying myself but resolving myself. But my soul is ever in its apprenticeship and being tested. I am expounding a lowly, lacklustre existence. You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as well as to one of richer stuff. Every man bears the whole Form of the human condition.3 [C] Authors communicate themselves to the public by some peculiar mark foreign to themselves; – the first ever to do so – by my universal being, not as a grammarian, poet or jurisconsult but as Michel de Montaigne. If all complain that I talk too much about myself, I complain that they never even think about their own selves.

[B] But is it reasonable that I who am so private in my habits should claim to make public this knowledge of myself? And is it also reasonable that I should expose to a world in which grooming has such credit and artifice such authority the crude and simple effects of Nature – and of such a weakling nature too? Is writing a book without knowledge or art not like building a wall without stones and so on? The fancies of the Muses are governed by art: mine, by chance. But I have one thing which does accord with sound teaching: never did man treat a subject which he knew or understood better than I know and understand the subject which I have undertaken: in that subject I am the most learned man alive! Secondly, no man ever [C] went more deeply into his matter, ever stripped barer its own peculiar members and consequences, or ever [B] reached more precisely or more fully the goal he had proposed for his endeavour. To finish the job I only need to contribute fidelity: and fidelity is there, as clean and as pure as can be found. I tell the truth, not enough to make me replete but as much as I dare – and as I grow older I dare a little more, for custom apparently concedes to old age a greater licence to chatter more indiscreetly about oneself. What cannot happen here is what I often find elsewhere: that the craftsman and his artefact thwart each other: ‘How can a man whose conversation is so decent come to write such a scurrilous book?’ or ‘How can such learned writings spring from a man whose conversation is so weak?’

[C] When a man is commonplace in discussion yet valued for what he writes that shows that his talents lie in his borrowed sources not in himself. A learned man is not learned in all fields: but a talented man is talented in all fields, even in ignorance. [B] Here, my book and I go harmoniously forward at the same pace. Elsewhere you can commend or condemn a work independently of its author; but not here: touch one and you touch the other. Anyone who criticizes it without knowing that will harm himself more than me; anyone who does know it has satisfied me completely. I shall be blessed beyond my merit if public approval will allow me this much: that I have made intelligent people realize that I would have been capable of profiting from learning if I had had any and that I deserved more help from my memory.

Let me justify here what I often say: that I rarely repent [C] and that my conscience is happy with itself – not as the conscience of an angel is nor of a horse, but as behoves the conscience of a man4 – [B] ever adding this refrain (not a ritual one but one of simple and fundamental submission): that I speak as an ignorant questioning man: for solutions I purely and simply abide by the common lawful beliefs.5 I am not teaching, I am relating.

There is no vice that is truly a vice which is not odious and which a wholesome judgement does not condemn; for there is so much evident ugliness and impropriety in it that perhaps those philosophers are right who maintain that it is principally the product of stupidity and ignorance, so hard it is to imagine that anyone could recognize it without loathing it.6 [C] Evil swallows most of its own venom and poisons itself. [B] Vice leaves repentance in the soul like an ulcer in the flesh which is forever scratching itself and bleeding.7 For reason can efface other griefs and sorrows, but it engenders those of repentance which are all the more grievous for being born within us, just as the chill and the burn of our fevers are more stinging than such as come to us from outside. I hold to be vices (though each according to its measure) not only those vices which are condemned by reason and nature but even those which have been forged by the opinions of men, even when false or erroneous, provided that law and custom lend them their authority.

Likewise there is no goodness which does not rejoice a well-born nature. There is an unutterable delight in acting well which makes us inwardly rejoice; a noble feeling of pride accompanies a good conscience. A soul courageous in its vice can perhaps furnish itself with composure but it can never provide such satisfaction and happiness with oneself. It is no light pleasure to know oneself to be saved from the contagion of a corrupt age and to be able to say of oneself: ‘Anyone who could see right into my soul would even then not find me guilty of any man’s ruin or affliction, nor of envy nor of vengeance, nor of any public attack on our laws, nor of novelty or disturbance, nor of breaking my word. And even though this licentious age not only allows it but teaches it to each of us, I have nevertheless not put my hand on another Frenchman’s goods or purse but have lived by my own means, in war as in peace; nor have I exploited any man’s labour without due reward.’ Such witnesses to our conscience are pleasant; and such natural rejoicing is a great gift: it is the only satisfaction which never fails us.

