6

6. On practice

[This chapter discusses a key event in Montaigne’s life: the brave but stupid act of one of his labourers who knocked him senseless from his horse in a minor encounter during the Wars of Religion. Reflecting on it led him to lose that philosophic fear of the act of dying which had obsessed him (and so many others before him). The major addition at the end shows that evil self-love (philautia as it was called) is the essence of pride; ‘knowing oneself, on the contrary, is the essence of wisdom. Philosophy was conceived by Socrates as ‘practising dying’ (that is, by training, to practise the separation of the soul from the body, which will be achieved in death). Montaigne, while still claiming to follow Socrates, shifts the ground towards ‘practising living’.]

[A] Even when our trust is readily placed in them, reasoning and education cannot easily prove powerful enough to bring us actually to do anything, unless in addition we train and form our Soul by experience for the course on which we would set her; if we do not, when the time comes for action she will undoubtedly find herself impeded.1 That explains why those among the philosophers who wished to attain to some greater excellence were never content to await the rigours of Fortune in shelter and repose for fear that Fortune might take them unawares, inexperienced and untried in battle; they preferred to go forth to meet her and deliberately threw themselves into the trial of hardships. Some renounced wealth to practise voluntary poverty; some sought toil and the austerity of a laborious life so as to harden themselves against ills and travail; some stripped themselves of those parts of their bodies which were most dear – their eyes, say, or their organs of generation – fearing that their use, being too pleasurable and too enervating, might weaken and relax the firmness of their souls. But practice is no help in the greatest task we have to perform: dying. We can by habit and practice strengthen ourselves against pain, shame, dire poverty and other occurrences: but as for dying, we can only assay that once; we are all apprentices when it comes to that.

Men were found in ancient days so excellent at using their time that they even assayed tasting and savouring their own death: they bent their minds on discovering what that crossing-over really was: but they have not come back to tell us about it.

Nemo expergitus extat Frigida quem semel est vitai pausa sequuta.

[Who once has felt the icy end of life awakes not again.]

Canius Julius, a noble Roman of particular virtue and steadfastness, was condemned to death by that [C] blackguard2 [A] Caligula; apart from the many wondrous proofs he gave of his determination, there was the moment when he was about to feel the hand of his executioner: one of his philosopher friends asked him, ‘Well, Canius, how goes it with your Soul at present? What is she doing? What are your thoughts dwelling on?’ – ‘What I am thinking about is preparing and bracing myself with all my might to see whether, in that short brief moment of death, I can perceive anything of the Soul’s departure and whether she herself has any sensation of issuing forth, so that if I do find out anything I may come back if I can to inform my friends.’ He was philosophizing not merely unto death but into death. What assurance was that, what a proud mind, to wish that even his death could teach him something and to feel free to think of anything else but that great event!

[B] Jus hoc animi morientis habebat.

[Even when dying he had such sway over his mind.]3

[A] Yet it does seem that we have some means of breaking ourselves in for death and to some extent of making an assay of it. We can have experience of it, not whole and complete but at least such as not to be useless and to make us more strong and steadfast. If we cannot join battle with death we can advance towards it; we can make reconnaissances and if we cannot drive right up to its stronghold we can at least glimpse it and explore the approaches to it. It is not without good cause that we are brought to look to sleep itself for similarities with death.

[C] How easily we pass from waking to falling asleep! And how little we lose when we become unconscious of the light and of ourselves! It could perhaps even seem that our ability to fall asleep, which deprives us of all action and sensation, is useless and unnatural were it not that Nature by sleep teaches us that she has made us as much for dying as for living and, already in this life, shows us that everlasting state which she is keeping for us when life is over, to get us accustomed to it and to take away our terror.

[A] But those who have fallen into a swoon after some violent accident and have lost all sensation, have been in my opinion very close to seeing Death’s true and natural face, for it is not to be feared that the fleeting moment at which we pass away comports any hardship or distress, since we cannot have sensation without duration. For us, suffering needs time; and time is so short and precipitate when we die that death must be indiscernible. What we have to fear is Death’s approaches: they can indeed fall within our experience.

