Montaigne in Barn Boots

Michael Perry

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062230584
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Biographies de philosophes

The beloved memoirist and bestselling author of Population: 485 reflects on the lessons he's learned from his unlikely alter ego, French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne.

"The journey began on a gurney, " writes Michael Perry, describing the debilitating kidney stone that led him to discover the essays of Michel de Montaigne. Reading the philosopher in a manner he equates to chickens pecking at scraps—including those eye-blinking moments when the bird gobbles something too big to swallow—Perry attempts to learn what he can (good and bad) about himself as compared to a long-dead French nobleman who began speaking Latin at the age of two, went to college instead of kindergarten, worked for kings, and once had an audience with the Pope. Perry "matriculated as a barn-booted bumpkin who still marks a second-place finish in the sixth-grade spelling bee as an intellectual pinnacle... and once said hello to Merle Haggard on a golf cart."

Written in a spirit of exploration rather than declaration, Montaigne in Barn Boots is a down-to-earth (how do you pronounce that last name?) look into the ideas of a philosopher "ensconced in a castle tower overlooking his vineyard, " channeled by a midwestern American writing "in a room above the garage overlooking a disused pig pen." Whether grabbing an electrified fence, fighting fires, failing to fix a truck, or feeding chickens, Perry draws on each experience to explore subjects as diverse as faith, race, sex, aromatherapy, and Prince. But he also champions academics and aesthetics, in a book that ultimately emerges as a sincere, unflinching look at the vital need to be a better person and citizen.

1

READING LIKE A CHICKEN

LIKE BIRDS WHO FLY ABROAD TO FORAGE FOR GRAIN, AND BRING IT HOME IN THE BEAK, WITHOUT TASTING IT THEMSELVES, TO FEED THEIR YOUNG; SO OUR PEDANTS GO PICKING KNOWLEDGE HERE AND THERE, OUT OF BOOKS, AND HOLD IT AT TONGUE’S END, ONLY TO SPIT IT OUT AND DISTRIBUTE IT ABROAD.

Have you ever dumped a pail of kitchen scraps into a chicken pen? When I did so this morning there was an eruption of flapping, squawking, and pecking. Every chicken for itself, barging and gorging. These are pigs with feathers. But for all their determination, they lack focus; two or three frantic pecks here and suddenly the bird is seized with the idea that the really good stuff is over there and claws and cackles its way by frenetic zig-zag through the others to get to it. Then it spots a bit of stale bread alongside yonder thistle and it’s off on another frantic foray.

So it is I read Michel de Montaigne.

I dip in here and there, highlight, underline, copy, and excerpt willy-nilly. It is rarely a structured pursuit. Outside the Essais themselves, I happen upon passages by google search, by tweet, by hot link, by recommendations in the comments section, by chance in the used bookstore, or through an offhand remark in a podcast. As my amateur interest in Montaigne has grown, so has my collection of books about or related to Montaigne. But this collection too has grown organically, which is to say, like mold: under less than perfect conditions and in haphazard directions. On the one hand, I unapologetically endorse the random fun of all this tangential discovery. If Montaigne wrote with “no evident centre,” I enjoy reading him the very same way. Conversely, I find myself indicted by Montaigne’s own words about birds and pedants. In my defense, I’m not sure anyone who has to look up the word pedant can be accused of being one, but as far as picking knowledge here and there, well, guilty, you bet. And happily so. While hopping helter-skelter through Montaigne’s work—snippet by snippet, epigraph by epigraph, any random page yielding something chewy—I am attempting to piece together a means of self-calibration. A fool’s procedure, perhaps, but I am building on Montaigne’s precedent:

Such foolishness fits my own case marvellously well. Am I for the most part not doing the same when assembling my material? Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me—not so as to store them up (for I have no storehouses) but so as to carry them back to this book, where they are no more mine than they were in their original place.

Montaigne included over two thousand quotations in the Essais. He referred to his constant cribbing as “gather[ing] a posy of other men’s flowers,” and his professed standard for quotation was simple: “I only say other people in order to better say myself.” This is neither theft nor laziness but humility.

One of my translations describes how Montaigne would “strain the writings of Plato.” I like the use of the word “strain,” as this implies discernment. I also like the image of pouring essays through a colander and trying to draw conclusions from what can be scraped from the screen—rather than “whole sections or pages.” This is a form of discretion. On the other hand (as Montaigne, the king of caveats, would want me to say) a strainer catches only the most solid (or obvious) objects. The subtler elements—the broth—is lost. I may be settling for only the fattest noodles, the most conspicuous vegetables, the most glutinous chunks. The “piths and gists,” as writer Jim Harrison put it.

The desire to write about Montaigne puts me in heavy traffic on a tricycle. The experts have been weighing in for over four hundred years now, and I am not one of them. I cannot speak to Montaigne in terms of “transalpine humanism,” or “epistemological scholasticism,” nor can I embroider up anything capable of expressing Montaigne’s “inexpugnable inner otherness.” (Honestly, if it’s that bad just call a plumber.) I welcome the words of librarian and writer Stefanie Hollmichel, who said of reading Montaigne, “while having extra scholarly knowledge adds to the enjoyment, it is not necessary to the enjoyment.” Terence Cave says that Montaigne was “preoccupied with philosophical issues which are relevant to practical human experience.” I’m not prepping for a doctoral defense, I’m trying to wedge some reflection in amongst the grocery-grubbing. Montaigne himself said that his writing “only nibbled upon the outward crust,” and that his “inerudition” disqualified him from presuming to instruct others. Coming from a guy with Montaigne’s education and experience this is a wheelbarrow’s worth of disingenuous self-deprecation, but the implication is that we amateurs are free to proceed, and for better or worse, it is exactly this sort of intellectual egalitarianism that leads me—armed with a disused nursing degree and unable to remember that the electrified pig fencer is electrified—to type up my thoughts on Montaigne. To sweep together the crumbs of the outward crust and study them upon my palm.

* * *

The poet Hannah Brooks-Motl, who wrote an entire book of poetry drawn from the Essais, once said that she has no “reading” of Montaigne’s work “in the strong academic sense of the word.” I hear myself in this and wonder sometimes, when I read Montaigne, or even about Montaigne, how my limited powers of discrimination might lead me to erroneous takes. How I might be misled via the prejudices or weakness of the interlocutor at hand. Am I putting my faith in the proper people? In reviews and prefaces of Montaigne’s work, or of books about Montaigne, writers and commenters often remark on the superiority of one text over another, laud the grace of this translation over that (usually citing translators by last name only, further adding to the insider-y feel), or cite the perceptiveness of one reviewer in contrast to the ham-headedness of another. Further confounding the issue is Montaigne himself, who amended his essays until his very death, leaving each translator to make personal decisions on how to handle edits and Montaigne’s post-mortal marginalia. And here I sit, reading at face value, with a limited capacity for judgment, continually suspicious of my own conclusions, philosophizing at freshman dorm stoner level without the weed. “It is in minds of middling vigour and middling capacity that are born erroneous opinions,” wrote Montaigne, and I wonder: What if I crib him out of context?

It would be perfectly felicitous. He did it to others all the time, regularly quoting poets and philosophers out of context to suit his own purpose. In fact he did it so often that Peter Burke called it characteristic of his work. If someone reads my interpretation of Montaigne and says, That is not what he meant, I can only reply, Well, that is where he delivered me.

* * *

Many writers have cast Montaigne’s work in terms of blogging and social media, and given his favorite subject, it would likewise be easy to cast Montaigne as the patron saint of the selfie generation. But Montaigne’s writing was a mirror constructed for looking into himself. I try to read his essays in the same manner, even—especially—if I read his criticism of another and recognize myself.

In my day-to-day public life (going to the store or post office as distinguished from yapping or singing into a microphone) I am clinically shy to the point of busting out in sheen-sweat and gut cramps. I cherish extended isolation. When I am out and about, I do not want to talk. And yet, when cornered in conversation, I find myself rattling on and on. Friends or strangers, I just can’t shut up. My amateur theory is that the logorrhea is symptomatic of solo pursuits. Trucker, farmer, logger, writer; each is a susceptible vocation. In these lines of work (writer napping in his old green chair excepted) there is little time to rest but much time to cogitate, and ultimately, develop capital “T” Theories, manifested in anecdote. Alone, we polish them in our mind. Then we get someone’s ear:

Once you are off, it is hard to cut it short and stop talking. Nothing tells you more about a horse than a pronounced ability to pull up short. I have even known men who can speak pertinently, who want to stop their gallop but who do not know how to do so. While looking for a way of bringing their hoofs together they amble on like sick men, dragging out trivialities.

There I am, busted by Montaigne. And as I roll past a half-century, he puts me on notice:

Old men are particularly vulnerable: they remember the past but forget that they have just told you! I have known several amusing tales become boring in one gentleman’s mouth: his own people have had their fill of it a hundred times already.

The Cotton/Hazlitt translation is even harsher, implying that repetitively loquacious old men are “dangerous company.”

I recently joined a group of musicians who had spent the previous week rehearsing with a friend of mine. After we made our introductions, one of the group mentioned they were going to a nearby Italian restaurant for dinner. “You know . . .” I said, but before I could say more, a band member I had never met previously said, “Is this your story about how Draganetti’s got its name?”

