How to Live

I enjoyed this at the beginning but I was expecting more of a collected summary of his best tidbits from the essays, and this turned into more of an autobiography that I didn't care much about since I hadn't yet read the essays. Might come back to this later after reading the essays.

Michel de Montaigne, een Franse filosoof uit de renaissance, schreef een verzameling “essais” die de vraag proberen te antwoorden over hoe te leven.

“‘Don't worry about death' became his most fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live. It made it possible to do just that: live.“

Een ongeluk met een paard waarbij hij bijna het loodje legt, legt de basis voor de zeer uiteenlopende stukken die hij in de jaren er na zal gaan schrijven. Soms korte stukken, soms lange, en in de loop der jaren zal hij blijven schaven aan eerder geschreven stukken (zodat er meerdere edities van de de Essais zullen ontstaan, die af en aan bejubeld en verguisd zullen worden in de eeuwen er na).

“His writing is full of things, Montaigne pointed out. If Plutarch wants to tell us that the trick in living well is to make the best of any situation, he does it by telling the story of a man who threw a stone at his dog, missed, hit his stepmother instead, and exclaimed, ‘Not so bad after all!' Or, if he wants to show us how we tend to forget the good things in life and obsess only about the bad, he writes about flies landing on mirrors and sliding about on the smooth surface, unable to find a footing until they hit a rough area.“

Dit boek beschrijft het leven van Montaigne, en zijn ideeën aan de hand van de vraag “Hoe te leven” en daarop twintig mogelijke antwoorden die steeds een ander aspect van Montaigne bespreken. Soms net wat te veel overlap in de hoofdstukken, maar het geeft een fascinerend beeld van deze filosoof.

“Our zeal does wonders when it is seconding our leaning towards hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion. Against the grain, toward goodness, benignity, moderation, unless as by a miracle some rare nature bears it, it will neither walk nor fly.”

Montaigne is the first essayist, a philosopher, an ordinary person. Sarah Bakewell takes a careful look at Montaigne's life and writings in this book and shares her thoughts on the ways Montaigne teaches us to live, with one question and twenty answers, including:

Question everything.
Live moderately.
Be convivial.
Be ordinary and imperfect.

Brilliant, I think. In an ordinary way.

And now I shall attempt to read the essays themselves.

Despite some initial warning signs (enumerated list, self help), the fantastic cover art and the fact that this book is about Montaigne drew me in. I've started reading his Essays several times and always bailed for one reason or another. I picked this up hoping it would give me some context and get me more excited to read, and maybe even finish the essays. It did. How to Live isn't just a biography of Montaigne, it's a history of Essays with a ton of rich context and interesting descriptions of the ways they have been influential throughout history. The 20 answers to the question of “how to live” don't define the book as much as give it some nice structure.

Instead of urging constant improvement like a typical self help book would do, How to Live feels like it's written to give you permission to live a more examined life. Montaigne didn't go through life explicitly seeking improvement, instead he sought eudaimonia or “human flourishing.” Often, finding that meant cutting back, spending more time alone, doing a good job but not a great job, focusing less on relationships and more on knowing and being comfortable with yourself. His essays, rather than preaching, are simply observations, mostly about his internal world.

Knowing Montaigne a little better, I feel more free to abstain from having an opinion on anything and everything. Montaigne is famous for reviving the Pyrrhonian Stoicsm idea of epohke which means “I suspend judgement,” or as Sextus put it more verbosely, “I now feel in such a way as neither to posit dogmatically nor to reject any of the things falling under this investigation.” Epohke is different from the contemporary concept of open-mindedness. Today to be open-minded is to accept everything and everyone as they are. Epohke doesn't have a goal of acceptance, it is goalless. It's an approach that may not work all the time, but settling in to that mode of thought, even for a short period of time, can be incredibly freeing.

Even in his stoicism Montaigne was not dogmatic. He summarized himself as “extremely idle, extremely independent, both by nature and by art.” What he did he did because he wanted to. Honor played a part, civic-mindedness played a part, love of his friends and family played a part, but overall he was true to himself. It's hard for me to grasp this entirely, but How to Live gave me a good start and made me excited to read more. Shakespeare was influenced by Montaigne and on occasion heavily borrowed from his works. Nietzsche was influenced by him, Flaubert, Joyce, Rousseau, Descartes and Virginia Wolf were all very heavily influenced by Montaigne and after reading How to Live, I'm going to very humbly throw my name into that list too.

This was a fabulous read. I tried to postpone reading it until I'd finished Montaigne's essays, and I'm very glad that I didn't. Bakewell provides a lot of backstory and history and context - things that a contemporary Montaigne reader would know, but we, 400 years later, don't have access to off the tops of our heads. Now I'm ready to jump in and start Montaigne over with a better understanding of the world he lived in.

So many important books, so little time. Why read this book instead of jumping straight into Montaigne? For one, because I didn't know that I needed to read Montaigne. Now I do, and I will.

Another reason to read this book: Context. Some people can dive head-first into a book without understanding its origin; the ethos of the time, the spirit of the author. Some people skip the Introduction. Not I. This may be a rather long Introduction, but it's both thorough and riveting. Kudos to Bakewell.