where he wrote his Essays. Left on the wall he wrote that he
resigned from his job on his birthday.
In 1571, Montaigne
decided to resign from his job as a counsellor at the Parliament (court of
justice) of Bordeaux and to retire to his castle. This was possible because he had
become a rich man. After the death of his father in 1568, he had inherited the
Castle of Montaigne and the entire estate that belonged to it. Now he could do
what he liked and he didn’t need the income of a job any longer; a job that he
didn’t like, because of all the scheming and intriguing by the other
counsellors. Now he was a free man. Now he had time to read the books that he
had inherited from his late friend Étienne de La Boétie. And he had time to
manage his estate. But since he didn’t like the latter he left this to others as
much as possible. And reading all day, every day, day in day out? To read is a
pleasure, but doing nothing else is something different. It’s not what you can
do all the time; at least, most of us cannot. Anyway, Montaigne could not. He
had thought that “I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full
leisure to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth
do, as being by time become more settled and mature…”. However, soon he became
bored. He discovered that being too isolated from the world is not good for you.
Moreover, he discovered that his mind begun to develop all kinds of strange
ideas and fantasies, ideas without coherence and context. Or as Montaigne
writes himself: His mind had become “like a horse that has broke from his
rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would
put him to…” and it had become full of “chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one
upon another, without order or design”.
Montaigne
solved the problem that he lived too isolated by returning to the world, as we
know from his life history. Montaigne began to travel again, inside and outside
France. And he started to network again, for Montaigne had also political aspirations.
Although these political aspirations didn’t materialize in the way he had in
his mind (it seems that he wanted to become France’s ambassador in Rome), it
made that he became a mediator between Henry, the King of Navarre, (who would
later become King Henry IV of France) and the French King Henry III; and it
made that he became appointed mayor of Bordeaux (which he accepted reluctantly).
Montaigne
solved the problem that his mind began to run away with him in a very different
way: He began to reflect on what happened in his mind. Or as Montaigne writes
himself: He began to “contemplate [the] strangeness and absurdity [of the ideas
that whirled through his mind]”, and to write them down, together with his
reflections on these ideas, “hoping in time to make it [=the mind] ashamed of
itself.” This resulted in his Essays, which would become one of the most
famous and most read books in the history of philosophy, a book that is still
widely read, more than 400 years later.
Montaigne tells
us what made him write his Essays, in “Of Idleness”, which is the eighth
essay in Book I. Actually, it should have been the first essay, for it is a
kind of statement why Montaigne began to write his work (beside his “To the
reader”, the preface of the Essays). That’s why this essay is so important.
But there is more. This essay tells us also something else: Humans cannot live
by doing nothing. Humans cannot live isolated from the world. If you didn’t
know it yet, you’ll have learned it now, in a time that a pandemic rules the
world and one lockdown after the other is proclaimed. Man is a social being and
when she or he is isolated from the world or isolates himself from the world, soon
the mind begins to behave like a runaway horse and to develop all kinds of
strange ideas. Then, as Montaigne made us clear by what he did and what he wrote,
there are two things we must do: Go back to the world and bring order again in
your mind, for idleness leads to nothing.
P.S. I had promised myself to avoid writing again on the present pandemic. But what happens? I started writing this blog with a very different idea in my mind, although I did want to write about Montaigne’s essay “Of Idleness”, indeed. But as it often goes, once I had started to write, the writing process pushed me in a direction that I hadn’t planned and hadn’t foreseen, and in the end it moved me towards the covid pandemic again. No help. One cannot live isolated from the world.
Source
All
quotations are from Michel de Montaigne, “Of Idleness”, Essays, Book I, chapter VIII; Gutenberg translation: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#link2HCH0008
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