The Complete Essays (148 page)

[B] Let us skip over Bembo and Equicola.

When I am writing I can well do without the company and memory of my books lest they interfere with my style. Also (to tell the truth) because great authors are too good at beating down my pretensions: they dishearten me… am tempted to adopt the ruse of that painter who, having wretchedly painted a portrait of some cocks, forbade his apprentices to let any natural cock enter his workshop.
¹⁰⁵
[C] And to lend me some lustre I would need to adopt the device of Antinonides the musician
¹⁰⁶
who, whenever he had to perform, arranged that, either before him or after him, his audience should have their fill of some bad singers. [B] But I cannot free myself from Plutarch so easily. He is so all-embracing, so rich that for all occasions, no matter how extravagant a subject you have chosen, he insinuates himself into your work, lending you a hand generous with riches, an unfailing source of adornments. It irritates me that those who pillage him may also be pillaging me: [C] I cannot spend the slightest time in his company without walking off with a slice of breast or a wing.

[B] For this project of mine it is also appropriate that I do my writing at home, deep in the country, where nobody can help or correct me and where I normally never frequent anybody who knows even the Latin of the Lord’s Prayer let alone proper French. I might have done it better somewhere else, but this work would then have been less mine: and its main aim and perfection consists in being mine, exactly. I may correct an accidental slip (I am full of them, since I run on regardless) but it would be an act of treachery to remove such imperfections as are commonly and always in me. When it is said to me, or I say to myself: ‘Your figures of speech are sown too densely’; ‘This word here is pure Gascon’; ‘This is a hazardous expression’ – I reject no expressions which are used in the streets of France: those who want to fight usage with grammar are silly – ‘Here is an ignorant development’; ‘Here your argument is paradoxical’; ‘This one is too insane’; [C] ‘You are often playing about; people will think that you are serious when you are only pretending’: [B] ‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘but I correct only careless errors not customary ones. Do I not always talk like that? Am I not portraying myself to the life? If so, that suffices! I have achieved what I wanted to: everyone recognizes me in my book and my book in me.’

Now I have tendency to ape and to imitate: when I took up writing verse – I wrote it exclusively in Latin – it always manifestly betrayed who was the last poet I had been reading; and some of my earliest essays are somewhat redolent of others’ work. [C] When in Paris I talk rather differently than at Montaigne. [B] Anyone I look at with attention easily stamps something of his on me. Whatever I contemplate I make my own – a silly expression, a nasty grimace, a ridiculous turn of speech. Faults, even more so: as soon as they strike me they cling to me and will not leave me unless shaken off; I have more often been heard using swearwords from conformity than by complexion.

[C] Such imitation kills, like that of those monkeys terrifying in strength and size which King Alexander had to confront in a certain country in India.
¹⁰⁷
He would have found it hard to get the better of them, but they showed him the way to do so by their tendency to imitate everything they saw being done. This inspired those who were hunting them to put on their boots, tying many knots in the laces, while the monkeys looked on; then to deck themselves in headgear with dangling nooses and to pretend to daub their eyes with bird-lime. And so those poor creatures were led to their doom by their apish complexions: they too daubed themselves with bird-lime, tied themselves in knots and garotted themselves. Yet the talent for cleverly imitating intentionally the words and gestures of another is no more in me than in a tree-stump. When I swear my own way it is always ‘By God’ – which is the most direct of all the oaths. They say that Socrates used to swear ‘By dog’; Zeno ‘By goats’ (the same exclamation used today by the Italians,
Cappari
); Pythagoras, ‘By air and by water.’

[B] I am marked so easily by surface impressions that, having Sire or
Your Majesty
[C] thoughtlessly [B] on my lips for three days in a row, those terms slip out a full week later instead of
Your Excellency
or
My Lord
. And any expression which I have fallen into saying in jest or for fun I will say the following day seriously. That is why I am loath to write on well-trodden topics: I am afraid I might treat them with another man’s substance. All topics are equally productive to me. I could write about a fly! (God grant that the topic I now have in hand be not chosen at the behest of a will which is as light as a fly’s.) I may begin with any subject I please, since all subjects are linked to each other.