Basing the recompense of virtuous deeds on another’s approbation is to accept too uncertain and confused a foundation – [C] especially since in a corrupt and ignorant period like our own to be in good esteem with the masses is an insult: whom would you trust to recognize what was worthy of praise! May God save me from being a decent man according to the self-descriptions which I daily see everyone give to honour themselves: ‘Quae fuerant vitia, mores sunt.’ [What used to be vices have become morality.]8

Some of my friends have occasionally undertaken to lay bare my heart, to charge me and put me through the assizes, either on their own initiative or else summoned by me; of all the offices of friendship that is not only the most useful for a well-turned mind but also the sweetest. I have always welcomed it with the most courteous and grateful of embraces. But speaking of it now in all conscience I have often found such false measure in their praise and blame that, judging from their standards, I would not have been wrong to do wrong rather than right.

[B] Especially in the case of people like us who live private lives which only go on parade before ourselves, we must establish an inner model to serve as touchstone of our actions, by which we at times favour ourselves or flog ourselves. I have my own laws and law-court to pass judgement on me and I appeal to them rather than elsewhere. I restrain my actions according to the standards of others, but I enlarge them according to my own. No one but you knows whether you are base and cruel, or loyal and dedicated. Others never see you: they surmise about you from uncertain conjectures; they do not see your nature so much as your artifice. So do not cling to their sentence: cling to your own. [C] ‘Tuo tibique judicio est utendum.’ [You must use your own judgement of yourself.]9 ‘Virtutis et vitiorum grave ipsius conscientiae pondus est: qua sublata, jacent omnia.’ [Your own conscience gives weighty judgement on your virtues and vices: remove that, and all lies sprawling.]

[B] Yet the saying that ‘repentance follows hard upon the sin’ does not seem to me to concern sin in full apparel, when lodged in us as in its own home. We can disown such vices as take us by surprise and towards which we are carried away by our passions; but such vices as are rooted and anchored in a will which is strong and vigorous brook no denial. To repent is but to gainsay our will and to contradict our ideas; it can lead us in any direction. It makes that man over there disown his past virtue and his continence!

Quæ mens est hodie, cur eadem non puero fuit? Vel cur his animis incolumes non redeunt genæ

[Alas! Why did I not want to do as a young man what I want to do now? Or why, thinking as I do now, cannot my radiant cheeks return?]10

Rare is the life which remains ordinate even in privacy. Anyone can take part in a farce and act the honest man on the trestles: but to be right-ruled within, in your bosom, where anything is licit, where everything is hidden – that’s what matters. The nearest to that is to be so in your home, in your everyday actions for which you are accountable to nobody; there is no striving there, no artifice.11 That is why Bias when portraying an excellent family state said it was one where the head of the family was of his own volition, the same indoors as he was outdoors for fear of the law and the comments of men: and it was a worthy retort of Julius Drusus to the builders who offered for three thousand crowns to re-plan his house so that his neighbours could no longer see in as they did: ‘I will give you six thousand, and you can arrange for them to see in everywhere!’ We comment with honour on Agesilas’ practice of taking up lodgings in the temples when on a journey, so that the people and the very gods could see what he did in private.12 A man may appear to the world as a marvel: yet his wife and his manservant see nothing remarkable about him. Few men have been wonders to their families.

[C] ‘No man has been a prophet not only in his own home but in his own country,’ says the experience of history.13 The same applies to trivialities. You can see an image of greater things in the following lowly example: in my own climate of Gascony they find it funny to see me in print; I am valued the more the farther from home knowledge of me has spread. In Guienne I pay my printers: elsewhere, they pay me. That consideration is the motive of those who hide away when alive and present, so as to enjoy a reputation when they are dead and gone. I would rather have a lesser one: I throw myself upon the world for the one that I can enjoy now. Once I am gone I acquit the world of its debt.

