Varúa magazine
Fall, 2010
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Sallust
New York – January. It is snowing in Manhattan. The temperature is an invitation to watch television or gaze at the harmless ceiling, but not to go out. However, my stomach, stimulated by the gastronomic alert of a local friend, chose to ignore the weather report and guided me to the food truck parked on 68th Street just off Lexington Avenue. It’s Yemeni, he had warned me affably. It makes the best falafel, schwarma and kebab, among other Eastern delicacies.
I was about to order when, between colors and smells, my eye caught a nearby small, out-of-place and rundown second-hand book stand against the outer wall of Hunter College, in flagrant infraction, for sure. The table, a cheap oddly-angled piece of furniture, was set so that anyone who dared could reach out and take a volume. But no sooner had I extended my arm than a young man wearing a scrawny beard and a red cap appeared and, without so much as a word, asked what I was looking for. What I wanted is what had found me, I replied similarly, pointing to a thick hardcover volume in perfect condition with the dust jacket still on. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, Stanford University Press, 1958, translated by Donald Frame and almost 900 pages long.
At this instant, I remembered that unjustly famous line: There, at my feet, was a backpack full of medicine and a box of ammunition. They were too heavy to carry both. I picked up the ammunition … The fable turned into a facile, fossil formula and then into verse; the pose and pass of belonging to a club that would never accept me as member even if I wanted to join. My quandary, more carnal, more real, was: Kebab or Montaigne, but I reacted and could dodge the spurious dilemma. So, after adopting the Frenchman for just under twenty dollars, I trembled with joy at the sight of the gargantuan pita bread sandwich and, like a modest haruspex, inspected its swollen entrails of meat, peppers, cucumbers, pine nuts and other ingredients that were impossible to identify in the mishmash. The two propitious events, occurring almost simultaneously, unnerved me; I felt as if I were in close proximity to the ominous shadow of blind Fortuna, the impostor that deceives men.
With the expectation that the Scoville units of jalapeno peppers would soon do their job of global warming, I walked quickly down Park Avenue and turned on 67th Street toward Madison. While waiting for the bus, it suddenly struck me that the best place to examine my new acquisition should not be on public transportation but rather in a setting that measured up to the nobility of the work and its author.
The Frick Collection
At 1 East 70th Street and running one block up Fifth Avenue stands the mansion of Henry Clay Frick, fragile freak turned merciless mogul, partner of Andrew Carnegie in the steel business and owner of a sophisticated art collection by the old masters, which he left to the city in the early 1900s.
The mansion’s majestic and serene atmosphere offers the best that money can buy, a small but numerous selection of the most distinguished creations of humankind: bronze and marble sculptures, portraits and landscapes, cabinets and commodes, tapestries, clocks, silver and porcelain. Seated before the “Bust of a Lady”, by Francesco Laurana, a 15th century master, I open my backpack and, taking out the book, read:
Lately when I retired to my home, determined so far as possible to bother about nothing except spending the little life I have left in rest and seclusion, it seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor that to let it entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time. But I find –
“Ever idle hours breed wandering thoughts.” Lucan
that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.
Montaigne, like Rabelais, was a child of the Cinquecento. The craft of writing during this period, as happens during any transition, was characterized by insecurity and experimentation. However, unlike the confused and immeasurable François, and despite having had to write between the words and daggers of two civil wars -the battle of ideas of the Renaissance and the impious clashes in the name of religion- Montaigne was safely anchored in the classic Greek and Roman works about which he knew so much more than many 16th century scholars, and perhaps even much more than those living today.
He was a hedonic but active reader, far from the escapist or narcotic reading. His higher education, necessary but not enough to produce a great author, was the master key that liberated and guided his thoughts with invulnerable efficiency.
Montaigne was born in 1533 in the Aquitaine region. He was baptized Michel Eyquem. As befits the noble customs of the times, the ancestry replaced the second part of his name with Montaigne, the name of the castle his grandfather Ramon had bought in 1477. He was a prosperous herring merchant and founder of the dynasty of the consecrated Château d’Yquem wine. His mother, Antoinette de Louppes (López), was a descendent of Spanish Jews that had converted to Catholicism. His father Pierre, a Roman Catholic, considered that the boy’s education should only be ruled and protected by the highest values that the classics could offer. In line with this premise, he distanced his child from the traditional schools, a decision that Montaigne would recognize in one of his essays several years later.
My late father, having made all the enquiries a man can make, among men of learning and understanding, about a superlative system of education, became aware of the drawbacks that were prevalent; and he was told that the long time we put into learning languages which cost the ancient Greeks and Romans nothing was the only reason we could not attain their greatness in soul and in knowledge. At all events, the expedient my father hit upon was this, that while I was nursing and before the first loosening of my tongue, he put me in the care of a German, who has since died a famous doctor in France, wholly ignorant of our language and very well versed in Latin. As for the rest of my father’s household, it was an inviolable rule that neither my father himself, nor my mother, nor any valet or housemaid, should speak anything in my presence but such Latin words as each had learned in order to jabber with me.
