Reading Essays

I started reading essays. Michel de Montaigne was recommended by a YouTube essayist, so I ordered the collection an dived in. I immediately felt like I had dived into the shallow end, proverbially hitting my head on the hard floor of simple concepts. (In truth, I have only read 2 essays of a tome that stands 1283 pages thick). And that was after I had read the forewords, the appendices, the editor's note and the biographical pages.

I'm not saying brother Michel was shallow, but with his depth of reading and classical education, I expected to dive into swirling, complex concepts that would seize my imagination and have me lying awake at night. But, no. And in his defense, he prefaces his collection by saying that his intent has been to lay his soul bare for his nearest and dearest to see, in all its imperfections, and was not trying to impress anyone at all.

What is impressive though, is the breadth of his classical education. I can imagine him shut away in his library, books strewn across his desk as he digs through the historical compost for the ideas and vignettes he references. The translator (Screech) had been put through the mills tracking down all his sources and references, providing translations and footnotes to help the 20th and 21st century reader make sense of the things. I'm grateful for his efforts - clearly it was a task of years.

The biography itself, structured as pages of bullet points, read as an outline for a saga, encompassing countries, kings, deaths, betrayals, wars, insurrections and love. Plenty to give a man like Michel material to try to make sense of human nature, surrounded by his convocation of long-dead historians and philosophers, and to interrogate his own shadows in that context. He does it bravely, humbly, simply.

The simplicity took me by surprise. The first essay I read, "We reach the same end by discrepant means", comprises a list of situations where men were moved, or not moved, to mercy. Examples from history list down the pages paragraph by paragraph. Michel gives no opinion as a conclusion, just ends with the example of Alexander the Great sacking Thebes, where every man who drew a sword was mowed down, and only old men, women and children were spared, albeit that from among their number he enslaved thirty thousand of them.

Throughout, he asks questions about those conquerors who, when confronted by the bravery of their adversaries, chose either mercy or ruthlessness. And his questions stand. I don't know what more to say about that.

In an anecdote I enjoyed, though, Michel draws on the story of Emperor Conrad III, a German King of the Holy Roman Empire until 1152, who was besieging Guelph in northern Italy on account of their support for the Pope. He paused in his onslaught to allow the noblewomen of that town to exit on foot carrying as much as they were able as a single concession in negotiations. The noblewomen responded to this mercy by loading their husbands, children and the Duke onto their backs, and bore them to safety. Conrad looked at this spectacle with mirth, delight and admiration, then and there ending his dispute with the Duke, and forever more treating his old adversary, and family, with kindness.

I think Michel says in this essay that there is a place for ruthlessness, a place for mercy, and nobleness in courage which, when tested, will not always be met with mercy.

In our contemporary age, most of us are very much at the mercy of our overlords, tens of thousands die daily in the ruthless slaughter of ideological and economic oppression. We will know the kind leaders by the extent to which they spare us suffering.

For all our distance in time, I have already begun to enjoy this conversation with Michel de Montaigne: we have much to think about together. I enjoy the language. I've missed reading the classics - I have read so many, I'm running out. So that I have 1270 pages still to go, will take me quite far into the year.