Meet Montaigne!

On a pleasant afternoon outside Bordeaux, in his tower at the corner of his family chateau, the writer and statesman Michel de Montaigne, stocky and bedraggled in britches and poofy blouse, was serving us wine from the estate’s northerly vineyards.

“I speak my mind freely on all things, even those which perhaps exceed my capacity and which I by no means hold to be within my jurisdiction,” he assured us as he wandered to a shelf and began fidgeting with a book of Cicero’s poems. “I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves, not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance...as children set forth their essays to be instructed, not to instruct.”

The beloved former mayor and adviser to French kings is perhaps best known for his three-volume collection of Essays, which he began writing upon his retirement in 1572, at the age of 37, when he discovered that simply allowing himself idle time to read and think led his mind, “like a runaway horse, [to] give itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and [to] give birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose,” that he began to write in order to “make [his] mind ashamed of itself.”

His first two volumes of Essays, which appeared in 1580, contained this prefatory warning: “Reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.” Yet readers did spend their leisure on reading the Essays, enjoying Montaigne’s candor; his wavering even-handedness; his playful, associative mind on display in the text. And not only in France in the sixteenth century, but around the world and through the centuries.

This simple man of letters seems as surprised as anyone that his literary legacy has lasted over four hundred years. “I do not love myself so indiscriminately, nor am I so attached and wedded to myself, that I cannot distinguish and consider myself apart, as I do a neighbor or a tree,” he commented as he poured refills then tenderly passed us an original printing of his book. “Here you have some excrements of an aged mind,” he chuckled, “now hard, now loose, and always undigested.” And we all had a hearty laugh together. 

Personal

Born Feb. 28, 1533, in Guyenne, France. Married to Françoise de la Chassaigne (1565-92), with six children, one who survived infancy. 

Why You Know Him

In his Essays, Michel performs acrobatic mental feats of association, considering everything that comes into his purview with artless art and graceless grace. “It is the language of conversation transferred to a book,” said Emerson. “Cut these words, and they would bleed.” 

What You Don’t Know

Out of respect for her honor, I have never gazed upon the breasts of Mme. De Montaigne.

I will not sit with thirteen at the table. I can dine without a tablecloth, but very uncomfortably without a clean napkin. My teeth…have always been exceedingly good… Since boyhood I learned to rub them on my napkin, both on waking up and before and after meals. I am not excessively fond of either salads or fruits, except melons.

My meat: rare. 

Favorite movies?

I was expecting more, or perhaps less, from Stoic. Perhaps the prison film is not my genre. The Cannibals was interesting in a lurid way, surprising in its Sophoclean inspiration. I frankly thought there would be more about the cannibals. Perhaps I’m too literal about these things. A Man For All Seasons was one I watched several times. It reminded me that as an ill conscience fills us with fear, so a good one gives us greater confidence and assurance.

When I dance, I dance, when I sleep, I sleep, and I think Fred Astaire is like a sleep dancer, walking on air . . . that magical man. He seems to stop time. So, I’d say Swing Time is a good one, with Ginger Rogers . . . I am very much driven by beauty. So let’s just say anything with Rita Hayworth. The felicity that glitters in virtue, shines throughout all her avenues and ways. Oh, and “Put the Blame on Mame”! 

What books are on your nightstand these days?

I study myself more than any other subject. 

Understood, but any books grabbing you lately?

Erasmus, Rabelais, La Boetie… 

What do you think of more contemporary essayists, say, James Baldwin?

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I. I also quite like that fellow Sebald. 

We understand that your tastes in music run from des Prez and Willaert to more contemporary fare. Can you share with us some of your favorite popular songs?

“Boys, Boys, Boys,” by Lady Gaga would seem to capture the essence of the Socratic impulse. Then there’s “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” by the White Stripes. Lisa Hannigan’s “I Don’t Know” is quite good. Dusty Springfield sang a song very true to my way of thinking, “How Can I Be Sure.” Then, of course, Ray Charles singing “You Don’t Know Me” speaks to me of the wavering and noncommital natures we carry in this shifting world. Similarly, the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” comes from a dilemma I have often found myself contemplating. 

So this new book, After Montaigne . . . what do you think of the use of your work as the basis for new musings?

I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement. I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself. [After Montaigne] has this notable advantage for my humor, that the knowledge I seek is there treated in detached pieces that do not demand the obligation of long labor, of which I am incapable.

I find it admirable at representing to the life the movements of the soul and the state of our characters. I cannot read it so often as not to find in it some new beauty and grace.

Amongst so many borrowed things, I am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service. All the glory that I aspire to in my life is to have lived it tranquilly. There is nothing that poisons a man so much as flattery.

But I’m flattered.

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David Lazar and Patrick Madden are co-editors of After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (Georgia, 2015), which includes over two dozen wonderful essayists writing "cover versions" of the master's works. They have each visited Montaigne's Tower in France, and were each turned away because it was then closed. David made it back the next day. Patrick will have to make another pilgrimage. Don't try to visit on Mondays or Tuesdays, friends!

Aaron Alford: Fussing Over Style

Don’t go looking for wisdom here—especially not wisdom that is not earned. At Arcadia Magazine, we’re not seeking essays that deliver epiphanies, advice, or words to live by. No brilliant thoughts on everyday household objects or clever insights into the quotidian. Do not try to reveal watertight truths for the betterment of all Humanity. (Note: We probably won’t be interested in your essay if you capitalize words like Humanity.) We receive a lot of these types of essays, ones whose titles usually begin with the dreadful “On…”

“On Friendship.”

