How to Live (18 page)

Although he transmuted his sorrow into literature, Montaigne’s grief was overwhelming, and it seemed to become greater with time. After La Boétie died, everything was “nothing but dark and dreary night.”
Traveling in Italy nearly eighteen years later, he wrote in his private diary: “This same morning, writing to Monsieur d’Ossat, I was overcome by such painful thoughts about Monsieur de La Boétie, and I was in this mood so long, without recovering, that it did me much harm.” He also wrote in the
Essays
about how he longed for a true companion in Italy—someone whose ways harmonized with his own, and who liked to do the things he liked to do. “I have missed such a man extremely on all my travels.”

He never ruled out the possibility of finding someone to reprise La Boétie’s role. Seneca had advised this: a wise man should be so good at making new friends that he can replace an old one without skipping a beat.
Sometimes, in the
Essays
, Montaigne seems to issue a come-hither call to candidates: he hopes his book will please “some worthy man” who will seek him out. Yet he did not really feel that anyone could replace the original. He was forever disappointed:

Whenever Montaigne sounds cool or detached from other people, as he sometimes does, one has to remember La Boétie. People should not, he writes, be “joined and glued to us so strongly that they cannot be detached without tearing off our skin and some part of our flesh as well.”
These are the words of a man who knows what it feels like to be flayed in this way.

In life, Montaigne apparently rebelled against La Boétie’s improving influence at times, but now no trace remained of this. With La Boétie safely dead, Montaigne could surrender to him unreservedly—and he could do what La Boétie had begged him to do: give him a place.

First he absorbed many of La Boétie’s books into his library, making room for his friend among his own most treasured possessions. Then he wrote about La Boétie’s death, rescuing as much as he could remember of the young philosopher’s testament to posterity. He prepared a stack of La Boétie’s writings for publication. Finally, when he retired, he made his friend the guiding spirit of his own new career. Alongside the main inscription about his retirement, he added another to his library wall: it is now worn and hard to decipher, but seems to consecrate all his future “studious work” to the memory of La Boétie, “the sweetest, dearest, and most intimate friend” the sixteenth century could produce.
La Boétie was
to watch over everything Montaigne did in his library: he would be his literary guardian angel.

By dying, La Boétie changed from being Montaigne’s real-life, flawed companion to being an ideal entity under Montaigne’s control. He became less a person than a sort of philosophical technique. Seneca had advised his followers to use their friends in this way. Having found some admirable man, he said, one should visualize him as an ever-present audience, in order to hold oneself to his exalted standards.
If you would live for yourself, he wrote, you should live for others—above all for your chosen friend.

Montaigne was willing to try any trick of this kind, if it promised consolation. As he wrote in one of his dedications to La Boétie’s posthumous books: “He is still lodged in me so entire and so alive that I cannot believe that he is so irrevocably buried or so totally removed from our communication.”
Letting La Boétie live on within himself was a way of fulfilling his friend’s dying wish, and easing his own loneliness. Meanwhile, he used techniques of distraction and diversion to get himself through the immediate shock of loss. Best of all, he discovered the therapeutic benefits of writing. By passing on La Boétie’s death narrative and farewell to the world in written form, he helped himself to relive the scene, and thus outlive it. He never fully got over La Boétie, but he learned to exist in the world without him, and, in so doing, to change his own life. Writing about La Boétie eventually led him to write the
Essays:
the best philosophical trick of all.

A
BOUT ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHERS
, Montaigne was usually dismissive: he disliked their pedantries and abstractions. But he showed an endless fascination for another tradition in philosophy: that of the great pragmatic schools which explored such questions as how to cope with a friend’s death, how to work up courage, how to act well in morally difficult situations, and how to make the most of life. These were the philosophies he turned to in times of grief or fear, as well as for guidance in dealing with more minor everyday irritations.

The three most famous such systems of thought were Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism: the philosophies collectively known as Hellenistic because they had their origins in the era when Greek thought and culture spread to Rome and other Mediterranean regions, from the third century
BC
onwards.
They differed in details, but were so close in essentials as to be hard to distinguish much of the time. Like everyone else, Montaigne mixed and matched them according to his needs.

All the schools had the same aim: to achieve a way of living known in the original Greek as
eudaimonia
, often translated as “happiness,” “joy,” or “human flourishing.”
This meant living well in every sense: thriving, relishing life, being a good person. They also agreed that the best path to
eudaimonia
was
ataraxia
, which might be rendered as “imperturbability” or “freedom from anxiety.”
Ataraxia
means equilibrium: the art of maintaining an even keel, so that you neither exult when things go well nor plunge into despair when they go awry. To attain it is to have control over your emotions, so that you are not battered and dragged about by them like a bone fought over by a pack of dogs.

It was on the question of how to acquire such equanimity that the philosophies began to diverge. Each had a different idea, for example, of how far one should compromise with the real world. The original Epicurean community, founded by Epicurus in the fourth century BC,
required followers to leave their families and live like cult members in a private “garden.” Skeptics preferred to remain amid the public hurly-burly like everyone else, but with a radically altered mental attitude. Stoics were somewhere in between. The two best known Stoic writers, Seneca and Epictetus, wrote for an elite Roman readership who were deeply involved in the affairs of their time and had no time for gardens, but who desired oases of tranquillity and self-possession wherever they could find them.

