Previous - 165. George Eliot, revisited
The Road to Character
Samuel Johnson & Michel de MontaigneNever been a big Johnson fan and, while it's interesting to learn more about him and to see what the more social side of Grub street looked like (as opposed to what Gissing showed us in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft), I'm not warming to him now. Montaigne, on the other hand, interests me.
p231 ..."if others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off -- though I don't know." Exactly.
One day, one of his servants, who was riding behind him, took off at full gallop and crashed right into Montaigne and his horse. Montaigne was thrown ten paces behind his horse and lay unconscious, spread on the ground, as if dead. His terrified servants began carrying his lifeless form back to the castle. As they did, he began to come to. His servants later told him how he had behaved -- gasping for air, scratching furiously at his chest, ripping at his clothes as if to free himself, apparently in agony. Inside, though, the mental scene was quite different. "I felt infinite sweetness and repose," he recalled, and took pleasure in "growing languid and letting myself go." He had the sensation of being carried aloft on a magic carpet.
What a difference, Montaigne later reflected, between the outward appearance and the inner experience. How astonishing. One sanguine lesson he drew is that nobody has to bother learning how to die: "If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do in the spot, fully and adequately. She will do the job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it."
What he doesn't say, but I think is implied here, is that he, like me on a few occasions, experienced his seeming unconsciousness as a conscious process.
Also, that description of the accident is nonsensical. I suppose the servant's horse bolted, startled Montaigne's horse (or attacked Montaigne's horse, horses don't just run into each other), and Montaigne fell off or was thrown from his horse.
Previously, Brooks describes the difficulty Montaigne has, when trying to be introspective, of finding his true self instead of a passing progression of conscious instants -- the ephemeral nature of self we've run into several times. Brooks doesn't quote it here, but I would imagine Montaigne must also have been struck by his experience of consciousness while apparently unconscious.
p232 Better and better, He's a slow reader, so he focuses on just a few books. He's a little lazy, so he learns to relax... Montaigne's mind naturally wanders, so he takes advantage and learns to see things from multiple perspectives. Every flaw comes with its own compensation.
The ardent and the self-demanding have never admired Montaigne... they conclude that his pervasive skepticism and self-acceptance just leads to self-satisfaction, even a tinge of nihilism. They dismiss him as the master of emotional distance and conflict avoidance.
Hear, hear!
He's also the only character in this book who doesn't come from the middle classes. (Marxists would argue, but Augustine's background might as well have been middle class.) He is not striving to build his character or to find meaning in his life. I'm thinking here of what class meant to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but also to Ford Madox Ford.
It is curious though, that so much of the development of science -- which is so often viewed as the domain of the middle classes -- was due to the genius of fairly isolated members of the gentry in so many different European nations. Would some of them have dropped the matter if they had understood the consequences of their work?
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