“On the Paper Cut I Got Yesterday.”

“On Toilet Paper.”

On the head of my firstborn, I swear to eat a bag of nails if we ever publish one of those essays.

We are not too terribly interested in writers working within the Montaigne vein (or vain, if you will), mostly because so few writers do it well. We respect tradition, and we recognize Montaigne as the great-grandpappy of everything we do, yes, okay, we get it—but these days, there is too much piddly writing committed in that man's name. Incoherent ramblings. Unjustified meandering. Too many writers use the "Essay As Representation Of The Mind At Work" thing as an excuse to string together as many loose associations and insights as it takes to convince themselves (but rarely their readers) that they are wonderful writers.

Several years ago, my graduate program was lucky enough to be visited by a big-time essayist, a major name in our genre. He was a wonderful man, just as everyone said he would be. He graciously stood before an auditorium packed with sleepy undergraduates and read a couple of essays. As the reading went on, the undergrads grew sleepier. I also wasn’t turned on by what I heard that night, but this guy was a big-name writer, an important figure, someone I felt pressured to admire. So when he finished reading, I headed for the back of the auditorium, elbowed my way through the crowd of students stuffing their pockets with free cookies, and bought his book of selected essays. He signed it for me, and I carried it home with plans to read it and thereby be woken up to all that is wonderful and good about personal essays—a second chance to get whatever it was I missed during his reading.

I read the introduction, just four pages, and then I read those four pages again. And that was enough for me. I was done. Five years have passed since that night, and I still can't find it in myself to read another word of that writer’s large, influential body of work. I’m still angry at one particular paragraph from his introduction, the one where he comments on his prose style. It helped me realize why a lot of very traditional personal essayists working these days (a lot of whom seem to be influenced by this writer) put me to sleep. The writer confesses that style just ain’t important to him, and as far as I can tell, he suggests that style shouldn’t be very important to any writer—it's just not something we should fuss with. He laughs at Flaubert’s notion of le mot juste. Unlike Babel, he never tries to unleash a period with the force of a bullet. We should simply end one sentence and start the next one immediately, right now, go, go. That's what works for him. He says that taking himself or the art of prose too seriously goes against the grain of his being.

Listen. Arcadia only wants to publish essays from writers who take the art of prose seriously. We do not have to take ourselves too seriously in this life—we sure as hell don’t—but we should all be serious about our sentences. We're interested in essays whose success depends on precise language, essays that feel deliberate and chock-full of purpose. Clear eyes, full hearts . . . all of that. We want essays that grip us and refuse to let go. Everything should be tight, hardly any slack (which is kind of the definition of grip, right?).

None of us nails le mot juste all the livelong day. Not all of our periods land with .45-caliber force. We break ourselves over the wheel of the sentence, and we fail all the time, all of us. But we should still try. Style is something to fuss with. Try to make your punctuation draw blood, or else why are you even doing this?

Send us something that you just had to write, something from inside your bones. No intellectual exercises and no armchair philosophizing. Don’t go looking for wisdom—just go looking. And please, do it with style.

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Aaron Alford is the nonfiction editor of Arcadia Magazine. His essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Bellingham Review, Memoir, River Teeth, Hobart, The Los Angeles Review, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. He is a doctoral candidate in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University, where he teaches literature and creative writing.

Dec 13: Dinty W. Moore on Sven Birkerts' "Telescope"

I can’t help but admire the remarkable concision and precision in Sven Birkerts’ essay “Telescope” in TriQuarterly.  I can’t help but admire that the essay, and essayist, cover so much ground in a paltry 630 words.  I can’t help but admire the way in which Birkerts captures the movement of the human mind, or at least the humanist mind, so carefully and exactly on the page. I love this small piece of nonfiction prose in much the same way that I love a brilliant short film.  It is all about the movement.

Birkerts begins with the possibility that Italian researchers have uncovered proof that neutrinos – those miniscule particles that only physicists can see – travel even faster than light at times, upsetting nothing less than the scientific applecart that is Einstein's special theory of relativity.  He then, deftly, references string theory and parallel universe theory, via a colleague “who actually can think about these things in intelligent ways.”  Birkerts momentarily threatens to swamp our mind with super science then lets us down easy through his own essayistic persona; he too is boggled, grasping these enormous concepts for only a fleeting instant before they become too huge to grasp.

So Birkerts moves on to the directly observable, “metal filings on a sheet of paper,” “baking soda added to vinegar,” radio kits, and chemistry sets. The quotidian trumps the unfathomable.  We are kids again, when science was as simple as an apple dropping from a tree.  

And then the turn. Birkerts once had a microscope. Once startled at “a sudden eyeful of the honeybee’s shockingly hairy leg.”But he didn’t like the squinting. “That magnitude of inspection,” he writes, “did not compel me—which should have told me I was a humanist.” He wanted a different view, not a view of micro-phenomena, but of “people who did not know they were being observed.”

In the end, Birkerts brief meditation on science and observation becomes an essay about essaying, about his own use of the essay as a vehicle for understanding human nature, and about the “glimmer of how the one thing related to the other.”  

Like Montaigne before him, Birkerts sees drama in the movement of a curious mind.  Suspense, even.  His essay is itself a telescope; “with a few gratifyingly decisive moves,” his essay pulls “section from section, snap snap, elongating, until” the essayist has created “a device worthy of old-time sea captains” and of a certain crotchety 16th century French noblemen who invented the form.

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Dinty W. Moore is the editor of Brevity and writes books.