Stoics and Epicureans shared a great deal of their theory, too. They thought that the ability to enjoy life is thwarted by two big weaknesses: lack of control over emotions, and a tendency to pay too little attention to the present. If one could only get these two things right—
controlling
and
paying attention
—most other problems would take care of themselves. The catch is that both are almost impossible to do. So difficult are they that one cannot approach them head-on. It is necessary to sidle in from lateral angles, and trick oneself into achieving them.

Accordingly, Stoic and Epicurean thinkers spent much time devising techniques and thought experiments. For example: imagine that today is the last day of your life. Are you ready to face death? Imagine, even, that this very moment—
now!
—is the last moment of your existence. What are you feeling? Do you have regrets? Are there things you wish you had done differently? Are you really alive at this instant, or are you consumed with panic, denial, and remorse? This experiment opens your eyes to what is important to you, and reminds you of how time runs constantly through your fingers.

Some Stoics even acted out these “last moment” experiments with props and a supporting cast. Seneca wrote of a wealthy man named Pacuvius, who conducted a full-scale funeral ceremony for himself every day, ending with a feast after which he would have himself carried from the table to his bed on a bier while all the guests and servants intoned, “He has lived his life, he has lived his life.”
You could achieve the same effect more simply and cheaply just by holding the idea of your own demise in your mind and paying full attention to it. The Epicurean writer Lucretius suggested picturing yourself at the point of death, and considering two possibilities. Either you have lived well, in which case you can go your way satisfied, like a well-fed guest leaving a party. Or you have not, but then it makes no
difference that you are losing your life, since you obviously did not know what to do with it anyway. This may offer scant comfort on your deathbed, but if you think about it in the midst of life it helps you to change your perspective.

Such shifts of attitude are the purpose of many of the thought experiments. If you have lost someone or something precious, you can try to value her, him, or it differently by imagining that you never knew that person, or never owned that object. How can you miss what you never had? A different angle produces a different emotion. Plutarch suggested such a ploy in a letter to his wife, after their two-year-old daughter died: he advised her to think back to before the girl was born, and pretend they were back in those days again.
Whether this consoled her is not known, but at least it gave her something to focus on instead of swimming in an ocean of undifferentiated grief. Montaigne and La Boétie both knew this letter well, for La Boétie translated it into French and Montaigne edited his translation for publication. It may have come into Montaigne’s mind each time one of his own children died, as well as when he lost La Boétie. The friendship had been so short that it should not have been difficult to remember a time before it and recapture his pre-La Boétie nonchalance.

Such tricks of the imagination can be used in mundane situations as well as extreme ones; they are effective even against mild feelings of boredom or depression. If you feel tired of everything you possess, suggests Plutarch, pretend that you have lost all these things and are missing them desperately. Whether the object is a favorite plate, a friend, a mistress, or the good fortune of living in a time of peace and in good health, this exercise magically makes it seem worth having after all. The principle is the same as when brooding on death: faced with the idea of losing something
now
, you realize its value.

The key is to cultivate mindfulness:
prosoche
, another key Greek term. Mindful attention is the trick that underlies many of the other tricks. It is a call to attend to the inner world—and thus also to the outer world, for uncontrolled emotion blurs reality as tears blur a view. Anyone who clears their vision and lives in full awareness of the world as it is, Seneca says, can never be bored with life.

A person who does not sleepwalk through the world, moreover, is freed to respond to situations in the right way, without hesitation—as if they
were questions asked all of a sudden, as Epictetus puts it.
A violent attack, a quarrel, the loss of a friend: all these are demands barked at you by life, as by a schoolteacher trying to catch you not paying attention in class. Even a moment of boredom is such a question. Whatever happens, however unforeseen it is, you should be able to respond in a precisely suitable way. This is why, for Montaigne, learning to live “appropriately” (
à propos
) is the “great and glorious masterpiece” of human life.

Stoics and Epicureans alike approached this goal mainly through rehearsal and meditation. Like tennis players practicing volleys and smashes for hours, they used rehearsal to carve grooves of habit, down which their minds would run as naturally as water down a river bed. It is a form of self-hypnotism. The great Stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius kept notebooks in which he would go over the changes of perspective he wished to drill into himself:

At other times, he imagined flying up to the heavens so that he could gaze down and see how insignificant all human concerns were from such a distance. Seneca did this too: “Place before your mind’s eye the vast spread of time’s abyss, and consider the universe; and then contrast our so-called human life with infinity.”

Another practice of the Stoics was to visualize time circling around on itself, over eons. Thus Socrates would be born again and would teach in Athens just as he did the first time; every butterfly would flap its wings in the same way; every cloud would pass overhead at the same speed. You yourself would live again, and have all the same thoughts and emotions as before, again and again without end. This apparently terrifying idea brought comfort, because—like the other ideas—it showed one’s own
fleeting troubles at a reduced size. At the same time, because everything you had ever done would come back to haunt you, everything
mattered
. Nothing was flushed away; nothing could be forgotten. Meditating on this forced you to pay more attention to how you lived your everyday life. It posed a challenge, but also led to a kind of acceptance: to what the Stoics called
amor fati
, or love of fate. As the Stoic Epictetus wrote: