The Complete Essays (25 page)

‘Truly imagine how much less bearable for Man, and how much more painful, would be a life which lasted for ever rather than the life which I have given you. If you did not have death you would curse me, for ever, for depriving you of it.

‘Seeing what advantages death holds I have deliberately mixed a little anguish into it to stop you from embracing it too avidly or too injudiciously. To lodge you in that moderation which I require of you, neither fleeing from life nor yet fleeing from death, I have tempered them both between the bitter and the sweet.

‘I taught Thales, the foremost of your Sages, that living and dying are things indifferent. So, when asked “why he did not go and die then,” he very wisely replied: “Because it
is
indifferent.”
⁶²

‘Water, Earth, Air and Fire and the other parts of this my edifice are no more instrumental to your life than to your death. Why are you afraid of your last day? It brings you no closer to your death than any other did. The last step does not make you tired: it shows that you are tired. All days lead to death: the last one gets there.’

[A] Those are the good counsels of Nature, our Mother.
⁶³

I have often wondered why the face of death, seen in ourselves or in other men, appears incomparably less terrifying to us in war than in our own homes – otherwise armies would consist of doctors and cry-babies – and why, since death is ever the same, there is always more steadfastness among village-folk and the lower orders than among all the rest. I truly believe that what frightens us more than death itself are those terrifying grimaces and preparations with which we surround it – a brand new way of life: mothers, wives and children weeping; visits from people stunned and beside themselves with grief; the presence of a crowd of servants, pale and tear-stained; a bedchamber without daylight; candles lighted; our bedside besieged by doctors and preachers; in short, all about us is horror and terror. We are under the ground, buried in our graves already!
Children are frightened of their very friends when they see them masked. So are we. We must rip the masks off things as well as off people. Once we have done that we shall find underneath only that same death which a valet and a chambermaid got through recently, without being afraid.
⁶⁴
Blessed
⁶⁵
the death which leaves no time for preparing such gatherings of mourners.

21. On the power of the imagination

[Imagination,
the faculty of evoking mental images, traditionally included, as here, much of what we nowadays classify as ‘thinking’: thoughts, concepts, ideas, opinions as well as mental pictures. Religious authorities were divided about the power of the imagination to produce ecstasies as well as ‘natural miracles’. Montaigne’s ideas are controversial without ceasing to be orthodox. The additions in [C] are more personal, less dominated by
exempla,
and include a development on male sexuality and on that impotence during the marriage-night which was widely thought to be caused by sorcery. Montaigne, who had studied law, gives a mock-legal savour to his defence of the Penis.]

[A]
‘Fortis imaginatio generat casum,’
[A powerful imagination generates the event,] as the scholars say.
¹
I am one of those by whom the powerful blows of the imagination are felt most strongly. Everyone is hit by it, but some are bowled over.
²
[C] It cuts a deep impression into me: my skill consists in avoiding it not resisting it. I would rather live among people who are healthy and cheerful: the sight of another man’s suffering produces physical suffering in me, and my own sensitivity has often misappropriated the feelings of a third party. A persistent cougher tickles my lungs and my throat.

The sick whom I am duty-bound to visit I visit more unwillingly than those with whom I feel less concerned and less involved. When I contemplate an illness I seize upon it and lodge it within myself: I do not find it strange that imagination should bring fevers and death to those who let it act freely and who give it encouragement.

In his own time Simon Thomas was a great doctor. I remember that I happened to meet him one day at the home of a rich old consumptive; he told his patient when discussing ways to cure him that one means was to provide occasions for me to enjoy his company: he could then fix his eyes on the freshness of my countenance and his thoughts on the overflowing cheerfulness and vigour of my young manhood; by filling all his senses
with the flower of my youth his condition might improve. He forgot to add that mine might get worse.
³

[A] Gallus Vibius so tensed his soul to understand the essence and impulsions of insanity that he toppled his own judgement from its seat and was never able to restore it again: he could boast that he was made a fool by his own wisdom.