[B] That man over there is escorted to his door ecstatically by a public procession: he doffs that role when he doffs his robes; the higher he has climbed the lower he falls. Once at home he is all tumult and baseness within. And even if right-rule is to be found in him, you need a quick and highly selected judgement to perceive it in his humble private actions. Besides, to be ordinate is a glum and sombre virtue. Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor belying yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and as tense as those of other lives. [C] And Aristotle says that private citizens serve virtue as highly and with as much difficulty as those who hold office.14 [B] We prepare ourselves for great occasions more for the glory than for good conscience. [C] The quickest road to glory would be to do for conscience what we do for glory. [B] And the virtue of Alexander seems to me to act out less virtue on its stage than that of Socrates in his humble obscure role. I can easily conceive of Socrates in Alexander’s place: but Alexander in Socrates’ place, I cannot. Ask Alexander what he can do and he will reply: ‘Subdue the whole world.’ Ask Socrates, and he will answer, ‘Live the life of man in conformity with his natural condition’: knowledge which is much more general, onerous and right.

The soul’s value consists not in going high but in going ordinately. [C] Its greatness is not displayed in great things but in the Mean.

Just as those who judge us by the touchstone of our motives do not rate highly the sparkle of our public deeds and see that it is no more than thin fine jets of water spurting up from the depths (which are moreover heavy and slimy), so too those who judge us from our brave outward show conclude that our inward disposition corresponds to it: they cannot couple ordinary talents just like their own with those other talents, so far beyond their ken, which amaze them. That is why we give savage shapes to demons. And who does not give Tamberlane arching eyebrows, gaping nostrils, a ghastly face and an immense size proportionate to the idea we have conceived of him from the spreading of his name? Once, if anyone had brought me to meet Erasmus it would have been hard for me not to take for adages and apophthegms everything he said to his manservant or to his innkeeper’s wife. We can with more seemliness imagine an artisan on his jakes or on his wife than a great lord chancellor venerated for his dignity and wisdom. It seems to us that they never come down from their lofty thrones, even to live.

[B] As vicious souls are often incited to do good by some outside instigation, so are virtuous souls to do evil. We must therefore judge souls in their settled state, when they are at home with themselves – if they ever are – or at least when they are nearest to repose in their native place. Natural tendencies are helped and reinforced by education, but they can hardly be said to be altered or overmastered. In my lifetime hundreds of natures have escaped towards virtue, or vice, despite teaching to the contrary:

Sic ubi desuetæ silvis in carcere clausæ Mansuevere feræ, et vultus posuere minaces, Atque hominem didicere pati, si torrida parvus Venit in ora cruor, redeunt rabiesque furorque, Admonitæque tument gustato sanguine fauces; Fervet, et a trepido vix abstinet ira magistro.

[As when wild beasts, shut up in a cage, forget their forests and are tamed, losing their menacing looks and learning to be ruled by men, yet if a tiny drop of blood falls on their avid lips, back come their snarls and their ragings; they have tasted blood; their jaws yawn wide; they are in turmoil and can hardly be stopped from venting their wrath on their trembling tamer.]15

You cannot extirpate the qualities we are originally born with: you can cover them over and you can hide them. Latin is a native tongue for me: I understand it better than French; yet it is forty years now since I used it for speaking or writing. Nevertheless on those two or three occasions in my life when I have suffered some extreme and sudden emotion – one was when my perfectly healthy father collapsed back on to me in a dead faint – the first words which I have dredged up from my entrails have always been in Latin – [C] nature, against long nurture, breaking forcibly out and finding expression. [B] And this example applies to many others.

Those who have sought in my time to improve the morals of the world with their new opinions reform the vices which show: the essential vices they leave us as they are – if they do not make them grow bigger. And such growth is to be feared: we are ready to take a holiday from all other good deeds on the strength of those uncertain surface reformations which cost us less and which gain us more esteem; and we thereby cheaply give satisfaction to our other vices: those which are inborn, of one substance with us and visceral.

Just take a little look at what our own experience shows. Provided that he listen to himself there is no one who does not discover in himself a form entirely entirely his own, a master-form which struggles against his education as well as against the storm of emotions which would gainsay it. In my case I find that I am rarely shaken by shocks or agitations; I am virtually always settled in place, as heavy ponderous bodies are. If I should not be ‘at home’ I am always nearby. My indulgences do not catch me away very far: there is nothing odd or extreme about them, though I do have some sane and vigorous changes of heart.

