What Do I Know?: Essential Essays

by Michel de Montaigne, David Coward (Translator), Yiyun Li (Introduction)

Overview

A fresh new translation of Michel de Montaigne’s most profound, searching essays, with an introduction from Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

This gift-worthy collection of 16 essays by “the father of the essay” is a short, accessible introduction to his work, offering a fascinating glimpse inside a great Renaissance mind

“I myself am the subject of my book.” So wrote Montaigne in the introductory note to his Essays, the book that marked the birth of the modern essay form.

In works of probing intelligence and idiosyncratic observation, Montaigne moved from intimate personal observation to roving theories of the conduct of kings and cannibals, the effects of sorrow and fear, and the fallibility of human memory and judgement.

This new selection of Montaigne’s 16 most ingenious essays appears in a lucid new translation by the prize-winning David Coward. What Do I Know? gives the modern reader profound insight into a great Renaissance mind.

What Do I Know? is divided into 3 sections and includes:

MONTAIGNE ON MONTAIGNE

• On Sorrow, On how our Actions are to be judged by the Intention, On Idling, On Liars, That we should not be considered happy until we are dead

ON THE PURSUIT OF REASON

• On Fear, To tell true from false, it is folly to rely on our own capacities, How we can cry and laugh at the same thing, On Solitude, On the Uncertainty of our Judgement, On Drunkenness

ON GOVERNANCE AND GOVERNORS

• On Cannibals, On the Inequality that exists between us, On Sleep, On our lease of life, On Carriages

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782278818
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	438,886
Product dimensions:	5.34(w) x 8.07(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was born on his family estate in Aquitaine, not far from Bordeaux. Raised speaking Greek and Latin, he studied law before embarking on a career of public service, first as a counselor of court in Périgueux and Bordeaux, then as a courtier to Charles the IX. Following the death of his father, Montaigne retired from public life to the Tower of his château to read and write. He published the first two volumes of his landmark Essays in 1580, with a third following in 1588; the complete Essays appeared posthumously in 1595.

David Coward is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Leeds and a translator of many books from the French, including Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret series and Arthur Cohen's Belle du Seigneur, for which he was awarded a Scott Moncrieff Prize.

Read an Excerpt

To the Reader
 
This, Reader, is a book written entirely in honest good faith. From the start, it forewarns you that in it I have no purpose other than to interest kin and self. I have not set out to flatter your notion of things and have given no thought to my reputation. Such ambitions are beyond my powers. I dedicate my book to the particular use of my family and friends so that, having lost me (as they shall in the near future), they will be able to recover some few evidences of my character and moods, and that in this way they might acquire a fuller and clearer understanding of me. If my purpose had been to seek the world’s favour, I should have appeared in borrowed plumes and followed a more orderly scheme of exposition. But I wish to be seen in my simple, natural and ordinary character, with no axe to grind and without artifice: for here I paint myself. My faults will show up bright in these pages as will my artless nature, insofar as respect for the social conventions allow. Had I lived my life among the nations which are said still to enjoy the freedom of nature’s primitive laws, I assure you that I should readily have drawn myself, whole and bare naked.
           Therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book. This being so. there is no reason why you should devote your leisure time on so trivial and unprofitable a topic.
           And so farewell.
           At Montaigne, this first day of March, one thousand five hundred and eighty.
 
 
 
PART ONE
 
 
MONTAIGNE ON MONTAIGNE
 
Montaigne declared himself to be the subject of his book, his main purpose being to follow the injunction inscribed over the entrance to the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi: ‘Know Thyself’. His thoughts were rooted in this clear-sighted estimate of the strengths and limitations of his mind and emotions. While his personality permeates his ideas, there are times when he slipped into self-examination by providing more direct ‘evidences’ of his characters and moods, revealing more clearly his engaging personality[RW1] .
 