Many things appear greater in thought than in fact. I have spent a large part of my life in perfect good health: it was not only perfect but vivacious and boiling over. That state, so full of sap and festivity, made thinking of illness so horrifying that when I came to experience it I found its stabbing pains to be mild and weak compared with my fears.

[B] Here is an everyday experience of mine: if I am sheltered and warm in a pleasant room during a night of storm and tempest, I am dumb-struck with affliction for those then caught out in the open; yet when I am out there myself I never even want to be anywhere else.

[A] The mere thought of being always shut up indoors used to seem quite unbearable to me. Suddenly I was directed to remain there for a week or a month, all restless, distempered and feeble; but I have found that I used to pity the sick much more than I find myself deserving of pity now I am sick myself, and that the power of my imagination made the true essence of actual sickness bigger by half. I hope the same thing will happen with death and that it will not be worth all the trouble I am taking to prepare for it, nor all the aids I am gathering together and invoking to sustain my struggle. But whatever may happen, we can never give ourselves too many vantages!

During the third of our disturbances (or was it the second, I do not remember which) I was out riding one day about one league from my home, which is situated at the very hub of the disturbances in our French Civil Wars; I reckoned I was quite safe and so near my dwelling that I had no need of better protection and had taken an undemanding but not very reliable horse. On my way back there suddenly arose an occasion to use that horse for a task to which it was not much accustomed; one of my men, a big strong fellow, was on a powerful farm-horse with a hopeless mouth but also fresh and vigorous. He wanted to show off and to get ahead of the others, but he happened to ride it full pelt right in my tracks and came down like a colossus upon me, a little man on a little horse, striking us like a thunderbolt with all his roughness and weight, knocking us over with our legs in the air. So there was my horse thrown down and lying stunned, and me, ten or twelve yards beyond, stretched out dead on my back, my face all bruised and cut about, the sword I had been holding lying more than ten yards beyond that, my belt torn to shreds; and me with no more movement or sensation than a log.

To this day that is the only time I have ever lost consciousness. Those who were with me, having assayed every means in their power to bring me round, thought I was dead; they took me in their arms and struggled back with me to the house, which was about half a French league away.

After having been taken for dead for two good hours, on the way I began to make movements and to inhale because such a great quantity of blood had been discharged into my stomach that my natural powers had to be restored for me to void it. They got me on my feet, when I threw up a bucketful of pure clotted blood; and I had to do the same several times on the way. With that I began to get a bit of life back into me, but only little by little and over so long a stretch of time that at first my sensations were closer to death than to life:

[B] Perche, dubbiosa anchor del suo ritomo, Non s’assecura attonita la mente.

[Because the mind, struck with astonishment, still doubts it will return and remains unsure.]

[A] The memory of this, being deeply planted in my soul, paints for me the face of Death and her portrait so close to nature that it somewhat reconciles me to her.

When I did begin to see anything, my sight was so dead and so weak that I could make out nothing but light:

come quel ch’or apre or chiude Gli occhi, mezzo tra’l sonno è l’esser desto.

[as one who now opens his eyes, now shuts them, half sleeping, half awake.]4

As for the faculties of my soul, they progressively came back to life with those of my body. I could see myself covered with blood since my doublet was spattered with the blood I had brought up. The first thought that occurred to me was that I had been shot in the head by a volley of harquebuses; and indeed several were being fired around us. To me it seemed as though my life was merely clinging to my lips. It seemed, as I shut my eyes, as though I was helping to push it out, and I found it pleasant to languish and to let myself go. It was a thought which only floated on the surface of my soul, as feeble and delicate as everything else, but it was, truly, not merely free from unpleasantness but tinged with that gentle feeling which is felt by those who let themselves glide into sleep.

