Detach yourself !

Montaigne's backroom in his castle where he
could retire and where he wrote his essays.

There has been a time that I wrote very short blogs or that a blog even consisted of a simple quote with hardly any comment or even no comment at all. Not all blogs were so then, but many were. And sometimes I think, why not write them this way again? Why spend thousand words on what can be said with hundred or less or with a good quotation? Why comment on what is obvious? And when I looked for a subject for this week’s blog, I came across this passage in Montaigne’s Essays and thought that just this was a passage that speaks for itself and that doesn’t need any additional comment:

“Wives, children, and goods must be had, and especially health, by him that can get it; but we are not so to set our hearts upon them that our happiness must have its dependence upon them; we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat. And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there; there to laugh and to talk, as if without wife, children, goods, train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them. We have a mind pliable in itself, that will be company; that has wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give.”

(Montaigne, “Of Solitude”, Essays, Book I-38 (or 39 in other editions), quoted from https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/montaigne/michel/essays/complete.html)

“Detach yourself!”, is what Montaigne says here. It is good to have people around you and there is nothing against having possessions and even being rich, but know how to detach yourself from them when necessary and keep always a place for yourself. Have a backroom where you can retire. To be attached to what is dear to you is okay, but there are limits to it, and you must keep a space for yourself. In the end this free space is your mind. And we can say that you must not only know to keep distance from the persons and material things around you – at the right time – but also from the immaterial things, like oppressive thoughts or self-imposed rules, such as how to compose these blogs. But, oops! Again I cannot keep myself from commenting on this quotation. Hadn’t I said that it speaks for itself? So detach yourself from me and take have your own thoughts.