The Essays of Montaigne, Volume 3

M >> Michel de Montaigne >> The Essays of Montaigne, Volume 3


"Nemo altero fragilior est; nemo in crastinum sui certior."

["No man is more fragile than another: no man more certain than
another of to-morrow."--Seneca, Ep., 91.]

For anything I have to do before I die, the longest leisure would appear
too short, were it but an hour's business I had to do.

A friend of mine the other day turning over my tablets, found therein a
memorandum of something I would have done after my decease, whereupon I
told him, as it was really true, that though I was no more than a
league's distance only from my own house, and merry and well, yet when
that thing came into my head, I made haste to write it down there,
because I was not certain to live till I came home. As a man that am
eternally brooding over my own thoughts, and confine them to my own
particular concerns, I am at all hours as well prepared as I am ever like
to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with
him I did not expect long before. We should always, as near as we can,
be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care,
at that time, to have no business with any one but one's self:--

"Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo
Multa?"

["Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?"
--Hor., Od., ii. 16, 17.]

for we shall there find work enough to do, without any need of addition.
One man complains, more than of death, that he is thereby prevented of a
glorious victory; another, that he must die before he has married his
daughter, or educated his children; a third seems only troubled that he
must lose the society of his wife; a fourth, the conversation of his son,
as the principal comfort and concern of his being. For my part, I am,
thanks be to God, at this instant in such a condition, that I am ready to
dislodge, whenever it shall please Him, without regret for anything
whatsoever. I disengage myself throughout from all worldly relations;
my leave is soon taken of all but myself. Never did any one prepare to
bid adieu to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and to shake
hands with all manner of interest in it, than I expect to do. The
deadest deaths are the best:

"'Miser, O miser,' aiunt, 'omnia ademit
Una dies infesta mihi tot praemia vitae.'"

["'Wretch that I am,' they cry, 'one fatal day has deprived me of
all joys of life.'"--Lucretius, iii. 911.]


And the builder,

"Manuet," says he, "opera interrupta, minaeque
Murorum ingentes."

["The works remain incomplete, the tall pinnacles of the walls
unmade."--AEneid, iv. 88.]

A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the
finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought
to perfection. We are born to action:

"Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus."

["When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed."
--Ovid, Amor., ii. 10, 36.]

I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to
extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me
planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens
not being finished. I saw one die, who, at his last gasp, complained of
nothing so much as that destiny was about to cut the thread of a
chronicle he was then compiling, when he was gone no farther than the
fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings:

"Illud in his rebus non addunt: nec tibi earum
jam desiderium rerum super insidet una."

["They do not add, that dying, we have no longer a desire to possess
things."--Lucretius, iii. 913.]

We are to discharge ourselves from these vulgar and hurtful humours.
To this purpose it was that men first appointed the places of sepulture
adjoining the churches, and in the most frequented places of the city, to
accustom, says Lycurgus, the common people, women, and children, that
they should not be startled at the sight of a corpse, and to the end,
that the continual spectacle of bones, graves, and funeral obsequies
should put us in mind of our frail condition:

"Quin etiam exhilarare viris convivia caede
Mos olim, et miscere epulis spectacula dira
Certantum ferro, saepe et super ipsa cadentum
Pocula, respersis non parco sanguine mensis."

["It was formerly the custom to enliven banquets with slaughter, and
to combine with the repast the dire spectacle of men contending with
the sword, the dying in many cases falling upon the cups, and
covering the tables with blood."--Silius Italicus, xi. 51.]

And as the Egyptians after their feasts were wont to present the company
with a great image of death, by one that cried out to them, "Drink and be
merry, for such shalt thou be when thou art dead"; so it is my custom to
have death not only in my imagination, but continually in my mouth.
Neither is there anything of which I am so inquisitive, and delight to
inform myself, as the manner of men's deaths, their words, looks, and
bearing; nor any places in history I am so intent upon; and it is
manifest enough, by my crowding in examples of this kind, that I have a
particular fancy for that subject. If I were a writer of books, I would
compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who
should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.
Dicarchus made one, to which he gave that title; but it was designed for
another and less profitable end.

Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so
infinitely exceed all manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be
quite out of his play when it comes to the push. Let them say what they
will: to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is
it nothing to go so far, at least, without disturbance or alteration?
Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us: if the death be
sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive
that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a certain
loathing and disdain of life. I find I have much more ado to digest this
resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when languishing of a
fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life,
by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I
look upon death with less terror. Which makes me hope, that the further
I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall
the more easily exchange the one for the other. And, as I have
experienced in other occurrences, that, as Caesar says, things often
appear greater to us at distance than near at hand, I have found, that
being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really
afflicted with them. The vigour wherein I now am, the cheerfulness and
delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a
disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify
those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more
troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy
upon me; I hope to find death the same.