I believe that those whom we see failing from weakness in the throes of death find themselves in that same state, and I maintain that we pity them without cause, thinking that they are troubled by grievous pains or have their souls full of distressing thoughts. It has always been my belief (despite the opinion of others including Etienne de La Boëtie) that those whom we see lying prostrate in a coma at the approach of death, or overwhelmed by the length of their illness or by an apoplectic fit or by the falling sickness –

[B] … vi morbi sæpe coactus Ante oculos aliquis nostros, ut fulminis ictu, Concidit, et spumas agit; ingemit, et fremit artus; Desipit, extentat nervos, torquetur, anhelat, Inconstanter et in jactando membra fatigat;

[often, before our very eyes, a man is struck down by illness as if by lightning; he foams at the mouth; he groans and he twitches; he is delirious; he stretches out his legs, he twists and turns; he pants for breath and tires his limbs as he throws himself about;]5

– [A] or by a wound in the head, and whom we can hear groaning and sometimes uttering penetrating sighs which we take for signs indicating that they seem to retain some remnant of consciousness, have, I repeat – no matter what bodily movements they make – both their body and soul buried in stupor.

[B] Vivit, et est vitæ nescius ipse suæ.

[He lives, unconscious of his own life.]6

[A] And I could never believe, after so great a stunning of the limbs and so great a weakening of the senses, that their souls could sustain any inward powers of self-cognition; and consequently that those men had any thoughts to torment them and to make them feel, or be aware of, their miserable condition; and that in consequence they were not much to be pitied.

[B] I can think of no state more horrifying or more intolerable for me than to have my Soul alive and afflicted but with no means of expressing herself; I would say the same of those who are sent to be executed with their tongues cut out, were it not that the most becoming death of that sort is one that is mute, provided that it is accompanied by a firm and grave countenance; the same applies to those wretched prisoners-of-war who fall into the clutches of those vile hangmen–soldiers of these times, by whom they are tortured with every kind of cruel mistreatment to compel them to pay some huge impossible ransom, being held meanwhile under such conditions and in such a place that they have no means of expressing their thoughts or of giving sign of their misery.

[A] The poets had imaginary gods favourable to the deliverance of such who thus dragged out a lingering death:

hunc ego Diti Sacrum jussa fero, teque isto corpore solvo.

[to Dis I bear, as he decreed, this lock of hair, and free thee from thy body.]7

Even such brief words and incoherent replies as we extort from the dying by yelling in their ears and storming about, even the gestures which seem to bear some relation to the questions we put to them, are, for all that, no testimony to their being alive, at least not fully alive. The same thing happens to us when we are hesitantly drifting off to sleep, before sleep has taken us over completely: we are aware of what is going on about us as in a dream, and we follow any words spoken with a cloudy uncertain sense of hearing which seems to touch only the edges of our soul; and, to the last words spoken to us which we could follow, we make replies more marked by chance than by sense.

Now that I have actually experienced it I have no doubt whatsoever that I have been right all the time. First of all, when I was unconscious I strove to rip my doublet half-open with my nails – I was not wearing armour – and I know that in my mind I felt none of the wounds: for many of our movements do not arise from any command of ours:

[B] Semianimesque micant digili ferrumque retractant.

[Half-dead fingers twitch and grasp the sword again.]8

[A] By some natural impulse, when we trip over we throw out our arms before we fall, which shows that our limbs spontaneously come to each other’s aid [B] and have movements independent of our reasoning:

Falciferos memorant currus abscindere membra, Ut tremere in terra videatur ab artubus id quod Decidit abscissum, cum mens tamen atque hominis vis Mobilitate mali non quit sentire dolorem.

[They tell how chariots with scythes on their wheels can cut so quickly that severed limbs are writhing on the ground before the mind has the power to feel the pain.]9

[A] My stomach was swollen with clotted blood; my hands rushed to it of their own accord, as they often do against the counsel of our will to a part which is itching. There are many animals, and men too, who are seen to contract their muscles and move after they are dead. Every man knows from his own experience that he has a part of his body which often stirs, erects and lies down again without his leave. Now such passive movements, which only touch our outsides, cannot be called ours. For them to be ours the whole man must be involved: any pain which our foot or our hand feels while we are asleep does not belong to us.