Whoa. The preemptive cutoff—from a stranger! Clearly she’d been warned.

Our stories are ourselves, and our well-worn stories are our well-worn selves. How then do we avoid leaving the listener—or the reader—well-worn out? Early on in his writing Montaigne was heavy into the Stoics. While Stoicism and small “s” stoicism are not identical, the latter draws on the lineage of the first, so in describing his every thought, emotion, and quirk, Montaigne was performing a contradiction, and according to Screech he was well aware of it:

When Montaigne eventually decided to make the Essays a book about himself, he was defying one of the basic taboos of all civilized society and one of the great interdicts of European culture. Lovers of self, blind to their own faults, were thought to be lynx-eyed for those of their neighbours. Montaigne took pains to show that he was not like that.

Because I want to live as a freelance writer, and a freelance writer must produce copy, I offer things in print I would never offer in conversation, as did Montaigne:

Amusing notion: many things that I would not want to tell anyone, I tell the public; and for my most secret knowledge and thoughts I send my most faithful friends to a bookseller’s shop.

Not so long ago I was signing books at a pleasant literary event attended by civilized people. A man placed his book on the table to be signed, then leaned in closely and in a confidential whisper asked, “How is your left testicle?”

I look at him dumbly.

“The irregularity?” he said.

“How do you know about that?!?”

“You wrote about it.”

“Well, I shouldn’t have.”

Later I found myself onstage grumbling about selfie sticks and how they are the quintessential metaphor of our self-centered society when it occurred to me that I was currently writing my fifth memoir. We are forever riding the prong of our own petard.

* * *

I wish I could drink Montaigne (or any writer, for that matter) in deep draughts, cogitate him at my leisure, and then reconstitute my impressions via some smooth extemporaneous flow. Just lay it out there like a pro. Unfortunately, my cerebral wiring is not up to the task, and so I default to my higgledy-piggledy ways, snipping and sharing as it suits me. Then circling back through, doing it all over again. I am at best a hazy generalist, and Montaigne warned us about people like me.

But: Back in the day, when my idea of literature was largely limited to cowboy books,* my friend Frank spent an entire night introducing me to a whole bookshelf’s worth of poets. I was galvanized. In short, all that good poetry led me to write a lot of bad poetry. But that good poetry still steeps within my soul, and writing that bad poetry led me to places where people cared about beauty and art and words and craft. Reading Montaigne leads me to write about Montaigne, and writing about Montaigne leads me to read even more Montaigne (and smart people on Montaigne).

Among all the chickens randomly ravaging the slop on any given morning, there is always one who locates a prize hunk of glop, nabs it, then darts into the weeds, hoping to choke it down before the other chickens catch on. The tactic is rarely successful, as there are always two or three other birds in hot pursuit, trying to rip the morsel from the first chicken’s beak or snatch it should it fall to the ground. But now and then one lucky bird scores and makes a clean escape. And then, safely out of sight, the bird discovers the treasured goodie is too big to swallow. And so it is you will sometimes return to the pen an hour later to find the same chicken trying to gag down a knob of gristle thrice the caliber of its gullet. Unwilling to turn it loose, the bird stands there, blinking in perplexity.

I am that chicken. I read the experts’ erudite, multilayered, cross-referential deconstructions and am left blinking, uncertain how to proceed, but unwilling to give up, hoping if nothing else to absorb some mental nutrition via proximity and osmosis. If my clodhopper curation yields up a strainerful of obvious, it is still a beginning—but only a beginning. I must study those chunks, then give the strainer a bounce and study them again, and see if the change in position has changed my thinking. Then clear the strainer and pour some more. “I think of reading not as the acquisition of static knowledge,” says the writer and critic Maria Popova, “but as the active springboard for thinking and dynamic contemplation.” The simple “assemblage of existing ideas,” she continues, does us little good unless we sit down with them:

The mindful reflection and expansion upon existing ideas and views, on the other hand, is a wholly different matter—it is the path via which we arrive at more considered opinions of our own, cultivate our critical faculties, and inch closer to truth itself.

How grateful I am for Popova’s use of the word inch. There is the suggestion that glacial progress is better than none. That I am free to read Montaigne in first gear. To be patient with myself. To worry less about getting Montaigne “right” and instead—in his own words—attempt to equal myself to my thefts. To continue with the reading habits of a piggy chicken: grabbing what I can, when I can, blinking at the big stuff, but not giving up, because (to quote Screech quoting Montaigne quoting Cicero): “Who can shoot all day withou...