1
On  Sorrowing  (Book I, 2 )    
 
I am one of those people who are little affected by an emotion for which I have little patience or regard, although most people, apparently by some common accord, have chosen to honour it by presenting it in a most favourable light. They dress it up as inner strength, courage and tender conscience – such a foolish, monstrous idea!  More fittingly, the Italians have found another word for it: tristezza[RW2] . For it is always a harmful state of mind, invariably irrational and unfailingly cowardly and base – an emotion in which the Stoics consistently forbid their faithful to indulge.
           But when, so the story goes, Psammenitus, King of Egypt, having been defeated and made prisoner by Cambyses, King of Persia, saw his daughter walk by dressed as a serving-girl sent to fetch water from the well, and all his friends weeping[RW3]  and lamenting around him, he sat quietly by, saying not a word, with his eyes fixed upon the ground. And when by-and-by he saw his son being led away to his death, he maintained the same composure. But on observing one of his household [RW4] being led away among the captives, he began to beat his breast and fell into a state of deep grief.
           This could well be said to resemble what was lately observed in one of our Princes who, being then in Trento, received word of the death of his older brother, who was the prop and honour of all his family and, then, soon after, of the demise of a younger brother, his second great hope. Having borne both these blows with exemplary fortitude, it so happened that a few days later one of his courtiers died, upon which new misfortune he was quite overcome and, abandoning his self-possession, surrendered to grief and sorrow in such a manner that those around him could only conclude that he had been affected by this final blow alone. But in truth it was because he was full to overflowing with grief that the final drop burst the dam of his self-possession.
           Now it could be (say I) that we might explain the story that way if it did not go on to tell how Cambyses asked Psammenitus why he had not been moved by the fate of his son and daughter but had reacted so violently to that of one of his household. 
           ‘Because,’ said he, ‘only the final blow could be conveyed by tears, the first two having run so deep they were beyond expression’.
           Pertinent here, perhaps, is the discovery of a painter of old who was charged with depicting Iphigenia sacrificed and, one by one, the grief of those present according to the reactions of each to the death of that beautiful young woman. By the time he came to her father, having exhausted all the expedients of his art, he painted him with features hidden as if to say that there was no visage capable of portraying grief so deep. That is why poets make believe that the wretched Niobe, having first lost seven sons and then as many daughters, being weighed down with her losses, was finally turned to stone, ‘being overcome with misery’ (Ovid Metamorphoses VI, 304), this being their best way of rendering that bleak, unspoken, unheeding stupor which numbs our senses when the accidents of life strike with a force that exceeds the limits of what we can bear.
           Such is the impact of these blows which, when they are extreme, overwhelm the mind and rob it of its freedom of expression. When we too are shaken to the core by some truly dreadful piece of news, we are stunned, numb, as if impeded in all our motions so that when afterwards the mind finds release in tears and weeping, it seems to become detached or disconnected and allows itself greater room for action and, now at its ease, ‘its pain allows utterance to its voice.’ (Virgil, Æneid, XI, 151)
           During the war which King Ferdinand waged against the widow of John, King of Hungary, in the environs of Buda, Raïsciac, a German Captain, seeing the body being brought back of a knight who all had observed acquitting himself with great gallantry in the thick of battle, offered [RW5] the conventional condolences. As curious as the others to know the identity of the man, he discovered after the armour was removed that the man was his son. But alone among the general weeping and wailing, he stood ramrod straight, speaking not a word, shedding not a tear, his eyes unwaveringly fixed upon him, until the intensity of his distress congealed his vital spirits and he fell stone dead upon the ground.
           And yet, though
                     whoever says he burns with love scarce burns at all,
                                                                                                                                                                                                           –– Petrarch, sonnet 137
lovers who seek to portray a love too great to bear will say:
I am lost! My senses are all stripped from me!
Lesbia! I see you and my soul, my voice do both flee away,
My body burns with an insubstantial flame,
My ears are full of their own clangour
And upon my eyes twice-fold night falls.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                ––  Catullus, LI, 5
           Thus it is not in the heat of the moment of intense ardour that we are capable of giving voice to our amorous complaints and feelings; at that moment, our whole being is given over to deep purposes and our body overwhelmed and aching with desire.
           Yet at times from that high pitch may proceed an accidental, untimely failure of performance which so disconcerts the lovers, and a loosening of the powerful grip of intense potency on the very brink of enjoyment (an accident not unknown to me). Passions which can be inwardly savoured and digested are not true passions at all.
Small griefs can speak but an aching heart is dumb.
                                                                                                                                                                                                           — Seneca, Hippolytus, II, iii
           An unexpected pleasure may come upon us unexpectedly [RW6] in the same way.
When she saw me and the armaments of Troy all around,
                                                    she panicked and, terror-struck, eyes staring and                                                                     bloodless-cheeked, she fainted away; her voice
did not return to her until long after.
                                                                                                                                                                                                            –– Virgil, Æneid, III, 306)
           In addition to the woman of Rome who died surprised by joy on seeing her son return along the road from the battle at Cannæ, Sophocles and Dionysius of Syracuse who both expired rejoicing, and Talva who died in Corsica as he read the honours which the Senate in Rome had conferred upon him, we have in our own century Pope Leo X who, having been informed of the taking of Milan which he had devoutly wished for, was overcome by such excess of delight that he fell prey to a fever to which he promptly succumbed. And for a more notable example still of the follies of human nature, it is recorded by the ancients that Diodorus the Dialectician dropped dead, laid low by an extreme fit of mortification because in his academy and in front of his public, he had failed to find a way of countering an argument that had been put up against him. 
           I myself am not at all given to such extravagant combustibility for I am naturally hard-headed and, by the daily use and discourse of reason, make my head harder every day.
 
