It was at least eight years after the publication of the first edition of the Essays and over twenty-five years after La Boétie’s death that Montaigne was able to complete his sentence and answer the question of ‘Why I loved him’. Saul Frampton goes further in his examination of Montaigne’s final manuscript when he notes that ‘each part of the addition [was] written in a different pen’.19 Frampton breaks down what at first appears to be one addition into its three component parts. From the initial full stop after ‘I feel that it cannot be expressed’ Montaigne first of all makes an opening for himself, deleting the full stop and reigniting the thought by inserting ‘except’. He writes ‘except by replying’ in one colour ink, ‘because it was him’ in another and ‘because it was me’ in a third shade, indicating that each small segment was written at a different time as the thought continued to germinate mid-articulation. The bursts of clarity within these short sentences are the closest that Montaigne gets to some kind of end point or realisation, but the process of revision that he follows in writing, namely his constant looping back into the text, mean that these moments of crystallisation are scattered throughout the Essays. The clarity, when it surfaces, is not an answer to the question of ‘Why I loved him’, but an acceptance of the felt unknowable that existed between the two friends, as the two words, ‘specifically’ and ‘inexplicable’ themselves add.
An important feature of Montaigne’s sanity is his capacity and willingness to go backwards and to think again by making additions to old thoughts. In order to do this he needs a language which will allow him to return to, re-open and re-energise old thoughts. In ‘On Repentance’ he writes about the value of the specific terms which allow him to do this important work of revision:
You make me hate things probable when you thrust them on me as things infallible. I love terms which soften and tone down the rashness of what we put forward, terms such as ‘perhaps’, ‘somewhat’, ‘some’, ‘they say’, ‘I think’ and so on. And if I had had any sons to bring up I would have trained their lips to answer with inquiring and undecided expressions such as, ‘What does this mean?’, ‘I do not understand that’, ‘It might be so’, ‘Is that true?’ so that they would have been more likely to retain the manners of an apprentice at sixty than, as boys do, to act as learned doctors at ten.20
Montaigne avoids the false language of certainty by using a set of terms that instead introduces a helpful uncertainty and flexibility into his thought process. These words are a set of tools for developing a healthier way of thinking, ‘softening’ rigid straight lines, ‘toning down’ black-and-white absolutism and instead creating space for contradiction, compromise and indecision in the very midst of the route. This is a vocabulary for changing the way of thinking that must be learned and practised. Having a syntactic language enabling the expression of doubt or contradiction – not a set of nouns but a series of functional route-seeking adverbs and conjunctions – makes it possible to have doubts and to be contradictory. Without a linguistic mechanism to help call forward these layers of feeling from the unconscious or implicit mind, it is impossible for them to exist in the conscious world. Montaigne was engaged in a lifelong apprenticeship, and part of the sanity of the Essays is due to the fact that he never stopped being willing to rethink and rework his ideas and thus he never reached – or even tried to reach – a conclusion. That is his creative and buoyant scepticism.
Montaigne’s Model of Self-Help
The programme of exercises typically contained within self-help books lead readers – theoretically – in a straight line from sickness to health. The imperative, instructive tone that they adopt establishes a sense of the counsellor–patient dynamic within the mind of the solitary reader and helps to impose a particular therapeutic framework. Warren Boutcher writes in The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe that the Essays have ‘recently been re-discovered as a kind of self-help book that is relevant to our time’.21 Yet, in his Essays Montaigne refuses to be explicitly instructive or to comply with any kind of permanently set framework. His tone is instead wryly comical, and it is this humour which, as Alexander Welsh describes in The Humanist Comedy, allows him to create a certain degree of mental ‘leeway’22 for himself. It is Montaigne’s capacity to create mental leeway, humour being only one of his methods for doing so, which is perhaps his most important contribution to psychology. It is his most valuable modification of the otherwise seemingly constrictive philosophy of Stoicism and the nuanced, discretionary quality most lacking in conventional self-help.
Marion Milner, a writer who later became a psychoanalyst, was reacting against the constraints of textbook psychology when, in 1926, she began keeping a diary. In A Life of One’s Own (1934) she went on to analyse her own diary writing experience:
Of course there were books on psychology, handbooks telling one how to be happy, successful, well-balanced, thousands of words of exhortation about how one ought to live. But these were all outside me; they seemed too remote, they spoke in general terms and it was hard to see how they applied in special cases; it was so fatally easy to evade their demands on oneself. Was there not a way by which each person could find out for himself what he was like, not by reading what other people thought he ought to be, but directly, as directly as knowing the sky is blue and how an apple tastes, not needing anyone to tell him? Perhaps, then, if one could not write for other people one could write for oneself.23
Milner was looking for a genuinely self-directed therapy rather than one which was imposed upon her from the outside. As she explains in A Life of One’s Own, her diary writing project was inspired by reading Montaigne’s Essays:
I must have known vaguely what lay ahead of me, for I still have a crumpled piece of paper with a quotation which I had copied out, and which I remember carrying about in my pocket at the time:
[…] Really she is the strangest creature in the world, far from heroic, variable as a weathercock, ‘bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal’ – in short, so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public, that a man might spend his life in merely trying to run her to earth.24
Milner is quoting an essay on Montaigne written by Virginia Woolf and published in The Common Reader in 1925. In turn, Woolf is quoting from Montaigne’s essay ‘On the inconstancy of the self’:
Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute: timid, insolent; chaste, lecherous; talkative, taciturn; tough, sickly; clever, dull; brooding, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant, generous, miserly and then prodigal – I can see something of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate; and anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself and in his very judgement this whirring about and this discordancy. There is nothing I can say about myself as a whole simply and completely, without intermingling and admixture. The most universal article of my own logic is DISTINGUO.25
This essay was first published in 1580, yet Montaigne returned to it at the end of his life to add more to his list of contradictory characteristics.