But what displeases me about my soul is that she usually gives birth
quite unexpectedly, when I am least on the lookout for them, to her profoundest, her maddest ravings which please me most. Then they quickly vanish away because, then and there, I have nothing to jot them down on; it happens when I am on my horse or at table or in bed – especially on my horse, the seat of my widest musings.

When speaking I have a fastidious zeal for attention and silence if I am in earnest; should anyone interrupt me he stops me dead. On journeys the very exigencies of the roads cut down my conversation; moreover I most often journey without the proper company for sustained conversation, which enables me to be free to think my own thoughts. What happens is like what happens to my dreams: during them I commend them to my memory (for I often dream I am dreaming); next morning I can recall their colouring as it was – whether they were playful or sad or weird – but as for all the rest, the more I struggle to find it the more I bury it in forgetfulness. It is the same with those chance reflections which happen to drop into my mind: all that remains of them in my memory is a vague idea, just enough to make me gnaw irritably away, uselessly seeking for them.

Well now, leaving books aside and talking more simply and plainly, I find that sexual love is nothing but the thirst for the enjoyment of that pleasure [C] within the object of our desire, and that Venus is nothing but the pleasure of unloading our balls;
¹⁰⁸
it becomes vitiated by a lack either of moderation or discretion:
¹⁰⁹
for Socrates love is the desire to beget by the medium of Beauty.
¹¹⁰

[B] Reflecting as I often do on the ridiculous excoriations of that pleasure, the absurd, mindless, stupefying emotions with which it disturbs a Zeno or a Cratippus,
¹¹¹
that indiscriminate raging, that face inflamed with frenzy and cruelty at the sweetest point of love, that grave, severe, ecstatic face in so mad an activity, [C] the fact that our delights and our waste-matters are lodged higgledy-piggledy together; [B] and that its highest
pleasure has something of the groanings and distraction of pain, I believe [C] that what Plato says is true: [B] Man is the plaything of the gods
¹¹²
–

quænam ista jocandi
Sævitia!                                    
[what a ferocious way of jesting!]

– and that it was in mockery that Nature bequeathed us this, the most disturbing of activities, the one most common to all creatures, so as to make us all equal, bringing the mad and the wise, men and beasts, to the same level.

When I picture to myself the most reflective and the most wise of men in such postures, I hold it as an effrontery that he should claim to be reflective and wise; like the legs on a peacock, they humble pride;

ridentem dicere verum
Quid vetat?                                    
[what can stop us telling the truth with a laugh?]
¹¹³

[C] Those who reject serious opinions in the midst of fun are, it is said, like the man who refuses to venerate the statue of a saint because it wears no drapery.

[B] We eat and drink as the beasts do, but those activities do not hamper the workings of our souls. So in them we keep our superiority over the beasts. But that other activity makes every other thought crawl defeated under the yoke; by its imperious authority it makes a brute of all the theology of Plato and a beast of all his philosophy. Everywhere else you can preserve some decency; all other activities accept the rules of propriety: this other one can only be thought of as flawed or ridiculous. Just try and find a wise and discreet way of doing it! Alexander said that he acknowledged he was a mortal because of sleep and this activity: sleep stifles and suppresses the faculties of our souls; the ‘job’ similarly devours and disperses them.
¹¹⁴
It is indeed a sign of our original Fall, but also of our inanity and ugliness. On the one hand Nature incites us to it, having attached to this desire the most noble, useful and agreeable of her labours: on the other hand she lets us condemn it as immoderate and flee it as indecorous, lets us blush at it and recommend abstaining from it.

[C] Are we then not beasts to call the labour which makes us bestial?

