Review: The “monster child” is a child, fourteen months, who cannot chew, can only suck, and is joined at the hip by another body without a head. Montaigne tries to assure the reader that if we are amazed at the apparition, God is not. Whatever comes in nature is natural in the eyes of God. And the same should be true of us.
Quotes:
“What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it…. From his infinite wisdom there proceeds nothing but that is good and ordinary and regular; but we do not see its arrangements and relationship.”
“We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be. Let this universal and natural reason drive out of us the error and astonishment that novelty brings us.”
The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.
Review: Montaigne is a critic of the books he reads, writing judgments of individual authors and their books after he has read them. Much of the essay is taken up with his judgments of individual books and authors. But he also discusses how he reads.
Quotes:
“…I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself.”
“And if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.”
“I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.”
“If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there, after making one or two attacks on them…. What I do not see at the first attack, I see less by persisting.”
“If this book wearies me, I take up another; and I apply myself to it only at the moments when the boredom of doing nothing begins to grip me.”
“Most of Aesop’s Fables have many meanings and interpretations.”
“I want a man to begin with the conclusion.”
“In general, I ask for books that make use of learning, not those that build it up.”
“To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as … unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those that I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it.”
The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.
Review: He has furnished his government office as if it were a boat and describes the trials he has encountered in his travels by boat. “…when I was unlucky enough to encounter sudden storms or rough waters, many times I cried aloud to the gods to spare my brief life.” January 25, 1043. China.
The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.
One-minute review: Musings, meditations. “…fragments ranging from a line to several pages.” A “random mode of composition.” Sometimes uses “subtle links” to join the compositions. Kenko had a function in the court and then became a Buddhist monk after the Emperor died. He celebrated the idea of the “beauty of impermanence.”
Some of his musings are interesting: “The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” ………. “Nothing leads a man astray so easily as sexual desire.” ………. “A man’s character, as a rule, may be known from the place where he lives.” ………. “In all things, I yearn for the past. Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased.” ………. “In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are most interesting.” ………. “The man of breeding never appears to abandon himself completely to his pleasures; even his manner of enjoyment is detached.” ………. “It does not matter how young or how strong you may be, the hour of death comes sooner than you expect.” ………. “Death is like that. The soldier who goes to war, knowing how close he is to death, forgets his family and even forgets himself.” ………. “When you confront death, no matter where it may be, it is the same as charging into battle.”
The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.
One-minute review: Court lady in tenth-century Japan who kept a journal recording her likes, dislikes and events around her. She likes to make lists.
The contemporary reader will find many of her “hateful things” familiar: men in their cups who shout; to envy others and complain about one’s own lot; the habits of elderly people; a crying baby interrupts her story; snoring men; mosquitoes; annoying noises; people who interrupt her story with a minor detail; a lover who talks about a former lover; dogs who won’t stop barking; people who try to use elegant language and look ridiculous.
She leaves us with one useful thought: “One’s attachment to a man depends largely on the elegance of his leave-taking.”
The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.
One-minute review: On the death of their little daughter. “Above all, my dear, help us both preserve our customary composure in this affliction.
Quotes:
“But the dreadful thing which does so much mischief in these cases I need have no fear of—I mean the visits of silly women and their cries and the continuing lamentations by which they fan and whet grief and prevent it from abating….”
“Endeavor often to transpose yourself in imagination to the period when our child was not yet born, and yet we had no cause to reproach Fortune; And then consider that our present state is a continuation of that former period….”
“But the soul which remains in the body but a short span and is then liberated quickly recovers its natural form, for the constraint [the body] which was put upon it was but mild and gentle.”
“The soul is incorruptible and you must imagine that its experience is like that of a caged bird.”
“It [the soul] is made to pass the gates of death as quickly as possible, before it conceives too great a love for the things of this world….”
The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.
One-minute review: The experience of difficulty in breathing is like “rehearsing death.” But so what? We were dead before we were born and we will be dead after we live. So what?
Quotes:
“..with anything else [other ailments] you’re merely ill, while with this [asthma] you’re constantly at your last gasp.”
“Even as I fought for breath, though, I never ceased to find comfort in cheerful and courageous reflections.”
“…when in fact it [death] precedes as well as succeeds.”
“The man, though, whom you should admire and imitate is the one who finds it a joy to live and in spite of that is not reluctant to die. For where’s the virtue in going out when you’re really being thrown out.”
The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.
