Montainge’s early view of life was a rather Epicurean pessimism. “The wretchedness of our condition,” he was to write, “makes us have less to desire than to fear...That is why the sect of philosophy that set the greatest value on voluptuousness and raised it to its highest price still ranked it with mere freedom from pain. To have no ill is to have the happiest state of well being that man can hope for.”
Though he said that he had thus far lived reasonably happily, except for the loss of his friend, this was a great exception. Moreover, his other bereavements were to contribute their share to his pessimism. Fifteen years later the mere expressions that reminded him of his grief could still revive it: “My poor master! Or, My great friend! Alas, my dear father! Or, My good daughter!” in his gloomy apprehension, he looked for security in preparation, like the healthy young men he had seen carrying pills around to take in case of a cold. As the surest way to the negative contentment that seemed to him the best he could hope for, he sought not merely local retirement but withdrawal from all close human contacts.
We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principle retreat and solitude…where to talk and laugh as if without wife, without children, and without possessions, without retinue and without servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it may be nothing new to us to do without them……
We have lived enough for others; let us live at least this remaining bit of life for ourselves…it is no small matter to arrange our retirement securely…Since God gives us leisure to make arrangements for moving out…let us pack our bags; let us take an early leave of the company…We must untie these bonds that are so powerful, and henceforth love this and that, but be wedded only to ourselves. That is to say, let the other things be ours, but not joined and glued to us so strongly that they cannot be detached without tearing off our skin and some part of our body as well. The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
In the essay just quoted, “Of Solitude” (I:39), four principal menaces are listed, Death, Poverty, Contempt and Disease. In another early essay (I:14) Montainge mentions only three: Death, Poverty, and Pain. Contempt did not disturb him seriously for very long, for he soon learned to know himself better than anyone else could know him and to rely on his laws and his court to judge himself. Poverty worried him somewhat for a while, but he knew that what we fear in it is pain. Pain and death are the great enemies, each with its claim to the first rank-death because it alone is inevitable, pain because it is what we fear even in death. Pain is more surely an evil, since death may be good fortune is painless; death is an evil more sure. Montainge had seen both at close range. Death had been all around, and he thought and spoke of it most of all.
His thoughts on the subject are those of La Boetie. All ideas he exchanged with his dying friend recur: that death is the test of our lives and our studies, the aim of philosophy and the proof that we have learned its lesson; that our own death should be an example that will encourage others to rise bravely above such accidents. Montainge is not so much afraid of death-or-pain as apprehensive about how well he will be able to endure them.
The early essays are full of the problem. One of them (I:19) takes its title from Solon’s famous pronouncement, “That Our Happiness Must not be Judged until after Our Death.” Solon was right, says Montainge, since only in death can we tell what was mask and what was true philosophy in a man’s life.
Apprendre is never closer to apprehend than in Montainge’s central chapter on death, “To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die” (I:20). Although generally stoical in tone, this is the mosaic of an electric humanist who draws on Pliny. Plutarch, and especially Lucretius, as well as on Cicero and Seneca. All sects agree, he says that the main function of philosophy and reason is to teach us how to die. Death is universal, as pain and poverty are not. Ignorance is of no use, for it makes us suffer more when the time comes. We must practice death, get used to it, think about it constantly. The premeditation of death is premeditation of liberty. Leave life, she tells us, as you entered is simply and unafraid; your death is a part of the order of things, an order you should not even whish to change.
With pain it is much the same for Montainge. The great question here is the degree of truth in his chapter life. “That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion. We Have of Them”. It would be fine indeed if this were true, he says; unfortunately it does not seem to be. For pain is the real stuffy, whose essence we truly and certainly know; our senses are the judges. It is what we fear in poverty and in death.
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