I'm chuffed to bring you a book review from Courtney Johnston aka Auchmill. Courtney has a great blog, tweets and you can also catch her on National Radio, talking about the arts with Kathryn Ryan. Here is Courtney's review of How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell.

 

I have been trying to read Montaigne's essays for about 12 years now.

Montaigne entered my consciousness in my first year at university,

when I somehow picked up the notion that every well-rounded reader

should be acquainted with him.

 

However, my every attempt to grapple with the Essays left me flummoxed

by the As and Bs and Cs that are scattered through the sentences

(noting which version of the Essays they are derived from), the

snippets of Latin and French, and the roundabouts and whirligigs of

the language. While every commentator dwells upon Montaigne's personal

appeal to the reader (a dangerous seduction for those who find his

writing seditious; satisfying self-identification for those who don't)

I couldn't find my entry point.

 

Sarah Bakewell has given it to me. She notes at the end of this book

that it was five years in the making, and I don't doubt that at all.

Not only must the research and reading required been prodigious, but

that crafting of research into the eventual structure of the book must

have been a painstaking process (unless Bakewell is touched by genius

when it comes to textual visualisation).

 

A little background. Michel Montaigne (1533-1592) was a landowner,

writer, politician and diplomat who live in the Aquitaine region of

France, near Bordeaux (his father was a winemaker, and the label still

exists). Montaigne lived through a period of French history

characterised by religious conflict and civil war, but also an

intellectual context that mirrored that of the Italian Renaissance,

with great love and respect for Greek and Roman culture and

philosophy.

 

During his life, Montaigne was perhaps better known for his influence

as a politician and go-between in royal matters than as a writer, but

he was also recognised for his Essays; short pieces of that reflect

his own point of view on various topics. The word 'Essay' here comes

from the French 'essai' for attempt or trial - Montaigne's pieces were

the first example of a new genre: short, subjective takes on a chosen

subject.

 

Bakewell's book, as the title declares, takes the overarching question

asked in Montaigne's essays - How to live? - and offers twenty answers

drawn from the texts. Both the structure and the answers - Use little

tricks; Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted;

Don't worry about death; Reflect on everything, regret nothing; Be

ordinary and imperfect - can sound glib. But both, when ventured into,

prove to be engrossing, pragmatic, and humane.

 

Bakewell manages to move roughly chronologically through Montaigne's

life, setting his essays within his upbringing, his education, his

personal relationships, his work as a public servant, and his

historical context. She shows us the prevailing intellectual modes of

the day, and does an especially good job of explaining how Montaigne's

writing has been received and perceived, used and abused up to the

present day. There are Montaigne's contemporaries, who admired his

application of Stoic philosophy and collation of extracts of classic

texts. We move to Descartes and Pascal, who were horrified and

transfixed by his Scepticism, and the 17th century libertins who

celebrated his free thinking. Four centuries of English readers and

interpreters took some pleasure in adopting this son of France, who

was cast out from his native literary tradition and placed on the

Index of Prohibited Books for 180 years. In the 20th century,

modernist writers sought to replicate the immediacy of Montaigne's

writing, the sense of being fully-grounded in the present; today we

are surrounded by the proliferation of the public/private personal

essay in the form of the blog.

 

Each of Bakewell's chapters then does not simply recap what Montaigne

says about reading and remembering what you read, or marriage and how

to raise children, or friendship, or how to prepare oneself for one's

death. And it could not be that simple, as Montaigne's writing is not

that simple. It would be easy to recast his writing as self-help

speak: to achieve goal X, apply methods Y and Z. But that wouldn't be

true to Montaigne's own approach, which was circular, occasionally

contradictory, always exploratory, never authoritative, and often

ended with a Gallic shrug, a wry smile, and whatever the French is for

'Eh, what do I know?'.

 

Underpinning Montaigne's essays - and his entire approach to life -

are three schools of classical philosophy. My favourite chapter of

Bakewell's book - 'Use little tricks' - lays out this territory, but

to give a rough summary: Stoicism taught Montaigne to face up to the

life unflinchingly. Scepticism taught him question everything to never

take anything fro granted, to always seek other perspectives, and to

avoid making or building off assumptions. And Epicureanism taught him

to focus on the pleasure available in life whilst living in these

ways.

 

All three schools, despite their different approaches, share one goal:

to achieve 'eudaimonia', a way of living that is translated as

happiness, or human flourishing. This means living well, without fear,

with the ability to enjoy every moment, by being a good person. The

best way to achieve eudaimonia is through 'ataraxia' or becoming free

of anxiety; of (consciously) developing the ability to move through

life on an even keel. To do this, one must overcome two major hurdles:

controlling one's emotions, and paying attention to the present. All

three schools taught ways - little tricks - of achieving these ends.

None offer an answer to the question 'How to live?'; none say that if

you do X and obey Y you will be happy. Instead, all three offer a

method, thought experiments and mental tricks that will help you calm

yourself and bring yourself into the moment. From there, it is up to

you. As Montaigne himself wrote: 'Life should be an aim unto itself, a

purpose unto itself'.

 

So Montaigne's essays show him attempting to live out these precepts,

to apply them to moments like the death of a friend, the fear of armed

bandits, the passing of a kidney stone, playing with one's cat

(somehow, in a way I still don't fully understand, Montaigne's sudden

switch of perspective, from seeing his cat as something he played with

to himself as a toy for his cat, got him blacklisted by Descartes and

led to his posthumous falling-out with the Catholic church).

 

Bakewell's book is utterly beguiling, which makes me think Montaigne

must be too. So I am going to tackle the essays again, this time

feeling a little more prepared, knowing what to look for, and ready to

be surprised.