The real condemnation which applies to the common type of men nowadays is that their very retreat is full of filth and corruption, that their amendment of life is vague, and their repentance nearly as sickly and guilt-ridden as their sinning. Some of them are so stuck to their vices by long habit or some natural bonding that they no longer find them ugly. There are others – and I am one of that regiment – for whom vice does have some weight but who counterbalance it by the pleasure it gives or by some other factor; they put up with it and give themselves over to it, but at a definite price – viciously though and basely. Yet a vastly disproportionate measure could be imagined between the vice and the price, one where the pleasure could with justice compensate for the sin (as expediency is said to do) – not when the pleasure is incidental, forming no part of the sin, as in theft, but as in lying with women where the pleasure resides in performing the sin and where the drive is violent and, so it is said, irresistible.

The other day when I was in Armagnac on the estates of one of my relations I met a peasant whom everybody called Pincher. He gave me this account of his life: being born to beggary and finding that he would never succeed in earning his bread and warding off indigence by the labour of his hands, he took the decision to become a thief and had spent his entire youth safely in that trade because he was so physically strong; for he used to harvest the corn and grapes on other men’s lands, but so far off and in such huge quantities that it was unthinkable that one man could have loaded so much on his back in one single night. He also took care to spread the damage equally about, so that each of his victims found the loss less hard to bear. Now, in his old age, he is rich for a man of his station – thanks to that trafficking, which he openly admits. To come to terms with God for his gains he declares that, by making free-gifts, he is always keen to compensate the heirs of all the men he robbed, and that if he does not finish this (for he simply cannot provide for all at once) he will charge his heirs to do so, based on the knowledge which he alone has of the evil he had done to each individual. From this account, be it true or false, that man regards theft as a dishonest deed; and he hates it… less than he hates poverty. He indeed repents of the theft as such, but he does not feel any repentance for its being counterbalanced and counterweighed. We do not find in this case that habitual practice which makes us fellows-incorporate with vice and brings our mind itself to conform to it; nor is it that violent gale which batters and blinds our soul and sweeps us for a while into the power of vice, judgement and all.

My custom is to be entirely given to what I do, marching, forward all of a piece. There is hardly an emotion in me which sneaks away and hides from my reason or which is not governed by the consent of almost all my parts, without schism or inner strife. The entire blame or praise for that belongs to my judgement; and once it accepts that blame it has it for ever, because virtually since birth it has always been one: the same bent, the same route, the same strength. And as for all my general opinions, I have since childhood lodged me where I was to remain.

There are sins which are violent, quick and sudden. Let us leave them aside. But as for those other sins, so often repeated, deliberated and meditated upon, those sins which are rooted in our complexions [C] and, indeed in our professions or vocations, [B] I cannot conceive that they could be rooted so long in one identical heart without the reason and conscience of him who is seized of them being constant in his willing and wanting them to be so; and the repentance which he boasts to come to him at a particular appointed instant is hard for me to imagine or conceive. [C] I cannot follow the Pythagorean dogma that men take on a new soul when they draw near to the statues of the gods to gather up their oracles, unless Pythagoras meant that their soul must actually be a new one, foreign to them and lent for the occasion, since their own soul showed so little sign of being cleansed by purification and condign for that duty.16 [B] What they do is flat contrary to the Stoics’ precepts, which do indeed command us to correct any vices or imperfections which we acknowledge to be in us but forbid us to be sorry or upset about them. But these men would have us believe that they do feel deep remorse and regret within; yet no amendment or improvement, [C] no break, [B] ever becomes apparent. But if you do not unburden yourself of the evil there has been no cure. If repentance weighed down the scales of the balance it would do away with the sin. I can find no quality so easy to counterfeit as devotion unless our morals and our lives are made to conform to it; its essence is hidden and secret: its external appearances are easy and ostentatious.

As for me, I can desire to be entirely different, I can condemn my universal form and grieve at it and beg God to form me again entirely and to pardon my natural frailty. But it seems to me that that should not be called repenting any more than my grieving at not being an angel or Cato.17 My doings are ruled by what I am and are in harmony with how I was made. I cannot do better: and the act of repenting does not properly touch such things as are not within our power – that is touched by regretting. I can imagine countless natures more sublime and better ruled than my own: by doing that I do not emend my own capacities, any more than my arm or my intelligence become more strong because I can imagine others which are. If imagining and desiring actions nobler than ours made us repent of our own we would have to go repenting of our most innocent doings, since we can rightly judge that they would have been brought to greater perfection and grandeur in a nature far excelling our own. When I reflect on my behaviour as a young man and as an old one I find that I have mainly behaved ordinately secundum me.18 My power of resistance can do no more. I do not flatter myself: in like circumstances I would still be thus. It is no spot but a universal stain which soils me. I do not know any surface repentance, mediocre and a matter of ceremony. Before I call it repentance it must touch me everywhere, grip my bowels and make them yearn – as deeply and as universally as God does see me.19