Some there are who forestall the hand of their executioners; one man was on the scaffold, being un-blindfolded so that his pardon could be read to him, when he fell down dead, the blow being struck by his imagination alone. When imaginary thoughts trouble us we break into sweats, start trembling, grow pale or flush crimson; we lie struck supine on our feather-beds and feel our bodies agitated by such emotions; some even die from them. And boiling youth grows so hot in its armour-plate that it consummates its sexual desires while fast asleep in a dream –

Ut quasi transactis sæpe omnibus rebus profundant
Fluminis ingentes fluctus, vestemque cruentent
.

[So that, as though they had actually completed the act, they pour forth floods of semen and pollute their garments.]
⁴

It is no new thing for a man to wake up with cuckold’s horns which he never had when he went to bed, but it is worth remembering what happened to Cyppus, a king in Italy: he had been very excited by a bullfight one day and his dreams that night had filled his head full of bulls’ horns: thereupon horns grew on his forehead by the sheer power of his imagination.
⁵

Nature had denied the power of speech to the son of Croesus: passion gave it to him; [C] Antiochus [A] fell into a fever from the beauty of Stratonice, which was too vigorously imprinted on his soul; Pliny says that, on the very day of the wedding, he saw Lucius Cossitius change from woman to man; Pontanus and others tell of similar metamorphoses which have happened in Italy in recent centuries. And, since both Iphis’ own desires and her mother’s were so vehement,

Vota puer solvit, quae foemina voverat Iphis
.

[Iphis fulfilled as a boy vows made as a girl.]
⁶

[B] I was travelling though Vitry-le-François
⁷
when I was able to see a man to whom the Bishop of Soissons had given the name of Germain at his confirmation: until the age of twenty-two he had been known by sight to all the townsfolk as a girl called Marie. He was then an old man with a full beard; he remained unmarried. He said that he had been straining to jump when his male organs suddenly appeared. (The girls there still have a song in which they warn each other not to take great strides lest they become boys, ‘like Marie Germain’.) It is not surprising that this sort of occurrence happens frequently. For if the imagination does have any power in such matters, in girls it dwells so constantly and so forcefully on sex that it can (in order to avoid the necessity of so frequently recurring to the same thoughts and harsh yearnings) more easily make that male organ into a part of their bodies.

[A] The scars of King Dagobert and of Saint Francis are attributed by some to the power of their imagination:
⁸
and they say that by it bodies are sometimes transported from their places; Celsus gives an account of a priest whose soul was enraptured in such an ecstasy that for a considerable period his body remained breathless and senseless.
⁹
[C] Saint Augustine gives the name of another priest who only needed to hear lamentations and plaintive cries to fall into a swoon, being carried so vigorously outside himself that, until he came back to life again, in vain would you shake him about, shout at him, pinch him or sear his flesh: the priest said he heard their voices, but as though coming from afar; he was also aware of the bruising and branding. That this was no stubborn concealing of his sense-impressions is shown by his being, during this time, without pulse or breath.
¹⁰

[A] It is likely that the credit given to miracles, visions, enchantments and such extraordinary events chiefly derives from the power of the
imagination acting mainly on the more impressionable souls of the common people. Their capacity to believe has been so powerfully ravished that they think they see what they do not see. I am moreover of the opinion that those ridiculous attacks of magic impotence by which our society believes itself to be so beset that we talk of nothing else can readily be thought of as resulting from the impress of fear or apprehension.
¹¹
I know this from the experience of a man whom I can vouch for as though he were myself: there is not the slightest suspicion of sexual inadequacy in his case nor of magic spells; but he heard one of his comrades tell how an extraordinary impotency fell upon him just when he could least afford it; then, on a similar occasion, the horror of this account struck his own imagination so brutally that he too incurred a similar fate; [C] from then on he was subject to relapses, the ignoble memory of his misadventure taunting him and tyrannizing over him. He found that this madness he could cure by another kind of madness: he admitted beforehand that he was subject to this infirmity and spoke openly about it, so relieving the tensions within his soul; by bearing the malady as something to be expected, his sense of constriction grew less and weighed less heavily upon him; then (his thoughts being unencumbered and relaxed) when an occasion arose to its liking, his body, finding itself in good trim for first sounding itself out, seizing itself and taking itself by surprise with its partner in the know, clean cured itself of that condition. Except for genuine impotence, never again are you incapable if you are capable of doing it once.

