Still, his conversation with the classics must be part of the answer to what made him the man he was. At 6, Montaigne was sent off to a boarding school in Bordeaux, 40 miles away, where the schoolroom study of Latin proved less congenial. Everyone else, including the servants, were commanded to speak only Latin when in earshot of the toddler. The one unconventional feature of his education was his father’s resolve that Latin would be his native tongue. But even after all their inventive explorations, how Montaigne got to be the man who could write these essays-how a liberal soul emerged in the provinces of 16 th-century France-remains something of a puzzle. In the end, Frampton, like Bakewell, does what he aims to do, sending you back to Montaigne himself.
Discussing the long-standing debates between geocentric and heliocentric astronomy, he writes, in a characteristic moment, “who knows but that a third opinion, 1,000 years from now, may overthrow the two former?” (Of course, a third view-that motion is always relative to a frame-did indeed show up, and sooner than Montaigne supposed.) He believes we must always bear in mind our own endless capacity for error. If you wanted to label the position, you could say that Montaigne is a fallibilist. But in Montaigne, skepticism isn’t a thesis it is an attitude.
People often say that Montaigne and Descartes are the first modern philosophical skeptics. He also had a gift for accepting that his guesses were merely guesses. For all his vaunted egoism, he had a gift for imaginative empathy for putting himself in the shoes of another man, or the paws of another creature for trying to guess how things might look to his cat. Montaigne ends what he himself calls “this river of babble” by remarking that men and women are “cast in the same mold,” except for what is due to “education and customs.” The essay is about as linear as a series of blog posts.įittingly, Montaigne’s response to cruelty was visceral before it was theoretical. Before long, he is bemoaning the inadequacy of his own endowment. Many pages in, he announces his theme: “What has the act of generation done to men-this action so natural, so necessary, and so just-that we dare not speak of it without shame?” That leads us, via the Virgil passage, which is about marital sex between Venus and Vulcan, to a discussion of sex and marriage generally.
One essay, “On Some Verses From Virgil,” begins with the annoyances of aging. Indeed, though the essays have titles, it is usually hard to say what they are about.
Almost everything we learn about the author and his views is offered en passant. But that’s not the only peculiarity of the work. Sixteenth-century readers weren’t used to being addressed in this take-it-or-leave-it way by an author who presumed our interest in his character.
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