In my business dealings several good opportunities have escaped me for want of the happy knack of conducting them: yet my decisions were well chosen secundum quid (that is, according to the events which they ran up against); my decisions are so fashioned as always to take the easiest and the surest side. I find that I proceeded wisely, according to my rule, in my previous deliberations given the state of the subject as set before me: and in the same circumstances I would do the same a thousand years from hence. I pay no regard to what it looks like now but to how it was when I was examining it.

[C] The force of any advice depends upon the time: circumstances endlessly alter and matters endlessly change. I have made some grievous mistakes in my life – important ones – for want of good luck not for want of good thought. In the subjects which we handle, and especially in the natures of men, there are hidden parts which cannot be divined, silent characteristics which are never revealed and which are sometimes unknown even to the one who has them but which are awakened and brought out by subsequent events. If my wisdom was unable to penetrate through to them and foresee them I bear it no grudge: there are limits to its obligations. What defeats me is the outcome, and [B] if it favours the side I rejected, that cannot be helped. I do not find fault with myself: I blame not what I did but my fortune. And that is not to be called repenting.

Phocion gave a certain piece of advice to the Athenians which was not acted upon. When the affair turned out successfully against his advice somebody asked him, ‘Well now, Phocion, are you pleased that things are going so well?’ ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I am happy that it has turned out this way, but I do not repent of the advice that I gave.’20 When my friends come to me for advice I give it freely and clearly, without (as nearly everyone does) dwelling on the fact that, since the matter is chancy, things can turn out contrary to what I think, so that they may well have cause to reproach me for my advice. That never bothers me, for they will be in the wrong: I ought not to have refused them such service.

[C] I have hardly any cause to blame anyone but myself for my failures or misfortunes, for in practice I rarely ask anyone for advice save to honour them formally; the exception is when I need learned instruction or knowledge of the facts. But in matters where only my judgement is involved, the arguments of others rarely serve to deflect me though they may well support me; I listen to them graciously and courteously – to all of them. But as far as I can recall I have never yet trusted any but my own. According to my standards they are but flies and midges buzzing over my will. I set little store by my own opinions but just as little by other people’s. And Fortune has treated me worthily. I receive little counsel: I give even less. I am very rarely asked for it: I am even less believed, and I know of no public or private undertaking which has been set right or halted on my advice. Even such persons as chance to be somewhat dependent on my advice have readily allowed themselves to be swayed by some completely different mind. Since I am just as jealous of my right to peace and quiet as of my right to authority, I prefer it that way. By leaving me out they are acting on my own principles, which consist in being settled and contained entirely within myself: it is a joy for me to be detached from others’ affairs and relieved of protecting them.

I have few regrets for affairs of any sort, no matter how they have turned out, once they are past. I am always comforted by the thought that they had to happen that way: there they are in the vast march of the universe and in the concatenation of Stoic causes; no idea of yours, by wish or by thought, can change one jot without overturning the whole order of Nature, both past and future.21

Meanwhile I loathe that consequential repenting which old age brings. That Ancient who said that he was obliged to the passing years for freeing him from sensual pleasures held quite a different opinion from mine: I could never be grateful to infirmity for any good it might do me. [C] ‘Nec tam aversa unquam videbitur ab opere suo providentia, ut debilitas inter optima inventa sit.’ [And Providence will never be found so hostile to her work as to rank debility among the best of things.]22 [B] Our appetites are few when we are old: and once they are over we are seized by a profound disgust. I can see nothing of conscience in that: chagrin and feebleness imprint on us a lax and snotty virtue. We must not allow ourselves to be so borne away by natural degeneration that it bastardizes our judgement. In former days youth and pleasure never made me fail to recognize the face of vice within the sensuality: nor does the distaste which the years have brought me make me fail to recognize now the face of pleasure within the vice.