As I was nearing my home, to which news of my fall had already run quickly, and after members of my family had greeted me with the cries usual in such circumstances, not only did I answer a word or two to their questions but they say that I was determined to order a horse to be provided for my wife whom I saw struggling and stumbling along the road, which is difficult and steep. It might appear that such thoughts must have arisen from a soul which is awake: nevertheless I played no part in them: they were empty acts of apparent thinking provoked by sensations in my eyes and ears: they did not arise from within me. I had no idea where I was coming from nor where I was going to; nor could I weigh attentively what I was asked. My reactions were trivial ones, produced by my senses themselves, doubtless from habit. Any contribution from my soul, which was only very lightly involved and as though licked by the dew of some light impression of the senses, came only in a dream. Meanwhile my condition was truly most agreeable and peaceful: I felt no affliction either for myself or for others; it was a kind of lassitude and utter weakness, without any pain. I saw my house but I did not recognize it. When they got me into bed, I experienced a feeling of infinite rest and comfort, for I had been dreadfully pulled about by those poor fellows who had taken the trouble to carry me in their arms over a long and very poor road and who, one after another, had tired themselves out two or three times.

I was offered several medicines: I would not take any of them, being convinced that I was fatally wounded in the head. It would have been – no lying – a very happy way to die, for the feebleness of my reasoning powers kept me from judging anything, and that of my body from feeling anything. I felt myself oozing away so gently, in so gentle and pleasing a fashion, that I can think of hardly any action [C] less grievous than [A] that was.10

When I began to come back to life and regained my strength,

[B] Ut tandem sensus convaluere mei, [As my senses at last regained their health,]11

[A] which was two or three hours later, only then did I feel myself all at once linked with pain again, having all my limbs bruised and battered by my fall; and I felt so ill two or three nights later that I nearly died a second time, but of a livelier death! And I can still feel the effects of that battering.

I must not overlook the following: the last thing I could recover was my memory of the accident itself; before I could grasp it, I got them to repeat several times where I was going to, where I was coming from, what time it happened. As for the manner of my fall, they hid it from me for the sake of the man who had caused it and made up other explanations. But some time later the following day when my memory happened to open up and recall to me the circumstances which I found myself in on that instant when I was aware of that horse coming at me (for I had seen it at my heels and already thought I was dead, but that perception had been so sudden that fear had no time to be engendered by it), it appeared to me that lightning had struck my soul with a jolt and that I was coming back from the other world.

This account of so unimportant an event is pointless enough but for the instruction I drew from it for my own purposes: for in truth, to inure yourself to death all you have to do is to draw nigh to it. Now, as Pliny says, each man is an excellent instruction unto himself provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close quarters.12

Here you have not my teaching but my study: the lesson is not for others; it is for me. [C] Yet, for all that, you should not be ungrateful to me for publishing it. What helps me can perhaps help somebody else. Meanwhile I am not spoiling anything: I am only using what is mine. And if I play the fool it is at my own expense and does no harm to anybody. Such foolishness as I am engaged in dies with me: there are no consequences. We have reports of only two or three Ancients who trod this road and we cannot even say if their manner of doing so bore any resemblance to mine since we know only their names.13 Since then nobody has leapt to follow in their traces. It is a thorny undertaking – more than it looks – to follow so roaming a course as that of our mind’s, to penetrate its dark depths and its inner recesses, to pick out and pin down the innumerable characteristics of its emotions. It is a new pastime, outside the common order; it withdraws us from the usual occupations of people – yes, even from the most commendable ones. For many years now the target of my thoughts has been myself alone; I examine nothing, I study nothing, but me; and if I do study anything else, it is so as to apply it at once to myself, or more correctly, within myself. And it does not seem to me to be wrong if (as is done in other branches of learning, incomparably less useful) I share what I have learned in this one, even though I am hardly satisfied with the progress I have made. No description is more difficult than the describing of oneself; and none, certainly, is more useful. To be ready to appear in public you have to brush your hair; you have to arrange things and put them in order. I am therefore ceaselessly making myself ready since I am ceaselessly describing myself.

Custom has made it a vice to talk about oneself and obstinately prohibits it, hating the boasting which always seems to be attached to any testimony about oneself. Instead of wiping the child’s nose you cut it off!

