How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell

In Sarah Bakewell’s versatile, brilliant and joyful account of Michel de Montaigne’s life and work there is a quote from poet and author Leonard Woolf proposing the 16^th century French philosopher to be “the first completely modern man” with an “intense awareness of and passionate interest in the individuality of himself and all other human beings.” Reading Bakewell’s book, and Montaigne’s Essays themselves, one becomes acutely aware of exactly how modern he is, of quite how relevant he is today as he was some 350 years ago. The time that has elapsed since first committing his thoughts to paper seems to have concertinaed into the briefest of moments and his ambiguity, his uncertainty and his energy, his awe and innocent perplexity at the vagaries of life, remain entirely undimmed. They are, even in the swirling miasma of twenty-first century living, some of the most exciting and thrilling and instructive ideas one is likely to come across. Indeed, it is this notion that the Essays transcend history that, for Bakewell, makes them such important writings.

Not that Montaigne’s age was devoid of incident, far from it. Sixteenth century France was a nation beset by rebellion, war, religious enmity, fraught political infighting, domestic uprisings and a succession of weak and ineffectual monarchs; but it was also an age of great philosophical introspection and few were as introspective as Michel Eqyuem de Montaigne. It is this that made, and still today makes, Essays so captivating or, in the words of the man himself “both wild and extravagant”: the subject matter is, quite simply, the author himself. Montaigne spares no aspect of his life, however trivial, in the pursuit of some meaning, doing nothing more than merely inviting his readers to watch him think. It was as beautiful a conceit then as it is today and in his easy-going and accessible style he creates an intense familarity, disarming in his honesty (“I am free to give myself up to doubt and uncertainty, and to my predominant quality which is ignorance”) and appealing in his idiosyncrasies. The result is a free-flowing ramble, a saunter through the mind of a man who, by a series of incidents scattered across his lifetime (including the death of all but one of his children, that of his most cherished friend La Boétie to the plague and his own near-death experience in a riding accident) had learnt that the best way to deal with life’s episodic inconsistencies was simply happy acceptance, just to relax; what we might call today “letting it slide.” As he says himself, “the only thing certain is that nothing is certain.”

Bakewell, rightly, places this attitude firmly within the lineage of the Hellenistic philosophy of the Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics and their collective encouragement of “mindfulness” through “equilibrium”, that is to say having complete control of one’s emotions – the goal should be happiness in this world (eudaimonia) not Heaven. But Montaigne extricates himself from the fanaticism, often violent, that can beset both philosophy and religion by remaining entirely grounded in the quotidian. It is an approach that would later drive some to distraction, notably Pascal and Descartes, but it is one that has ensured an unbreakable bond with the common reader. So, he writes on his forgetfulness, his cat’s role in his understanding of differing perspectives, liars, thumbs, “That we laugh and cry for the same thing”, smells, sleep, the scent on his moustache, pedantry, cannibals…the essays are as varied as they are simple. And they are more accomplished and relevant for it.

Bakewell’s thrust that Essays has passed through the ages undiminished is hard to dismiss. So much of what Montaigne concluded then, in that he concludes anything at all other then there are no simple conclusions, might help us to better grasp the violent shifts in today’s changing world should we choose to embrace it. The notion that the best way to tolerate randomness and uncertainty, to understand and engage with haughty ideologies that pass as universal codes of behaviour, to comprehend the multiplicity of the human condition, would be simply to suspend judgment is a wonderfully truthful one. And it is one that, while counterintuitive to a modern world where we are encouraged to seek out only definitive answers, should really command our attention. For this reason alone How to Live is a fantastic, enjoyable and enthralling primer into a world of relaxed thinking and tolerance and it, and of course the essays themselves, thoroughly deserve to reach as wide a readership as possible.

Image courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library