“WHEN I AM PLAYING WITH MY CAT, HOW DO I KNOW THAT SHE IS NOT PLAYING WITH ME? Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life,” by Saul Frampton (Pantheon. 300 pp. $26)
“HOW TO LIVE, Or, A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer,” by Sarah Bakewell (Other. 389 pp. $25)
Suppose that Earth was invited to join the Intergalactic Congress of Planets, and its chair-being, Zinglos-Atheling, wanted to know more about our strange species. What one person in history would you choose to best represent humanity? On the one hand, Socrates and Jesus are a bit too saintly (or more than saintly) to be wholly representative; on the other, Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan are, as the saying goes, all too human.
You could hardly go wrong by picking Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), the subject of these two excellent books. This French nobleman retired to his book-lined tower in his late 30s and spent the next 20 years in self-scrutiny, gradually revealing more about himself than anyone had ever done before. His essays — Montaigne originated the genre — discuss philosophies of life, quote widely from the ancients and are full of anecdotes from Plutarch, but they also tell us that their author is short, suffers terribly from kidney stones and wishes he didn’t have such a small penis. Above all else, Montaigne celebrates life in all its glorious messiness, while reminding us that nothing matters more than human connectedness and kindness to people and animals.
An endlessly digressive writer, Montaigne is as much raconteur as moralist, and his book offers some of the best after-dinner conversation in the world. You can never be sure what this French humanist will say next. The innocuous-sounding “On Some Lines of Virgil” isn’t about Latin poetry; it’s about sex and eroticism. His greatest single essay — and his last — bears the majestic title “On Experience.” In it, Montaigne reminds us that no matter how high our social status, we all still sit on our own bottoms.
Sarah Bakewell’s “How to Live,” which first appeared last fall to deserved acclaim, has a slight tendency to longwindedness, and its chapter titles verge on the irritatingly cutesy (e.g., “How to live? Do a good job, but not too good a job”). No matter. The book is packed with useful information: Bakewell clarifies the nature of stoicism and scepticism, looks into the lives of Montaigne’s parents, his wife and his adopted daughter, Marie de Gournay (who first edited the essays), and examines closely Montaigne’s famous friendship with Etienne de La Boetie. Asked to explain why he cared so much for his friend, Montaigne could only say: “Because it was him; because it was me.” No better definition of love has yet appeared. All in all, “How to Live” touches on every aspect of Montaigne’s thought, life and influence, and culminates in a fascinating chapter on the complicated textual history of the “Essays.”
In the end, Bakewell concludes that Montaigne’s greatest lesson is that “life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself” and that our troubled 21st century “could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgment, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict.”
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