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Montaigne

What book has made the greatest difference in my life? Montaigne's Essays, without a doubt, but it was Dr. Lewis Thomas' essay, "Why Montaigne is not a Bore", in The Medusa and the Snail that brought me to him.

Montaigne, Thomas says, "makes friends in the first few pages of the book, and he becomes the best and closest of all your friends as the essays move along. To be sure, he does go on and on about himself, but that self turns out to be the reader's self as well.

"All contradictions may be found in me. . .", Montaigne says, "bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever, stupid; surly, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; liberal, miserly and prodigal: all this I see in myself according to how I turn. . .. I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word.

"there is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and duly; not any science so arduous as to know how to live theis life of ours well and naturally. And of our maladies the most wild and barbarous is to despise our being. . . . For my part, love life and cultivate it."

As Thomas concludes: He persuades you of hois ordinariness on every page. You cannot help but believe him in this; he is, above all else, an honest and condid man. . . . if Montaigne is an ordinary man, then what an encouragement. .. is . . . an ordinary man! You cannot help but hope."

What difference did it make?

He thought about things the way I thought about things. . . and he talked about it.

He made me comfortable with our similar but unusual brand of thoughtfulness. He referred me to those of like mind in the Greek and Roman classics. My younger generation were never exposed to Seneca, Tacitus or Theophrastus as our parents laboriously translated their exercises from Latin to English. They talked about the simple daily problems of living; things that are important to me as an ordinary human being.

From there I expanded my reading to other great thinkers throughout history who turned their wisdom to timeless everyday problems; who else's wisdom had been stripped from my formal education: Jefferson, Samuel Johnson, Confucious, the great religious minds, Marx, Kant.

These men address what our schools, churches and families fail to do well-- deal with the simple daily problems of living.

Then Julian Jaynes in Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind pointed out that the mark of thoughtfulness that these great men share is accessible to almost anyone who can perceive the advantage of it. Thoughtfulness is an acquired trait. And I am learning how to teach how to teach it.

What a difference that will make! And all from idly reading Montaigne.

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