Let us but observe in the ordinary changes and declinations we daily
suffer, how nature deprives us of the light and sense of our bodily
decay. What remains to an old man of the vigour of his youth and better
days?

"Heu! senibus vitae portio quanta manet."

["Alas, to old men what portion of life remains!"---Maximian, vel
Pseudo-Gallus, i. 16.]

Caesar, to an old weather-beaten soldier of his guards, who came to ask
him leave that he might kill himself, taking notice of his withered body
and decrepit motion, pleasantly answered, "Thou fanciest, then, that thou
art yet alive."--[Seneca, Ep., 77.]--Should a man fall into this
condition on the sudden, I do not think humanity capable of enduring such
a change: but nature, leading us by the hand, an easy and, as it were, an
insensible pace, step by step conducts us to that miserable state, and by
that means makes it familiar to us, so that we are insensible of the
stroke when our youth dies in us, though it be really a harder death than
the final dissolution of a languishing body, than the death of old age;
forasmuch as the fall is not so great from an uneasy being to none at
all, as it is from a sprightly and flourishing being to one that is
troublesome and painful. The body, bent and bowed, has less force to
support a burden; and it is the same with the soul, and therefore it is,
that we are to raise her up firm and erect against the power of this
adversary. For, as it is impossible she should ever be at rest, whilst
she stands in fear of it; so, if she once can assure herself, she may
boast (which is a thing as it were surpassing human condition) that it is
impossible that disquiet, anxiety, or fear, or any other disturbance,
should inhabit or have any place in her:

"Non vulnus instants Tyranni
Mentha cadi solida, neque Auster
Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae,
Nec fulminantis magna Jovis manus."

["Not the menacing look of a tyrant shakes her well-settled soul,
nor turbulent Auster, the prince of the stormy Adriatic, nor yet the
strong hand of thundering Jove, such a temper moves."
--Hor., Od., iii. 3, 3.]

She is then become sovereign of all her lusts and passions, mistress of
necessity, shame, poverty, and all the other injuries of fortune. Let
us, therefore, as many of us as can, get this advantage; 'tis the true
and sovereign liberty here on earth, that fortifies us wherewithal to
defy violence and injustice, and to contemn prisons and chains:

"In manicis et
Compedibus saevo te sub custode tenebo.
Ipse Deus, simul atque volam, me solvet. Opinor,
Hoc sentit; moriar; mors ultima linea rerum est."

["I will keep thee in fetters and chains, in custody of a
savage keeper.--A god will when I ask Him, set me free.
This god I think is death. Death is the term of all things."
--Hor., Ep., i. 16, 76.]

Our very religion itself has no surer human foundation than the contempt
of death. Not only the argument of reason invites us to it--for why
should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented?
--but, also, seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not
infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than once to undergo one of
them? And what matters it, when it shall happen, since it is inevitable?
To him that told Socrates, "The thirty tyrants have sentenced thee to
death"; "And nature them," said he.--[Socrates was not condemned to death
by the thirty tyrants, but by the Athenians.-Diogenes Laertius, ii.35.]--
What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only
step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us the
birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included.
And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence,
is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.
Death is the beginning of another life. So did we weep, and so much it
cost us to enter into this, and so did we put off our former veil in
entering into it. Nothing can be a grievance that is but once. Is it
reasonable so long to fear a thing that will so soon be despatched?
Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long,
nor short, to things that are no more. Aristotle tells us that there are
certain little beasts upon the banks of the river Hypanis, that never
live above a day: they which die at eight of the clock in the morning,
die in their youth, and those that die at five in the evening, in their
decrepitude: which of us would not laugh to see this moment of
continuance put into the consideration of weal or woe? The most and the
least, of ours, in comparison with eternity, or yet with the duration of
mountains, rivers, stars, trees, and even of some animals, is no less
ridiculous.--[ Seneca, Consol. ad Marciam, c. 20.]

But nature compels us to it. "Go out of this world," says she, "as you
entered into it; the same pass you made from death to life, without
passion or fear, the same, after the same manner, repeat from life to
death. Your death is a part of the order of the universe, 'tis a part of
the life of the world.

"Inter se mortales mutua vivunt
................................
Et, quasi cursores, vitai lampada tradunt."

["Mortals, amongst themselves, live by turns, and, like the runners
in the games, give up the lamp, when they have won the race, to the
next comer.--" Lucretius, ii. 75, 78.]

