Montaigne In Barn Boots

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Every now and then, I go on Amazon and search for books about Montaigne. I’m not exactly sure why I do this.

What I mean is, reading about Montaigne is no substitute for just reading the man himself. Aside from a few minor points which may have gotten lost in translation over the centuries and require an explanatory footnote, the Essays themselves are pretty straightforward. No tour guide necessary. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, said he never had the urge to write until after reading Montaigne. He related a story of being snowbound in a mining camp with a copy of the Essays for company, where he read it three times and knew it almost by heart. When he returned to migratory work in the San Joaquin Valley, he quoted the book so often that his fellow workers would ask him, “What does Montaigne say?” to settle various arguments. One bunkmate borrowed the book for an hour and said upon returning it, “Anyone can write a book like this.”

Well — not exactly, but it’s easy to see how he (and many others) could get that impression. Montaigne is very approachable and conversational. But it’s not easy to write about your own thoughts and impressions without falling into “Dear Diary” self-absorption; the trick is in using those thoughts and impressions to make interesting connections with the wider world that strangers will find relevant enough to read and care about. And let’s not forget that a well-turned phrase isn’t something that most people can toss off effortlessly. For most of us, including Montaigne, it takes a lot of practice and a fair amount of revising and rewriting. As the popular meme might put it, “One does not simply step into Montaigne’s shoes.”

So what am I hoping to find with a book like Michael Perry’s Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy? Do I expect, mutatis mutandis, a modern version of the original? I don’t think so, and not just because there are some mighty trees which cast too wide of a shadow for anything else to grow in close proximity. Ben Schott, for example, has recently published an homage to P.G. Wodehouse, in which he puts Jeeves and Wooster through some new adventures. Now, as someone who would love to hear that some medium had started channeling a steady supply of new stories through the restless shade of Wodehouse, am I going to read Schott’s version? Not on your life. The slightest difference in character or dialogue would feel to me as the pea did to the princess. It’s unfair to expect someone to improve upon perfection, and it’s hubristic to try. Besides, what would it even mean to say that someone is “like” Montaigne? One of the most irritating low-wattage bulbs of comparative illumination I’ve ever seen flickers on the jacket of several of Theodore Dalrymple’s books, where it is claimed that he is “the Orwell of our time.” All I can think about when I see that is how many ways the two men are absolutely nothing alike, which I’m sure was not the intention. How would one transport the quiddity of a writer like Montaigne across five centuries and have it arrive in a recognizable condition?

Is it novelty, then? Am I hoping to learn something new that I didn’t already know? Possibly, but deep down, at least, I know better. Damon Linker once offered a suggestion why political conservatives are underrepresented in the humanities — he thought it was because the research model of the modern university incentivizes “progress” in knowledge, which is ill-suited for the study of classic writers and thinkers who can’t be improved upon. The only way to make Shakespeare, Montaigne, etc. “relevant” today is to study them in the context of our current ephemeral fixations — race, gender, oppression, and sundry other grievances. Likewise, it’s very doubtful there’s anything left to be excavated from the literature on Montaigne, just dust and bone fragments of interest only to narrow specialists. Philippe Desan recently published a new “mythbusting” biography of Montaigne which, I am reliably informed, was a dully-written academic hatchet job aiming to reduce its subject to an opportunistic hypocrite. If that’s what scholarship is typically producing, I’m not interested.

The Lady of the House read Perry’s book immediately after I did. As she comes from genuinely rural, cow-centric origins, she was skeptical at first, thinking that the whole concept seemed a bit too gimmicky, like a printed-page reality show designed by a New York publisher: “Hey, let’s take a 16th-century French nobleman and make him roommates with a modern-day Wisconsin roughneck! Imagine the wacky hijinks!” (Perry does relate one amusing anecdote of a former, yes, New York-based publicist who wanted to throw a book release party for him and his neighbors and asked where she might go about renting gingham tablecloths and genuine straw bales. “I guess she assumed I’d supply my own overalls and banjo,” he said.) There was one passage in particular early on in the book:

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, multi-layered, 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.

