…the house I live in…

Many years ago in high school, or perhaps it was middle school, I can’t recall, my teacher placed on a table a one hundred-year calendar. There were two standard pages together containing 100 little boxed years, and within each box, 12 month boxes, and smaller still, such that you had to squint or use a magnifying glass, each week, and again, like a Russian doll, 7 days within each week. It was an impractical calendar, not useful for anything other than to the launch the imagination–and launch it I did. I stood over it, my head swimming, and out-loud declared, “Somewhere on these two pages is the day I am going to die.”

That is my relationship with death—death, my mysterious soul mate. I know that someday we will meet—I saw it on a calendar!

Montaigne wrote extensively about death, declaring, “Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death.” This essay, “To Learn to Philosophize is to Learn to Die” addresses the topic directly; but as is often the case with our French friend, death casts a shadow over much of what he wrote.

Montaigne had a near-death experience in 1570. He was 36 years old and riding “a very easy but not very strong horse” through the woods on his estate. He was accompanied by several of his workers when he was knocked off his horse.

“…one of my men, in order to show his daring and get ahead of his companions, spurred his horse at full speed up the path behind me, came down like a colossus on the little man and little horse, and hit us like a thunderbolt with all his strength and weight, sending us both head over heels.”

He was thrown a dozen yards, landing on his head. His workers fearing the worst took him back to the castle, where it was assumed he would die. His staff would later recall that he was throwing up blood and thrashing about. He recounts that he “took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go. It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul…mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep.” The event, recorded in the sixth essay of book two (“Of Practice”), changed the course of his life, instilling in him a sense of clarity and purpose. Most importantly for the essay we’re considering, it reframed his perception and opinion of death.

Prior to the event, Montaigne’s tells us that his attitude towards death was typical, laced with fear and worry, especially after the death of his father, the death of his best friend, Etienne de la Boetié, and the inescapable bloody “religious wars” that surrounded him all of his life. “My house…is situated at the very hub of all the turmoil of the civil wars of France.”

Did you, when you read the title of this essay, perhaps grimace? That is understandable, as most of us keep our notions of death tucked away and out of sight. “The remedy of the common herd is not to think about it,” he writes. I suspect this perspective of death has grown more pronounced since Montaigne. How could it possibly be otherwise, considering the advent of funeral homes, hospitals, and the modern industrialization of death? Such an attitude, he argues, diminishes the spirt of being alive. Death has been our companion since birth—“The first day of your birth leads you toward death as to life”—and the sooner we accept this the sooner we can get on with life. “Let us rid it of its strangeness, come to know it.”

It is easy to forget that Montaigne was a man of the Renaissance. For many of us, myself included, the Renaissance conjures up images, Michelangelo’s David, for instance, or Leonardo strolling through the streets of Florence, his cape billowing. But the Renaissance was more than that and it came about due to the rediscovery and appreciation of the ancient world, the Greeks in particular. The contributions of the ancients had been lost to the Christian dogmatism of the Middle Ages; and Montaigne, unlike the other intellectuals and artists of his time would have none of it, dogmatism of all stripes being anathema to him.

With the rediscovery of the ancients came a new appreciation of their concept of virtue, the greek word being areté, a word that had been hijacked, so to speak, by the early Christian fathers. It is not too great a stretch to say that Montaigne, plumbing the ancient texts, embraced a pre-Christian interpretation of areté. (I don’t want to take that statement too far, as Montaigne claims to be a “practicing Catholic.” ¹ ) This interpretation embraced a life intertwined with death—death as a life companion—and was not a thing one should attempt to outrun. In familiarity, he claims, death is stripped of its fear-inducing strangeness, and to consider this deeply is a life-enhancing virtue. “All the wisdom and reasoning in the world boils down finally to this point: to teach us not to be afraid to die.”

A truly virtuous well-lived life must recognize and even embrace the role death will play, indeed plays from the outset. This is the message Montaigne gleamed from his reading of the ancients. He observed that the peasants of his village seem more adept at this than the intellectuals and landed aristocracy of his day. This is a theme we will repeatedly encounter in Montaigne, that in our learnedness and accomplishments we have lost many of the basic and virtuous realities of life.

“Just as we plant our cemeteries next to churches, and in the most frequented parts of town, in order to accustom the common people, women and children, not to grow panicky at the sight of a dead man, and so that the constant sight of bones, tombs, and funeral processions should remind us of our condition….”

The value of this attitude is to be found in a life lived in full recognition of the human condition. This should have an empowering effect, he argues,
“I want…to act, and to prolong the functions of life as long as [ I] can; and I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.” I love this image, the philosopher tending to his garden when death takes him, accepting equally of his demise as well as his unfinished work. Sadly for Montaigne the end was not so poetic.

Thanks for reading. Live bold and remember:

“To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it…Whenever a horse stumbles, a tile falls, or a pin pricks, let us at once chew over this thought: ‘Supposing that was death itself?’”

^{1. “Montaigne’s religious beliefs remain enigmatic. The person who manages to figure out what he truly believed will be clever indeed. Was he a good Catholic, or a secret atheist? He died as a Christian, and his contemporaries were accustomed to his acts of faith, for example when he travelled to Rome in 1580. However, by the early 17th century his views were seen as precursors of libertinism, a precursor to the free thinking that would mark the Enlightenment.” ~ Antoine Companion}