"Shall I exchange for you this beautiful contexture of things? 'Tis the
condition of your creation; death is a part of you, and whilst you
endeavour to evade it, you evade yourselves. This very being of yours
that you now enjoy is equally divided betwixt life and death. The day of
your birth is one day's advance towards the grave:

"Prima, qux vitam dedit, hora carpsit."

["The first hour that gave us life took away also an hour."
--Seneca, Her. Fur., 3 Chor. 874.]

"Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet."

["As we are born we die, and the end commences with the beginning."
--Manilius, Ast., iv. 16.]

"All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the
expense of life itself. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay
the foundation of death. You are in death, whilst you are in life,
because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you
had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while
you live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and
more sensibly and essentially. If you have made your profit of life, you
have had enough of it; go your way satisfied.

"Cur non ut plenus vita; conviva recedis?"

["Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast?
"Lucretius, iii. 951.]

"If you have not known how to make the best use of it, if it was
unprofitable to you, what need you care to lose it, to what end would you
desire longer to keep it?

"'Cur amplius addere quaeris,
Rursum quod pereat male, et ingratum occidat omne?'

["Why seek to add longer life, merely to renew ill-spent time, and
be again tormented?"--Lucretius, iii. 914.]

"Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil
as you make it.' And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day
is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other
shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and
disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall
also entertain your posterity:

"'Non alium videre patres, aliumve nepotes
Aspicient.'

["Your grandsires saw no other thing; nor will your posterity."
--Manilius, i. 529.]

"And, come the worst that can come, the distribution and variety of all
the acts of my comedy are performed in a year. If you have observed the
revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth,
the virility, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part,
and knows no other art but to begin again; it will always be the same
thing:

"'Versamur ibidem, atque insumus usque.'

["We are turning in the same circle, ever therein confined."
--Lucretius, iii. 1093.]

"'Atque in se sua per vestigia volvitur annus.'

["The year is ever turning around in the same footsteps."
--Virgil, Georg., ii. 402.]

"I am not prepared to create for you any new recreations:

"'Nam tibi prxterea quod machiner, inveniamque
Quod placeat, nihil est; eadem sunt omnia semper.'

["I can devise, nor find anything else to please you: 'tis the same
thing over and over again."--Lucretius iii. 957]

"Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is
the soul of equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same
destiny, wherein all are involved? Besides, live as long as you can, you
shall by that nothing shorten the space you are to be dead; 'tis all to
no purpose; you shall be every whit as long in the condition you so much
fear, as if you had died at nurse:

"'Licet quot vis vivendo vincere secla,
Mors aeterna tamen nihilominus illa manebit.'

["Live triumphing over as many ages as you will, death still will
remain eternal."--Lucretius, iii. 1103]

"And yet I will place you in such a condition as you shall have no reason
to be displeased.

"'In vera nescis nullum fore morte alium te,
Qui possit vivus tibi to lugere peremptum,
Stansque jacentem.'

["Know you not that, when dead, there can be no other living self to
lament you dead, standing on your grave."--Idem., ibid., 898.]

"Nor shall you so much as wish for the life you are so concerned about:

"'Nec sibi enim quisquam tum se vitamque requirit.
..................................................
"'Nec desiderium nostri nos afficit ullum.'

"Death is less to be feared than nothing, if there could be anything less
than nothing.

"'Multo . . . mortem minus ad nos esse putandium,
Si minus esse potest, quam quod nihil esse videmus.'

"Neither can it any way concern you, whether you are living or dead:
living, by reason that you are still in being; dead, because you are no
more. Moreover, no one dies before his hour: the time you leave behind
was no more yours than that was lapsed and gone before you came into the
world; nor does it any more concern you.

"'Respice enim, quam nil ad nos anteacta vetustas
Temporis aeterni fuerit.'

["Consider how as nothing to us is the old age of times past."
--Lucretius iii. 985]

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists
not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived
long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present
with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to
have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never
to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet
there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more
pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same
way?

"'Omnia te, vita perfuncta, sequentur.'

["All things, then, life over, must follow thee."
--Lucretius, iii. 981.]

"Does not all the world dance the same brawl that you do? Is there
anything that does not grow old, as well as you? A thousand men, a
thousand animals, a thousand other creatures, die at the same moment that
you die:

"'Nam nox nulla diem, neque noctem aurora sequuta est,
Quae non audierit mistos vagitibus aegris
Ploratus, mortis comites et funeris atri.'

["No night has followed day, no day has followed night, in which
there has not been heard sobs and sorrowing cries, the companions of
death and funerals."--Lucretius, v. 579.]