She thought this almost seemed to pander to the expectation of, say, the quintessential NPR listener who happened to be reading. Aw, isn’t that just so folksy! But as a fellow under-educated fowl — nobody here but us chickens! — I appreciated what he was saying here. I, too, have had to make up in graft what I lack in formal education. And to be fair, how else is he supposed to put it? Take the particular and make it universal. If his “particular” is a Midwestern farm, so be it. It only seems jarring because of the background assumption that people “like him” don’t read Montaigne, and why should that be? If Montaigne is surrendered to the academics, well, we’ve already seen how that will turn out.

The book is very colloquial and conversational; I breezed through it over two bedtime reading sessions. I wouldn’t say it was profound, but I still felt kindly disposed toward it. I winced a bit to see him approach the concept of intersectionality in his musings, but I had to admit that Montaigne himself would have probably been just as sanguine and interested in the topic were he to visit us (Perry even managed to find an impressively reasonable quotation from Roxane Gay, which must have taken no small amount of effort and open-mindedness). Thankfully, the book wasn’t overly weighed down by the trendy and topical. I suppose I just like the idea of sitting around having an informal discussion about Montaigne, even one conducted through the temporal and spatial distance of the written word. The aforementioned chicken image also made me realize that whenever I feel like I’ve truly understood something, it’s been through a skillful metaphor. In my own writing, the moments I’m proudest of are those when I’ve vividly — and accurately — said, “A is B,” or better yet, I suppose, for being more counterintuitive, “A is Z.” I’m not one for laboriously accumulating details; I generally feel like I get something when I can deftly compare it to something else. Perhaps I just tend to think more in pictures. Or maybe it’s the playful nature of metaphors that appeals to me, the inherent humor of comparing unlike things.

In fact, that’s probably the closest I’ll get to an answer to my original question. I don’t expect to find a modern clone of Montaigne, and I don’t expect to learn anything new about him. I just enjoy seeing other people kick around the ball that he put into play on the field to begin with. I like seeing other people inspired by his example to play with the instruments and techniques that he introduced. Some of the efforts may be decidedly amateur, but there are far worse ways to spend a few hours than thinking or conversing about Montaigne with others, even if only in spirit.

I’m Gonna Keep On Loving You

By in jests japes jokes jollies, world football No Comments

Jürgen Klopp:

On being nine points clear at the top of the table…

I would really wish that you would all try to, I don’t know, we switch – you come here and I go there. Tomorrow it could be seven and then we play against Man City and it could be four, it’s possible. I’m not the smartest person in the world but I’m really not an idiot – not always at least! So it’s really nothing, it’s absolutely not important how many points you are ahead in December, even if it’s the end of December. So what you all create, and I get that, how can you not be positive about us? But all of you are the first, if we drop three points, the next headline is ‘Are they nervous now?’

So that’s an easy job. I would love to be in your situation. We cannot play that game and we don’t do it. Before the game, we all heard about the result of Tottenham, but do you think the party started already? I didn’t see a smile on any face in the dressing room. We came here in this situation with 54 points after 20 matchdays with completely being focused on the situation, and now it’s not about creating headlines, creating stories, it’s still about preparing football matches, play them as good as you can and try to get as many points as you can. That’s it.

On whether it will be different going to Manchester City as the league leaders on Thursday…

What do you think? When we went to City last year, do you think I had the table in the dressing room and said, ‘We are fourth, they are first?’ It’s just not important, we wanted to win the game. We wanted to win the game – the league game, which we obviously didn’t do but we wanted to win it that day and I think everyone who remembers it saw that. The only thing that has changed is that you all ask [about] it, that’s all. It’s not a problem, you can ask what you want. We go to City not with whatever-point distance, we only go there to try to play the best football game we can play. 100 per cent.

On whether the challenge is different depending on whether you’re chasing or leading at the top based on his experiences at Borussia Dortmund…

No, it was not for us [at Dortmund]. That’s the only thing I really remember, that it was not for us and we never thought about it. We were four points ahead for a while then we had Bayern at home. We won the game and Bayern missed a penalty, then we had six or seven points but the next game was the derby and stuff like that. It is a supporters and journalists’ game [talking about the points gap at the top] – and that’s absolutely OK, play it. But we cannot – we cannot be part of it, absolutely not. The only thing that can get annoying after a while is answering the same questions, so maybe you think a little bit about what you ask and not all the time the same! Then you will make my life easier!