It is wonderful how everyone profited from this. My father and mother learned enough Latin in this way to understand it, and acquired sufficient skill to use it when necessary, as did also the servants who were most attached to my service. Altogether, we Latinized ourselves so much that it overflowed all the way to our villages on every side, where there still remain several Latin names for artisans and tools that have taken root by usage. As for me, I was over six before I understood any more French or Perigordian than Arabic. And without artificial means, without a book, without grammar or precept, without the whip and without tears, I had learned a Latin quite as pure as what my schoolmaster knew, for I could not have contaminated or altered it.
His lineage, not his prose, enabled him to explore, though halfheartedly, the world of politics, which discriminates and condemns. He was an involuntary governor of Bordeaux for four years and a moderate mediator between two Henrys – one Catholic, the other Protestant.
Le Train Bleu
The mansion closes its doors. I must leave. Sunset and nostalgia for the Château d’Yquem brought to mind the former maître d’, Sebastián Villagra, a Paraguayan who like a devout missionary sustained that winter is the best wine tasting season to savor a Sauvignon Blanc. I never fully understood why he made such a daring assertion and have no interest in finding out so long as I have a bottle at hand, and possibly full.
So I set off for Le Train Blue, not to Calais or the Riviera, but to the formidable dining car stationed in the heights of Bloomingdale’s, escorted by the memory of a few glasses I had sipped several seasons ago.
Montaigne’s essays reveal that he was not only a merely extraordinary reader. He also had a remarkable memory, something akin to the savant syndrome, which enabled him to quote dozens of authors and passages in brief extracts. With Montaigne, the maxim Every man’s library is his private literature takes on meaning.
Pierre Villey, who was a prodigious erudite and could even read the work of Montaigne with his eyes closed -in fact, he transcribed the complete works into Braille- listed the authors most mentioned in the essays. At least fifty authors comprise the list, almost all Latin, Greek not having been part of his education as a youth. Cicero, appearing over 300 times, leads the group. Horace and Lucretius, both Epicureans, share the list with some 150 mentions each. Ovid, Terence, Martial, Suetonius, Propertius, Juvenal, Flavius Josephus and Virgil also compete in the ranking.
Montaigne excels in the art of evocative quotation, not as a forced recourse for gratuitous brilliance, a pedant’s means, or an end in itself, as happens, say, with Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a book that turns to distant corners of literature to present exotic names that impact on the careless reader; rather, it is a way to produce beauty that springs from an organic, not mechanical, relationship with his books – from the relevant mention of authors, titles and stages that grant competence and authority to the object of the narrative. Montaigne lived and experienced the classics as he wrote and played, avoiding the loathed tediousness of his daily chores. He sought freedom with the help of his past teachers who attentively tendered him a friendly hand. Modestly, he said:
We Labor only to fill our memory, and leave the understanding and the conscience empty. Just as birds sometimes go in quest of grain, and carry it in their beak without tasting it to give a beakful to their little ones, so our pedants go pillaging knowledge in books and lodge it only on the end of their lips, in order merely to disgorge it and scatter it to the winds.
It is wonderful how appropriately this folly fits my case. Isn’t it doing the same thing, what I do in most of this composition? I go about cadging from books here and there the sayings that please me, not to keep them, for I have no storehouses, but to transport them into this one, in which, to tell the truth, they are no more mine than in their original place. We are, I believe, learned only with present knowledge, not with past, any more than with future.
I shut the book and drain my glass. I bid goodbye to the still train.
Montaigne instituted the canon of the modern essay. He wrote about the same topics that Seneca and Plutarch had covered – his favorites. Yet, while they used the form of the moral treatise or epistles to their friends, he referred to his digressions as “essays”. In French, essai, a test, an attempt, given the lack of a foreseeable scheme, no road book, but rather an ongoing search for an equilibrium between approximations and divergences, constant derivations, fluctuations, doubts and certainties. His statement: What do I know? merely confirms that he chose to distance himself from any rigid system of thought.
Cruelty, sloth, fear, disease, friendship, vanity are not themes he uses to produce a collection of apothegms, so popular during his formative years. Montaigne eludes the brachylogical construction by incorporating the subjective factor, personal experiences – from the deepest to the most pedestrian.
Borges could have written: Classic is not an author that necessarily has such or such merits; it is an author that the generations of men, urged by different reasons, read with previous enthusiasm and with a mysterious loyalty.
If Montaigne’s works still prevail, despite the whims of trade and fashion, it is because they are rooted in the classic tradition, that intangible matter of which we are all made.
Translation: Laura Pakter