"To what end should you endeavour to draw back, if there be no
possibility to evade it? you have seen examples enough of those who have
been well pleased to die, as thereby delivered from heavy miseries; but
have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying? It must,
therefore, needs be very foolish to condemn a thing you have neither
experimented in your own person, nor by that of any other. Why dost thou
complain of me and of destiny? Do we do thee any wrong? Is it for thee
to govern us, or for us to govern thee? Though, peradventure, thy age
may not be accomplished, yet thy life is: a man of low stature is as much
a man as a giant; neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell.
Chiron refused to be immortal, when he was acquainted with the conditions
under which he was to enjoy it, by the god of time itself and its
duration, his father Saturn. Do but seriously consider how much more
insupportable and painful an immortal life would be to man than what I
have already given him. If you had not death, you would eternally curse
me for having deprived you of it; I have mixed a little bitterness with
it, to the end, that seeing of what convenience it is, you might not too
greedily and indiscreetly seek and embrace it: and that you might be so
established in this moderation, as neither to nauseate life, nor have any
antipathy for dying, which I have decreed you shall once do, I have
tempered the one and the other betwixt pleasure and pain. It was I that
taught Thales, the most eminent of your sages, that to live and to die
were indifferent; which made him, very wisely, answer him, 'Why then he
did not die?' 'Because,' said he, 'it is indifferent.'--[Diogenes
Laertius, i. 35.]--Water, earth, air, and fire, and the other parts of
this creation of mine, are no more instruments of thy life than they are
of thy death. Why dost thou fear thy last day? it contributes no more to
thy dissolution, than every one of the rest: the last step is not the
cause of lassitude: it does not confess it. Every day travels towards
death; the last only arrives at it." These are the good lessons our
mother Nature teaches.

I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war
the image of death, whether we look upon it in ourselves or in others,
should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own
houses (for if it were not so, it would be an army of doctors and whining
milksops), and that being still in all places the same, there should be,
notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of
people, than in others of better quality. I believe, in truth, that it
is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out,
that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of
living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of
astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering
servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed
with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror
round about us; we seem dead and buried already. Children are afraid
even of those they are best acquainted with, when disguised in a visor;
and so 'tis with us; the visor must be removed as well from things as
from persons, that being taken away, we shall find nothing underneath but
the very same death that a mean servant or a poor chambermaid died a day
or two ago, without any manner of apprehension. Happy is the death that
deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.




CHAPTER XX

OF THE FORCE OF IMAGINATION

"Fortis imaginatio generat casum," say the schoolmen.

["A strong imagination begets the event itself."--Axiom. Scholast.]

I am one of those who are most sensible of the power of imagination:
every one is jostled by it, but some are overthrown by it. It has a very
piercing impression upon me; and I make it my business to avoid, wanting
force to resist it. I could live by the sole help of healthful and jolly
company: the very sight of another's pain materially pains me, and I
often usurp the sensations of another person. A perpetual cough in
another tickles my lungs and throat. I more unwillingly visit the sick
in whom by love and duty I am interested, than those I care not for, to
whom I less look. I take possession of the disease I am concerned at,
and take it to myself. I do not at all wonder that fancy should give
fevers and sometimes kill such as allow it too much scope, and are too
willing to entertain it. Simon Thomas was a great physician of his time:
I remember, that happening one day at Toulouse to meet him at a rich old
fellow's house, who was troubled with weak lungs, and discoursing with
the patient about the method of his cure, he told him, that one thing
which would be very conducive to it, was to give me such occasion to be
pleased with his company, that I might come often to see him, by which
means, and by fixing his eyes upon the freshness of my complexion, and
his imagination upon the sprightliness and vigour that glowed in my
youth, and possessing all his senses with the flourishing age wherein I
then was, his habit of body might, peradventure, be amended; but he
forgot to say that mine, at the same time, might be made worse. Gallus
Vibius so much bent his mind to find out the essence and motions of
madness, that, in the end, he himself went out of his wits, and to such a
degree, that he could never after recover his judgment, and might brag
that he was become a fool by too much wisdom. Some there are who through
fear anticipate the hangman; and there was the man, whose eyes being
unbound to have his pardon read to him, was found stark dead upon the
scaffold, by the stroke of imagination. We start, tremble, turn pale,
and blush, as we are variously moved by imagination; and, being a-bed,
feel our bodies agitated with its power to that degree, as even sometimes
to expiring. And boiling youth, when fast asleep, grows so warm with
fancy, as in a dream to satisfy amorous desires:--