You might think there’s nothing sweeter about being a Liverpool fan right now than seeing the club leading the Premier League while playing fantastic football, but I don’t know, I think I enjoy seeing Klopp treat the British sports media with the acidic contempt they so richly deserve just as much, maybe even more. And like I said before, he gives good copy, so they have to keep coming back for more, even as he reminds them again and again how trifling they are.

Sowing the Seeds of Love

By in extraordinary popular delusions, nietzsche, philosophy, psychology No Comments

Rob Henderson:

It can be hard, though, to accept that morality motivates violence. Maybe there’s something wrong with thinking of violence as moral. Isn’t the point of morality to care for people, or at least not hurt them?

We are told that a “surprising new scientific theory explains why morality leads to violence.” It turns out that people are willing to be violent over the things they care most deeply about, especially if those things are considered rare and irreplaceable. I suppose this is “surprising” to anyone raised in a Skinner box, unacquainted with the great philosopher-poets who already addressed this inherent shapeshifting, transitory, mysterious nature of life long ago:

“How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? Or the will to truth out of the will to deception? Or selfless action out of self-interest? Or the pure sunlike gaze of the sage out of covetousness? Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, even worse; the things of the highest value must have another, separate origin of their own—they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this turmoil of delusion and desire! Rather from the lap of being, the intransitory, the hidden god, the ‘thing-in-itself ‘—there must be their basis, and nowhere else!”— This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudice by which the metaphysicians of all ages can be recognized; this kind of valuation looms in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this “belief” that they trouble themselves about “knowledge,” about something that is finally christened solemnly as “the truth.” The fundamental belief of the metaphysicians is the belief in oppositions of values. It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them to raise doubts right here at the threshold where it is surely most necessary: even if they vowed to themselves, “de omnibus dubitandum.” For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and second, whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use? For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to appearance, the will to deception, self-interest, and desire. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things—maybe even one with them in essence. Perhaps! — But who has the will to concern himself with such dangerous Perhapses!

Obiter Scripta, no. 58

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The rest of the book was covered in graffiti like a boxcar parked too long outside the train yard: scribbles, circles, underlines, arrows, and rambling marginalia, all against a backdrop of pink highlighter swipes.

— Michael Perry, Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy

I’ve never understood why people do this to their books. I mean, strictly from a pragmatic point of view, wouldn’t it be easier and better to keep a notebook (or blog) for recording your thoughts as you make your way through a book, where you can annotate to your heart’s content? It’s the clutter that bothers me — the garish colors and illegible scrawls. It’s like trying to think after walking into a small, loud room. How can I profitably absorb anything with some Pink Highlighter Notation-bro braying at me the whole time? And how much space is there in the margins to record anything of substance anyway? It’s like having a Twitter feed scrolling alongside your reading. I’ve only ever used a red pen to make small brackets around a line or paragraph for future reference. My Darwinist attitude is, if I can’t remember why I bracketed this section, I probably didn’t have anything worthwhile to say about it anyway. And now that I’ve bought myself a Scanmarker for Christmas, I don’t even need to do that anymore. (It goes without saying, but people who dog-ear pages should be put in thumbscrews.)

Profanity Is So Boring, It’s Really Got Me Snoring

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Ruth Graham:

Despite the occasional marketing hurdle, however, clearly these books are selling just fine. That’s the surprising thing about all of these supposedly irreverent titles. The premise of their humor is that they’re shocking, but they’re now so prevalent that it’s hard to imagine being shocked by them. They are “the product of a culture in which transgressing social norms has become an agreed-on social norm,” as essayist Dan Brooks wrote of the “naughty” card game Cards Against Humanity a few years ago. That game has been so successful that G-rated board games like Taboo and Cranium now tout “dark” or “adult” versions for people who enjoy dirty jokes, but can’t conjure them unless they’re printed on a deck of glossy cards. Profanity is now utterly basic.

As I said recently, I do identify as a person of colorful language, though I mostly only use it privately, typically toward inanimate objects. I have a rule of thumb for cursing around friends and acquaintances: never be the first one to start working blue, as it were. If they feel uninhibited enough to swear in my presence, then I might reciprocate, but otherwise, I’m happy to never cross that line. Not because of any middle-aged squeamishness, but because I prefer to avoid overly-easy familiarity. I value modesty and restraint more as a rule, keeping a reticent arm’s-length. But, yes, there’s also the fact that profanity is just unimaginative and boring as currently used. As Melissa Mohr suggested, there are some words and phrases that could be artfully deployed to cause actual shock, but we aren’t that brave yet. Personally, I’d rather unearth some forgotten classics. Let’s all try to bring back “swive,” shall we?

Obiter Scripta, no. 57

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Copcot was making his way through Shotover forest, to the east of the city, on his way to mass at Horspath church on Christmas Day 1376, amusing himself by reading Aristotle as he went, as undergraduates do, when suddenly he was confronted by a wild boar. Scholar and beast eyed each other. Then, according to an account printed in 1876, “as quick as speech the taberdar thrust the volume, vellum, brass and all, into the animal’s throat, and then finished the business with the spear, whilst his opponent was digesting his classics.” An 1823 account gives the “touching climax” to the story: “‘Swallow that, if you can’ (cried the unarmed student thrusting his Aristotle down the boar’s throat). ‘Graecum est’, cried the boar, and expired, foaming at the mouth; for he found Aristotle (as many other throats had done and will do) too hard for him.”

— Andrew Gant, Christmas Carols: From Village Green to Church Choir

We’ve seen quite a few bears on our hikes, including a mom with her cubs. This convinces me that I should start carrying some Zizek and Habermas in my pack for protection.

A Bourgeois Carol

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Joseph Bottum:

Back in the days when Freudianism dominated literary criticism, the critic Edmund Wilson complained of those who gave psychological explanations of Scrooge’s conversion. The story is essentially a fairy tale, and it’s as meaningless to psychoanalyze Scrooge as it is to ask about penis envy and the death wish in Little Red Riding Hood. Dickens’s friend and first biographer, John Forster, insisted that Dickens took a “secret delight” in giving “a higher form” to nursery stories, and that’s probably the best way to read A Christmas Carol.

It’s naïve of me, I know, but it previously would never have occurred to me that adherents of the various schools of criticism would have felt called to practice their dark arts on such a straightforward story. But this is the second time in as many days that I’ve been, uh, “enlightened.” Stephen Nissenbaum, in The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday, writes that Scrooge is “essentially a member of the petite bourgeoisie” who has failed to understand that such relentless hard work and striving is no longer required of him. “Whatever else Scrooge’s conversion represents, it also marks his realization that he has “made it,” after all — that he can finally afford to ease up on himself and others. Considered sociologically, Scrooge’s conversion may mark his entry into the easy culture of the upper-middle-class world, a world for which he has previously been eligible only in an economic sense, but which his temperament has heretofore barred him from joining.” He goes on to stress that this still occurs within limits — Scrooge has a turkey sent to the Cratchits; he doesn’t deliver it himself. His Christmas is spent among family at his nephew Fred’s house, signifying the transformation of the formerly rowdy, carnival-esque atmosphere of Christmas into one captured by “domestic ideology.” Furthermore, even providing your employees with gifts is just “good business practice,” a strategic means of ensuring their continued loyalty. Coincidentally, it was at just this point in the book when I finally pressed the “eject” button.

Obiter Scripta, no. 56

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As it happened, publishers and booksellers were the shock troops in exploiting — and developing — a Christmas trade. And books were on the cutting edge of a commercial Christmas, making up more than half of the earliest items advertised as Christmas gifts…In fact, even before books were actually labeled as Christmas presents in the newspapers, they were being marketed for that purpose.

—Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday

That tone of strongly-implied disapproval runs throughout the book, a tedious Marxish archeological dig below the foundations of the holiday to unearth the telltale potsherds of paternalism, classism, nativism, and, worst of all, rapacious commercialism and inauthentic consumerism. What the materialist cynics never understand is that even amid humble, degraded origins, something noble and timeless can still shine through. Here, as with the ancient Icelandic tradition of jólabókaflóð, is a reminder of the sort of old-fashioned Christmas values we would all do well to resurrect.

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