[B] In their religions all peoples have several similarities which coincide, such as sacrifices, lights, incense, fastings, offertories and, among others, the condemnation of this act. All their opinions come to it, not to mention the widespread practice of cutting off the foreskin [C] which is a punishment for it. [B] Perhaps we are right to condemn ourselves for giving birth to such an absurd thing as a man; right to call it an act of shame and the organs which serve to do it shameful. [C] (It is certain that mine may now properly be called shameful and wretched.)

The Essenes whom Pliny mentions were maintained for several centuries without wet-nurses or swaddling-clothes by the arrival of outsiders who, attracted by the beauty of their doctrines, constantly joined them. An entire people risked self-extermination rather than engage in woman’s embraces, risked having no successors rather than create one.
¹¹⁵
It is said that Zeno lay with a woman only once in his entire life; and that that was out of politeness, so as not to seem to have too stubborn a contempt for that sex.
¹¹⁶

[B] No man likes to be in on a birth: all men rush to be in on a death. [C] To unmake a human being we choose an open field in broad daylight: to make one, we hide away in a dark little hollow. When making one we must hide and blush: but glory lies in unmaking one, and it produces other virtues. One act is unwholesome: the other, an act of grace, for Aristotle says that in his country there is a saying ‘To do a man a favour’, which means to kill him.
¹¹⁷
The Athenians showed those two activities to be equally blemished when they were required ritually to purge the island of Delos and to seek reconciliation with Apollo: within its coasts they forbade both childbirth and burial:
¹¹⁸

[B]
Nostri nosmet pænitet
.
[We are embarrassed by our very selves.]

[C] We regard our very being as vitiated.

[B] There are some nations where they hide to eat. I know one lady (among the greatest) who shares the opinion that chewing distorts the face, derogating greatly from women’s grace and beauty; when hungry she avoids appearing in public. And I know a man who cannot tolerate watching people eat nor others watching him do so: he shuns all company even more when he fills his belly than when he empties it. [C] In the Empire of the Grand Turk you can find many men who, to rise above their fellows, never allow themselves to be seen eating a meal; they eat but once a week; they slash and disfigure their faces and limbs and never talk to anyone – [‘95] fanatics [C] all – folk who believe they are honouring their nature by defacing it; who pride themselves on their contempt; who seek to make themselves better by making themselves worse.

[B] What a monstrosity of an animal,
¹¹⁹
who strikes terror in himself, [C] whose pleasures are a burden to him and who thinks himself a curse. [B] Those there are who hide their existence –

Exilioque domos et dulcia limina mutant
[They give up their homes and domestic delights to go into exile]
¹²⁰

– stealing away from the sight of other men; they shun health and happiness as harmful and inimical qualities. There are not merely several sects but whole peoples for whom birth is a curse, death a blessing. [C] And some there are who loathe the sunlight and worship the darkness.

[B] We show our ingenuity only by ill-treating ourselves: that is the real game hunted by the power of our mind – [C] an instrument dangerous in its unruliness.

[B]
O miseri! quorum gaudia crimen habent
.
[O pitiful men, who hold their joys a crime.]

Alas, wretched Man, you have enough [C] necessary [B] misfortunes
¹²¹
without increasing them by inventing others. Your condition is wretched enough already without making it artificially so. You
have uglinesses enough which are real and of your essence without fabricating others in your mind. [C] Do you really think that you are too happy unless your happiness is turned to grief? [B] Do you believe that you have already fulfilled all the necessary duties in which Nature involves you and that, unless you bind yourself to new ones, Nature is [C] defective and [B] idle within you? You are not afraid to infringe her universal and undoubted laws yet preen yourself on your own sectarian and imaginary ones: the more particular, [C] uncertain and [B] controverted they are, the more you devote your efforts to them. [C] The arbitrary laws of your own invention – your own parochial laws – engross you and bind you: you are not even touched by the laws of God and this world. [B] Just run through a few
exempla
of that assertion: why, all your life is there.