I have nothing to do with it now, but I judge it as though I did. [C] Personally, when I give my reason a lively and attentive shake, I find that [B] it is just the same as in my more licentious years, except that it has perhaps grown more feeble and much worse with age; [C] and I find that, although it declines to stoke up such pleasures out of consideration for the interests of my physical health, it would not do that, even now, any more than it once did, for the sake of my spiritual health. [B] I do not think it any braver for seeing it drop out of the battle. My temptations are so crippled and enfeebled that they are not worth opposing. I can conjure them away by merely stretching out my hands. Confront my reason with my former longings and I fear that that it will show less power of resistance than once it did. I cannot see that, of itself, it judges in any way differently now than it did before, nor that it is freshly enlightened. So if it has recovered it is a botched recovery. [C] A wretched sort of cure, to owe one’s health to sickliness.

It is not for our wretchedness to do us that service: it is for the happy outcome of our judgement. As for whacks and afflictions, you can make me do nothing but curse them: they are meant for men whose desires are aroused only by a good whipping. Indeed my reason runs freer when things go well: it is far more distracted and occupied when digesting misfortunes than pleasures. I can see much more clearly when the weather is serene. Health counsels me both more actively and usefully than illness does. I had progressed as far as I could towards right-rule and reformation when I had health to enjoy. I would be ashamed and jealous if the wretched lot of my decrepitude were to be preferred above the years when I was healthy, aroused and vigorous, and if men had to esteem me not for what I was but for ceasing to be like that. It is my conviction that what makes for human happiness is not, as Antisthenes said, dying happily but living happily.23 I have never striven to make a monster by sticking a philosopher’s tail on to the head and trunk of a forlorn man, nor to make my wretched end disavow and disclaim the more beautiful, more wholesome and longer part of my life. I want to show myself to have been uniform and to be seen as such. If I had to live again, I would live as I have done; I neither regret the past nor fear the future. And unless I deceive myself, things within have gone much the same as those without. One of my greatest obligations to my lot is that the course of my physical state has brought each thing in due season. I have known the blade, the blossom and the fruit; and I now know their withering. Happily so, since naturally so. I can bear more patiently the ills that I have since they come in due season, and since they also make me recall with more gratitude the long-lasting happiness of my former life.

My wisdom may well have had the same stature in both my seasons, but it was far more brilliant and graceful then, green-sprouting, gay and naïve; now it is bent double, querulous and wearisome.

I disclaim those incidental reformations based on pain. [B] God must touch our hearts.24 Our conscience must emend itself by itself, by the strengthening of our reason not by the enfeebling of our appetites. Sensual pleasure, of itself, is neither so pale nor so wan as to be perceived by bleared and troubled eyes. We must love temperance for its own sake and out of respect for God who has commanded it to us; and chastity too: what we are presented with by rheum, and what I owe to the grace of my colic paroxysms, are neither chastity nor temperance.25

You cannot boast of despising and of fighting pleasure if you cannot see her and if you do not know her grace and power, or her beauty at its most attractive. I know them both: and I am the one to say so. But it seems to me that our souls are subject in old age to ills and imperfections more insolent than those of youth. I said so when I was young, and they cast my beardless chin in my teeth. And I still say so now that my [C] grey [B] hair lends me credit. What we call wisdom is the moroseness of our humours and our distaste for things as they are now. But in truth we do not so much give up our vices as change them – for the worse, if you ask me. Apart from silly tottering pride, boring babble, prickly unsociable humours, superstition and a ridiculous concern for wealth when we have lost the use of it, I find that there are more envy and unfairness and malice; age sets more wrinkles on our minds than on our faces. You can find no souls – or very few – which as they grow old do not stink of rankness and of rot. It is the man as a whole that marches towards his flower and his fading.

[C] When I see the wisdom of Socrates and several of the circumstances surrounding his condemnation, I would venture to conclude that to some degree he connived at it and deliberately put up a sham defence, since at seventy years of age he soon had to suffer the benumbing of his splendid endowments and the clouding over of his habitual clarity.

[B] What transformations do I daily see wrought by old age in those I know. It is a powerful illness which flows on naturally and imperceptibly. You must have a great store of study and foresight to avoid the imperfections which it loads upon us – or at least to weaken their progress. I know that, despite all my entrenchments, it is gaining on me foot by foot. I put up such resistance as I can. But I do not know where it will take me in the end. Yet come what may, I should like people to know from what I shall have declined.