In vitium ducit culpæ fuga. [Flying from a fault, we fall into a vice.]14

I find more evil than good in that remedy. But even if it should be true that engaging people in talk about oneself is inevitably presumption, still, if I am to carry out my plan I must not put an interdict on an activity which makes that sickly quality public, since it is in me and I must not hide that defect; I do not merely practise it: I make a profession of it. Anyway, my belief is that it is wrong to condemn wine because many get drunk on it. You can abuse things only if they are good. I believe that that prohibition applies only to the popular abuse. It is a bridle made to curb calves: it is not used as a bridle by the Saints, who can be heard talking loudly about themselves, nor by philosophers nor by theologians;15 nor by me though I am neither one nor the other. If they do not literally write about themselves, when the occasion requires it they do not hesitate to trot right in front to show off their paces. What does Socrates treat more amply than himself? And what does he most often lead his pupils to do, if not to talk about themselves – not about what they have read in their books but about the being and the movement of their souls? We scrupulously talk of ourselves to God and to our confessors, just as our neighbours do before the whole congregation.16 ‘But,’ somebody will reply, ‘we talk then only of our offences.’ In that case we say it all: for our very virtue is faulty and needs repentance.

My business, my art, is to live my life. If anyone forbids me to talk about it according to my own sense, experience and practice, let him also command an architect to talk about buildings not according to his own standard but his next-door neighbour’s, according to somebody else’s I knowledge not his own. If publishing one’s own worth is pride, why does not Cicero puff the eloquence of Hortensius, and Hortensius that of Cicero?17

Perhaps they mean that I should witness to myself by works and deeds not by the naked word alone. But I am chiefly portraying my ways of thinking, a shapeless subject which simply does not become manifest in deeds. I have to struggle to couch it in the flimsy medium of words. Some of the wisest of men and the most devout have lived their lives avoiding any sign of activity. My activities would tell you more about Fortune than about me. They bear witness to their own role not to mine, unless it be by uncertain conjecture: they are samples and reveal only particulars. I am all on display, like a mummy on which at a glance you can see the veins, the muscles and the tendons, each piece in its place. Part of me is revealed – but only ambiguously – by the act of coughing; another by my turning pale or by my palpitations. It is not what I do that I write of, but of me, of what I am. I hold that we must show wisdom in judging ourselves, and, equally, good faith in witnessing to ourselves, high and low indifferently. If I seemed to myself to be good or wise – or nearly so – I would sing it out at the top of my voice. To say you are worse than you are is not modest but foolish. According to Aristotle, to prize yourself at less than you are worth is weak and faint-hearted. No virtue is helped by falsehood; and the truth can never go wrong. To say we are better than we are is not always presumption: it is even more often stupidity. In my judgement, the substance of that vice is to be immoderately pleased with yourself and so to fall into an injudicious self-love.

The sovereign remedy to cure self-love is to do the opposite to what those people say who, by forbidding you to talk about yourself, as a consequence even more strongly forbid you to think about yourself. Pride lies in our thoughts: the tongue can only have a very unimportant share in it. They think that to linger over yourself is to be pleased with yourself, to haunt and frequent yourself is to hold yourself too dear. That can happen. But that excess arises only in those who merely finger the surface of themselves; who see themselves only when business is over; who call it madness and idleness to be concerned with yourself; for whom enriching and constructing your character is to build castles in the air; who treat themselves as a third person, a stranger to themselves.

If anyone looks down on others and is drunk on self-knowledge let him turn his gaze upwards to ages past: he will pull his horns in then, discovering many thousands of minds which will trample him underfoot. If he embarks upon some flattering presumption of his own valour let him recall the lives of the two Scipios and all those armies and peoples who leave him so far behind. No one individual quality will make any man swell with pride who will, at the same time, take account of all those other weak and imperfect qualities which are in him and, finally, of the nullity of the human condition.

Because Socrates alone had taken a serious bite at his god’s precept to ‘know himself’ and by such a study had reached the point of despising himself, he alone was judged worthy of being called The Sage.18

If any man knows himself to be thus, let him boldly reveal himself by his own mouth.