 
 
2
On how our actions are to be judged by the Intention (I, 7) 
 
It is said that death cancels all obligations. I know of some who have put a very different interpretation on this notion. Henry VII, King of England, came to an agreement with Don Philip, son of Maximilian the emperor or, to present him more honourably, father of the emperor Charles V, that the said Phillip should give into his keeping his enemy the Duke of Suffolk (of the White Rose, who had escaped and fled to the Low Countries) against an undertaking[RW7]  that Henry would make no attempt on the Duke’s life. Yet on his deathbed, in his will, the King ordered his son to have the Duke killed immediately after he himself was dead. 
           More recently in Brussels, the tragedy of the execution of Counts Egmont and Horn staged for us by the Duke of Alba was remarkable for a number of extraordinary particulars. Among them was the fact that the said Count of Egmont (on whose word and assurance Count Horn had come to give himself up to the Duke of Alba) requested most insistently that he should be put to death first, for that way his dying would free him of the obligation to Count Horn.
           Now it seems to me that death did not cancel the word Henry had given, but that even before he met his end, Count Egmont was fully released from his pledge.
           For we cannot be held to account beyond the limits of what our strength and capacities can perform. It follows that actions and their consequences are not ours to command and that in reality we are in charge of nothing but our will. Therefore, and inescapably, it is in our will that all the rules and the whole duty of man begin and are rooted. This is why Count Egmont, believing both his soul and his will to be bound by the assurance he had given – even though the power to keep his word was not in his hands – was most certainly absolved of his duty and would have been even if he had survived Count Horn. But the King of England, in failing to keep his word by wilful intent, can no more be excused because he deferred the enactment of his treachery until after his death than the mason of whom Herodotus speaks who, having faithfully throughout his life kept the secret of the treasure house of his master, the King of Egypt, revealed all to his children as he lay dying. 
           In my time, I have known several cases of men who, being quite aware of their guilt in purloining the property of others, have been minded to salve their conscience by making amends in their wills to atone after their deaths. Yet in doing this, they do nothing of practical consequence: they neither set a time by which they should conclude so pressing a matter nor do they seek to right the wrong in a way that would harm them or their interests. Since they owe, they must pay – and feel the payment hurt their pocket. For the more they pay and the more it hurts, the more just and meritorious is the act of restitution. Penitence needs a burden to be carried.
            Others still sink lower who delay keeping for their last will and testament some hateful piece of knavery directed against someone of their acquaintance which they have kept concealed during their lifetime. And so they give the offended party cause to remember them without fondness and they also show how little they care about their conscience. For though they might fear death, they have not been able to make their malice die with them and extend its life beyond theirs. They are iniquitous judges, for they delay forming a judgement until they are no longer in a position to examine the facts of the case.
            If I am able, I will take every care that my death shall say nothing that has not already been said by my life.
 
 [RW1]Or temperament?

 [RW2]Are we to deduce from this a negative connotation? Make clear, perhaps in a note?

 [RW3]‘began weeping’? Somehow the perspective seems odd with him seeing his daughter and  afterwards everyone who is around him

 [RW4]Meaning a servant? Make clearer?

 [RW5]Why underlined?

 [RW6]Another word here? Not sure the repetition works

 [RW7]Rephrase? full stop, then ‘In return, Henry promised to make no attempt on the Duke’s life’?

Table of Contents

PART ONE
MONTAIGNE ON MONTAIGNE

    1      On Sorrow
    2      On how our Actions are to be judged by the Intention
    3      On Idling
    4      On Liars
    5      That we should not be considered happy until we are dead

PART TWO
ON THE PURSUIT OF REASON

    6      On Fear
    7      To tell true from false, it is folly to rely on our own capacities
    8      How we can cry and laugh at the same thing
    9      On Solitude
    10    On the Uncertainty of our Judgement
    11    On Drunkenness

PART THREE
ON GOVERNANCE AND GOVERNORS

    12    On Cannibals
    13    On the Inequality that exists between us
    14    On Sleep
    15    On our lease of life
    16    On Carriages