The idyll was painfully brief. Four years after the first meeting, in August 1563, La Boétie fell ill with stomach cramps and died a few days later. The loss was to haunt Montaigne for ever:
In truth if I compare the rest of my life … to those four years which I was granted to enjoy the sweet companionship and fellowship of a man like that, it is but smoke and ashes, a night dark and dreary. Since that day when I lost him … I merely drag wearily on.
Throughout the Essays, there were expressions of longing for a soul mate comparable to the dead companion. Eighteen years after La Boétie’s death, Montaigne was still visited by periods of grief. In May 1581, in La Villa near Lucca, where he had gone to take the waters, he wrote in his travel journal that he had spent an entire day beset by ‘painful thoughts about Monsieur de La Boétie. I was in this mood so long, without recovering, that it did me much harm.’
He was never to be blessed again in his friendships, but he discovered the finest form of compensation. In the Essays, he recreated in another medium the true portrait of himself that La Boétie had recognized. He became himself on the page as he had been himself in the company of his friend.
Authorship was prompted by disappointment with those in the vicinity, and yet it was infused with the hope that someone elsewhere would understand; his book an address to everyone and no one in particular. He was aware of the paradox of expressing his deepest self to strangers in bookshops:
Many things that I would not care to tell any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts, I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller’s stall.
And yet we should be grateful for the paradox. Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
(Ill. 17.12)
Montaigne might have begun writing to alleviate a personal sense of loneliness, but his book may serve in a small way to alleviate our own. One man’s honest, unguarded portrait of himself – in which he mentions impotence and farting, in which he writes of his dead friend and explains that he needs quiet when sitting on the toilet – enables us to feel less singular about sides of ourselves that have gone unmentioned in normal company and normal portraits, but which, it seems, are no less a part of our reality.
4
On Intellectual Inadequacy
There are some leading assumptions about what it takes to be a clever person:
What clever people should know
One of them, reflected in what is taught in many schools and universities, is that clever people should know how to answer questions like:
1. Find the lengths or angles marked
x
in the following triangles.
2. What are the subject term, predicate term, copula and quantifiers (if any) in the following sentences: Dogs are man’s best friend; Lucilius is wicked; All bats are members of the class of rodents; Nothing green is in the room?
3. What is Thomas Aquinas’s First Cause argument?
4. Translate:
(Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics
, I i–iv)
5. Translate:
In capitis mei levitatem iocatus est et in oculorum valitudinem et in crurum gracilitatem et in staturam. Quae contumelia est quod apparet audire? Coram uno aliquid dictum ridemus, coram pluribus indignamur, et eorum aliis libertatem non relinquimus, quae ipsi in nos dicere adsuevimus; iocis temperatis delectamur, immodicis irascimur
.
(Seneca,
De Constantia
, XVI. 4)
Montaigne had faced many such questions and answered them well. He was sent to one of France’s best educational establishments, the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, founded in 1533 to replace the city’s old and inadequate Collège des Arts. By the time Michel started attending classes there at the age of six, the school had developed a national reputation as a centre of learning. The staff included an enlightened principal, André de Gouvéa, a renowned Greek scholar, Nicolas de Grouchy, an Aristotelian scholar, Guillaume Guerente, and the Scottish poet George Buchanan.
If one tries to define the philosophy of education underpinning the Collège de Guyenne, or indeed that of most schools and universities before and after it, one might loosely suggest it to be based on the idea that the more a student learns about the world (history, science, literature), the better. But Montaigne, after following the curriculum at the Collège dutifully until graduation, added an important proviso:
If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.
Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding.
Two great thinkers of antiquity were likely to have featured prominently in the curriculum at the Collège de Guyenne and been held up as exemplars of intelligence. Students would have been introduced to Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics, in which the Greek philosopher pioneered logic, and stated that if A is predicated of every B, and B of every C, necessarily A is predicated of every C. Aristotle argued that if a proposition says or denies P of S, then S and P are its terms, with P being the predicate term and S the subject term, and added that all propositions are either universal or particular, affirming or denying P of every S or part of S. Then there was the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, who assembled a library for Julius Caesar and wrote six hundred books, including an encyclopedia on the liberal arts and twenty-five books on etymology and linguistics.
Montaigne was not unmoved. It is a feat to write a shelf of books on the origins of words and to discover universal affirmatives. And yet if we were to find that those who did so were no happier or were indeed a little more unhappy than those who had never heard of philosophical logic, we might wonder. Montaigne considered the lives of Aristotle and Varro, and raised a question:
What good did their great erudition do for Varro and Aristotle? Did it free them from human ills? Did it relieve them of misfortunes such as befall a common porter? Could logic console them for the gout …?
To understand why the two men could have been both so erudite and so unhappy, Montaigne distinguished between two categories of knowledge: learning and wisdom. In the category of learning he placed, among other subjects, logic, etymology, grammar, Latin and Greek. And in the category of wisdom, he placed a far broader, more elusive and more valuable kind of knowledge, everything that could help a person to live well, by which Montaigne meant, help them to live happily and morally.
The problem with the Collège de Guyenne, despite its professional staff and principal, was that it excelled at imparting learning but failed entirely at imparting wisdom – repeating at an institutional level the errors that had marred the personal lives of Varro and Aristotle:
I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology …