Withdraw into yourself, but first prepare yourself to welcome yourself there. It would be madness to entrust yourself to yourself, if you did not know how to govern yourself. There are ways of failing in solitude as in society.6
‘But’ is always an important word for Montaigne and here the sharp second thought allows him to launch on past Seneca’s initial advice. In practice the Stoic maxim can only be a starting point. After the first shift of withdrawal from the public realm into the private space, there must be a second move, developing from the private sphere into the individual space.
In 1580 – nine years after retiring – Montaigne published the first edition of his Essays, consisting of 94 chapters split into two volumes. He wrote in the first person, in French rather than Latin, and covered a whole host of varied themes, for as he would later assert, ‘All topics are equally productive to me. I could write about a fly!’7 Montaigne called these short improvised bursts of writing ‘essais’ or ‘attempts’, inventing the essay as a form of relatively unpremeditated thinking. Time and mood took the place of a prior sense of assumed importance or a definitive commitment to hierarchical size. After their first publication, Montaigne continued to work on his Essays: a second edition was printed in 1582, and in 1588 a radically altered third edition was produced. This version of the Essays contained a third volume consisting of 13 new chapters. Rather than simply adding to the length of his work over time, Montaigne also returned again and again to the original 94 essays of Books I and II, revising and adding quotations to them in light of his further thinking and reading. Approximately five hundred and fifty new quotations were inserted into the third edition of the Essays, along with a further six hundred additions to the text. In the four years between the publication of the third edition of the Essays and Montaigne’s death in 1592, he continued to make changes to his book, adding one thousand new passages and making an estimated nine thousand revisions to his punctuation. The final manuscript that he had been working on up until his death is known as ‘The Bordeaux Copy’ and provides the source material for the posthumous editions of the Essays that are published today. This manuscript was the culmination of 21 years of work, yet it remained unfinished because Montaigne’s method of continual revision meant that there could never be a definitive, fixed version of the Essays; instead it was a living text.
The Essays were originally conceived as a tribute to Montaigne’s friend – his fellow councillor, writer and Stoic – Etienne de La Boétie, who had died in 1563. Montaigne planned to publish his friend’s work, De La Servitude Volontaire, alongside his own writing in order to preserve the memory of La Boétie and recreate a dialogue between the two men. However, Montaigne eventually resolved not to publish his friend’s work, replacing what was to be the heart of the book with his own essay ‘On Friendship’. A chapter of La Boétie’s sonnets was included in early editions of the Essays but was later struck out by Montaigne in protest at the misappropriation of his friend’s memory and political ideas by radical Protestants calling for a revolt against the Catholic monarchy. Instead, Montaigne left a blank space where the sonnets had previously been printed and the statement, ‘Nine and Twenty Sonnets of Etienne de la Boétie: These verses can be found elsewhere.’8 While La Boétie’s work can no longer be found within the Essays, his Stoic beliefs did leave an important imprint on Montaigne’s life and work. Montaigne turned to ancient philosophy for comfort after the death of La Boétie. He read widely in his retirement and inscribed his favourite quotations onto the walls and beams of his study, making them a concrete part of his physical environment. The philosophers that he frequently quotes in his Essays became his companions in thinking and provided him with a supporting structure or scaffolding upon which to build his own work.
Montaigne has an easy personal intimacy with the material that he quotes. He assimilates his reading into his writing and blends ancient philosophy with his own thoughts to create a chorus of co-opted voices within one text. The idea of ‘essaying’ or ‘trialling’ is central to Montaigne’s work. As he writes, Montaigne is putting philosophy – and in particular the philosophy of Stoicism – to the test. Over the course of the 21 years that Montaigne was writing the Essays, he repeatedly questions whether Stoicism is a philosophy that can work in practice. Over time, as his conclusions begin to change, he is less inclined to disguise quotations from Seneca within his writing and instead more likely to hold them up – distinctly apart from his own thoughts – so that they can be properly inspected and critiqued.
‘The taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have of them’ is characteristic of the early essays of Book I in which Montaigne is largely supportive of Stoicism. He begins by thinking about the same Stoic maxim of Epictetus that Jules Evans described as being the starting point for Albert Ellis in the development of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), ‘Men are disturbed not by things but by their opinions about them.’9 Montaigne measures this central tenet against his own lived experiences:
There is an old Greek saying that men are tormented not by things themselves but by what they think about them. If that assertion could be proved to be always true everywhere it would be an important point gained for the comforting of our wretched human condition. For if ills can only enter us through our judgement it would seem to be in our power either to despise them or to deflect them towards the good: if the things actually do throw themselves on our mercy why do we not act as their masters and accommodate them to our advantage? If what we call evil or torment are only evil or torment as far as our mental apprehension endows them with those qualities then it lies within our power to change those qualities. […] Let us see whether a case can be made for what we call evil not being evil in itself or (since it amounts to the same) whether at least it is up to us to endow it with a different savour and aspect.10
The repetition of ‘if’ four times in this passage shows Montaigne’s sceptical mind in action, while the phrase ‘let us see’ marks the movement from theory to personal, practical example. Montaigne is testing the concept set out by the Greek Stoic Epictetus, for can it actually be possible in reality that a person can determine their own emotional responses by regulating their thoughts? Can the theory be translated into practice? And if it can, then why isn’t that the end of all of our problems? Why do we still suffer if it is in our power to transform our suffering by changing the way we think? For the Stoics, the extent to which pain is felt is a choice; its magnitude is determined by how much mental territory it is given to exist within. While certain patterns of thought accommodate pain and give it space to grow, Stoicism was developed as a means of starving and shrinking it.
In his essay ‘On Practice’ Montaigne describes a riding accident that brought him close to death. Before the accident Montaigne had been intently preoccupied with his own mortality, but this experience led to a change in his thinking and was a practical reminder of what Seneca had warned of in his Epistle XIII, ‘Some things torment us more than they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all.’11 For Montaigne, knowledge that is gained through chance or by accident – as happens here – seems to be a particularly important way of learning:
Many things appear greater in thought than in fact. I have spent a large part of my life in perfect good health: it was not only perfect but vivacious and boiling over. That state, so full of sap and festivity, made thinking of illness so horrifying that when I came to experience it I found its stabbing pains to be mild and weak compared to my fears.
Here is an everyday experience of mine: if I am sheltered and warm in a pleasant room during a night of storm and tempest, I am dumbstruck with affliction for those then caught out in the open; yet when I am out there myself I never want to