Book Report: How to Live

42. Sarah Bakewell, How to Live; or, A Life of Montaigne—in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) (8/25/21)

This book has everything: philosophy, biography, history, criticism, motion, delight. Ostensibly the story of the original essayist Montaigne (1533–1592) himself, it is organized in such a way that Bakewell can take elegant detours without losing the reader. The "twenty attempts at an answer" to the very basic question of "how to live" all come from Montaigne's thoughts and writing, but she uses them to also explore sixteenth-century French history (and what a period it was, marked by religious warfare and the plague); the editorial history of his Essays themselves, from Montaigne's own obsessive rewrites straight into present-day scholarship; Montaigne's influences from among Classical writers and philosophers, especially the Stoics, Skeptics, and Epicureans; his worries and fascinations. In straight biography, the book covers his childhood and youth, his marriage and home life, his travels through Europe, his famous loving friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, his political career as both mayor of Bordeaux and advisor to kings, his death. But all that is woven into a more general exploration of, simply, how to live.

As Gustave Flaubert advised a friend wondering how to approach Montaigne's Essays, "Don't read him as children do, for amusement, nor as the ambitious do, to be instructed. No, read him in order to live." In wrapping up the book, Bakewell observes:

For Montaigne, it was always life that mattered. Virginia Woolf was especially fond of quoting this thought from his last essay: it was as close as Montaigne ever came to a final or best answer to the question of how to live.

Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.

Either this is not an answer at all, or it is the only possible answer. It has the same quality as the answer given by the Zen master who, when asked, "What is enlightenment?" whacked the questioner on the head with a stick. Enlightenment is something learned on your own body: it takes the form of things happening to you. This is why the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics taught tricks rather than precepts. All philosophers can offer is that blow on the head: a useful technique, a thought experiment, or an experience—in Montaigne's case, the experience of reading the Essays. The subject he teaches is simply himself, an ordinary example of a living being.
     Although the Essays present a different facet to every eye, everything in them is united in that one figure: Montaigne. This is why readers return to him in a way they do to few others of his century, or indeed to most writers of any epoch. The Essays are his essays. They test and sample a mind that is an "I" to itself, as all minds are.

The subjects that Montaigne covers range from thumbs to cruelty, diversion to smells, friendship to cannibals, names to experience. Anything that caught his eye—or his mind. He rambles, he segues, he sometimes infuriates by not getting to the point, or seemingly any point. But he is always engaged.

Some of the "attempts at answers" that Bakewell distills from the Essays include Don't worry about death; Pay attention; Use little tricks; Survive love and loss; Question everything; Be convivial: live with others; Wake from the sleep of habit; Guard your humanity; See the world; Give up control; Be ordinary and imperfect; Reflect on everything, regret nothing.

Bakewell ends with a charming, imagined vignette:

There they  are, then, in Montaigne's library. The cat is attracted by the scratching of his pen; she dabs an experimental paw at the moving quill. He looks at her, perhaps momentarily irritated by the interruption. Then he smiles, tilts the pen, and draws the feather-end across the paper for her to chase. She pounces. The pads of her paws smudge the ink on the last few words; some sheets of paper slide to the floor. The two of them can be left there, suspended in the midst of their lives with the Essays not yet fully written, while we go and get on with ours—with the Essays not yet fully read.

Her conclusion: "Out of that moment—and countless others like it—came his whole philosophy. . . . No abstract principles are involved; there are only two individuals, face to face, hoping for the best from one another."

Indeed, this central message is universal and extends throughout time. And so no wonder I kept being struck as I read by how similar 16th-century France seemed in an existential way to 2021 America: we humans struggle, we have disagreements, we encounter dangers and setbacks, we dream and yearn, we accomplish things, we long for and also nurture love. In short, we want to live as full a life as possible. In this, we are all so much more alike than our petty (or even not so petty) differences would seem to indicate.

I loved this book. 

And I am now officially just on top of my reading challenge, so you'll probably be seeing some kids' books and lighter fare coming down the pike!