[A] This misfortune is to be feared only in adventures where our souls are immoderately tense with desire and respect; especially when the opportunity is pressing and unforeseen, there is no means of recovering from this confusion. I know one man who found it useful to bring to it a
body [C] on the point of being [A] satisfied [C] elsewhere,
¹²
in order to quieten the ardour of this frenzy and who, growing older, finds himself less impotent for being less potent.

Yet another found it helpful when a friend assured him that he was furnished with a counter-battery of enchantments certain to preserve him. I had better tell how that happened.

A highly placed Count with whom I was intimate was marrying a most beautiful lady who had long been courted by a guest present at the festivities; those who loved him were worried about him – especially one of his relations, an old lady who was presiding over the marriage (which was being held in her house): she feared there might be sorcery about and told me of it. I begged her to put her trust in me. I happened to have in my strong-boxes a certain little flat piece of gold on which were engraved celestial symbols, protecting against sunstroke and relieving headaches when correctly applied to the cranial suture; it was sewn on to a ribbon to be tied under the chin to keep it in place – a piece of lunacy akin to the one we are talking of. This peculiar present had been given me by Jacques Peletier: I decided to get some good out of it.
¹³
I told the Count that he might well incur the same misfortune as others and that there were those who would willingly see that he did so: but he should go to the marriage-bed confidently since I would do him a friendly turn, not failing in his moment of need to perform a miracle which lay within my power, provided that he promised me on his honour to keep it most faithfully secret, simply giving me a sign if things had gone badly when we rushed in with the festive supper. Both his soul and his ears had received such a battering that, because of his troubled imagination, he had indeed been incapable of an erection: so he gave me the sign. He was then to get up (I had told him) under pretence of chasing us out, playfully seize the night-shirt I was holding (we were much the same size) and wear it until he had followed my prescription – which was as follows: as soon as we had left the room he was to withdraw to pass water: he was then to say certain prayers three times and make certain gestures: each time he was to tie round himself the ribbon I had put into his hand and carefully lay the attached medallion over his kidneys, with the figure in a specified position. Having done so, he should draw the ribbon tight so that it could not come undone:
then he was to go back and confidently get on with the job, not forgetting to throw my night-shirt over his bed in such a way as to cover them both.

It is such monkeyings-about which mainly produce results: our thoughts cannot free themselves from the convictions that such strange actions must derive from some secret lore. Their weight and respect come from their inanity. In short the figures on my talisman proved to have more to do with Venus than with the Sun, more potent in action than as a prophylactic.

I was led to do this deed (which is so foreign to my nature) by a rash and troubled humour. I am opposed to all feigned and subtle actions; I hate sleight of hand not only in games but even when it serves a purpose. The way is vicious even if the deed is not.

Amasis, a King of Egypt, wed Laodice, a very beautiful Grecian maiden. He was a pleasant companion in every other way, but he was incapable of lying with her; he threatened to kill her, thinking there had been some witchcraft. Appropriately enough where mental apprehensions are concerned, she deflected his attention towards invocations: having made his vows and prayers to Venus, he found that very night, after his sacrificial oblations, that he had been divinely restored.
¹⁴

Women are wrong to greet us with those affected provocative appearances of unwillingness which snuff out our ardour just as they kindle it. The daughter-in-law of Pythagoras used to say that a woman who lies with a man should doff her modesty with her kirtle and don it again with her shift.
¹⁵
[A] The heart of an attacker is easily dismayed when disturbed by calls to arms which are many and diverse; it is a bad start, once imagination makes a man suffer this shame (which she only does in those first encounters, since they are tempestuous and eager: it is in the first encounter that one most fears a defeat); this occurrence then puts him into a feverish moodiness which persists when subsequent opportunities arise.
¹⁶

[C] Married folk have time at their disposal: if they are not ready they should not try to rush things. Rather than fall into perpetual wretchedness by being struck with despair at a first rejection, it is better to fail to make it properly on the marriage-couch, full as it is of feverish agitation, and to wait for an opportune moment, more private and less challenging. Before
possessing his wife, a man who suffers a rejection should make gentle assays and overtures with various little sallies; he should not stubbornly persist in proving himself inadequate once and for all. Those who know that their member is naturally obedient should merely take care to out-trick their mental apprehensions.