If scholars paid such attention to the classics, it was, suggested Montaigne, from a vainglorious wish to be thought intelligent through association with prestigious names. The result for the reading public was a mountain of very learned, very unwise books:
There are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other. All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.
But interesting ideas are, Montaigne insisted, to be found in every life. However modest our stories, we can derive greater insights from ourselves than from all the books of old:
Were I a good scholar, I would find enough in my own experience to make me wise. Whoever recalls to mind his last bout of anger … sees the ugliness of this passion better than in Aristotle. Anyone who recalls the ills he has undergone, those which have threatened him and the trivial incidents which have moved him from one condition to another, makes himself thereby ready for future mutations and the exploring of his condition. Even the life of Caesar is less exemplary for us than our own; a life whether imperial or plebeian is always a life affected by everything that can happen to a man.
Only an intimidating scholarly culture makes us think otherwise:
We are richer than we think, each one of us.
We may all arrive at wise ideas if we cease to think of ourselves as so unsuited to the task because we aren’t 2,000 years old, aren’t interested in Plato’s dialogues and live quietly in the country:
You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as well as to one of richer stuff.
It was perhaps to bring the point home that Montaigne offered so much information on exactly how commonplace and private his own life had been – why he wanted to tell us:
That he didn’t like apples
:
I am not overfond … of any fruit except melons.
That he had a complex relationship with radishes
:
I first of all found that radishes agreed with me; then they did not; now they do again.
That he practised the most advanced dental hygiene
:
My teeth … have always been exceedingly good … Since boyhood I learned to rub them on my napkin, both on waking up and before and after meals.
That he ate too fast
:
In my haste I often bite my tongue and occasionally my fingers.
And liked wiping his mouth
:
I could dine easily enough without a tablecloth, but I feel very uncomfortable dining without a clean napkin … I regret that we have not continued along the lines of the fashion started by our kings, changing napkins likes plates with each course.
Trivia, perhaps, but symbolic reminders that there was a thinking ‘I’ behind his book, that a moral philosophy had issued – and so could issue again – from an ordinary, fruit-resistant soul.
There is no need to be discouraged if, from the outside, we look nothing like those who have ruminated in the past.
Cicero 106–43 BC (Ill. 18.3)
In Montaigne’s redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one’s mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient philosophers and mistake Scipios.
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
(Ill. 18.4)
V
Consolation for a Broken Heart
1
For the griefs of love, he may be the finest among philosophers:
The Life, 1788–1860 (Ill. 19.1)
1788 Arthur Schopenhauer is born in Danzig. In later years, he looks back on the event with regret: ‘We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.’ ‘Human existence must be a kind of error,’ he specifies, ‘it may be said of it, “It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.” ’ Schopenhauer’s father Heinrich, a wealthy merchant, and his mother Johanna, a dizzy socialite twenty years her husband’s junior, take little interest in their son, who grows into one of the greatest pessimists in the history of philosophy: ‘Even as a child of six, my parents, returning from a walk one evening, found me in deep despair.’
Heinrich Schopenhauer (Ill. 19.2)
Johanna Schopenhauer
1803–5 After the apparent suicide of his father (discovered floating in a canal beside the family warehouse), the seventeen-year-old Schopenhauer is left with a fortune that ensures he will never have to work. The thought affords no comfort. He later recalls: ‘In my seventeenth year, without any learned school education, I was gripped by the misery of life as Buddha was in his youth when he saw sickness, old age, pain and death. The truth … was that this world could not have been the work of an all-loving Being, but rather that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings; to this the data pointed, and the belief that it is so won the upper hand.’
Schopenhauer is sent to London to learn English at a boarding-school, Eagle House in Wimbledon. After receiving a letter from him, his friend Lorenz Meyer replies, ‘I am sorry that your stay in England has induced you to hate the entire nation.’ Despite the hatred, he acquires an almost perfect command of the language, and is often mistaken for an Englishman in conversation.
Eagle House School, Wimbledon (Ill. 19.3)
Schopenhauer travels through France, he visits the city of Nîmes, to which, 1,800 or so years before, Roman engineers had piped water across the majestic Pont du Gard to ensure that citizens would always have enough water to bathe in. Schopenhauer is unimpressed by what he sees of the Roman remains: ‘These traces soon lead one’s thoughts to the thousands of long-decomposed humans.’
(Ill. 19.4)
Schopenhauer’s mother complains of her son’s passion for ‘pondering on human misery’.
1809–1811 Schopenhauer studies at the university of Göttingen and decides to become a philosopher: ‘Life is a sorry business, I have resolved to spend it reflecting upon it.’
On an excursion to the countryside, a male friend suggests they should attempt to meet women. Schopenhauer quashes the plan, arguing that ‘life is so short, questionable and evanescent that it is not worth the trouble of major effort.’
Schopenhauer as a young man (Ill. 19.5)
1813 He visits his mother in Weimar. Johanna Schopenhauer has befriended the town’s most famous resident, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who visits her regularly (and likes talking with Sophie, Johanna’s housemaid, and Adele, Arthur’s younger sister). After an initial meeting, Schopenhauer describes Goethe as ‘serene, sociable, obliging, friendly: praised be his name for ever and ever!’ Goethe reports, ‘Young Schopenhauer appeared to me to be a strange and interesting young man.’ Arthur’s feelings for the writer are never wholly reciprocated. When the philosopher leaves Weimar, Goethe composes a couplet for him:
Willst du dich des Lebens freuen
,
So musst der Welt du Werth verleihen