1580 2026
This is an AI modernization of Selected Essays into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.
Michel de Montaigne was born in 1533 on his family's estate near Bordeaux and spent his working life as a magistrate in the Bordeaux parlement. In 1571, at thirty-eight, he retired to a tower on the estate, had sentences from his favourite authors painted on the beams of the ceiling, and started writing. The first two books came out in 1580; a third, along with additions to the others, followed in 1588. France spent those years in a civil war over religion, which he lived in the middle of and mostly declines to discuss directly.
He called the pieces essais, meaning attempts or trials, and the word has been the name of the form ever since. What he was trying was his own judgement, on paper, to find out what he thought. So the essays wander. He starts on one subject, remembers a story from Plutarch, goes after it, comes back, notices he has contradicted what he said ten pages earlier, and says so with no embarrassment at all. That is the method, not a failure of it. The quotations are constant, mostly Latin poets and historians; this edition gives them in English rather than printing the Latin and a translation both.
His subject is himself, stated plainly and without any pretence that he is a representative case. He writes about his bad memory, his height, his fear of death and how he argued himself out of it, his kidney stones and what passing one is actually like, what he eats, how he sleeps, and what he thinks about while riding. He also writes about torture, colonisation and the burning of witches, and he is harder on his own century than almost anyone in it: the essay on cannibals, about Brazilians he questioned through an interpreter, works round to the conclusion that the people roasting each other in France are the barbarians, and the essay on cripples says that it is putting a very high value on your guesses to roast a man alive for them.
This is a selection, not the whole book. Montaigne wrote a hundred and seven essays; here there are twenty-three, along with the short note to the reader that opens the original, arranged as he arranged them, in three books. Most of the best known are here: on friendship, on cannibals, on the education of children, on solitude, on books, on repentance, on cripples, on coaches, and the long final essay on experience. Five famous ones are not. The Apology for Raymond Sebond, which is longer than everything in this volume put together and contains both his motto, what do I know, and the passage about his cat, is absent, as are Of Vanity, Upon Some Verses of Virgil, Of Presumption and Of Physiognomy.
The English follows Charles Cotton's translation of 1685 and 1686.
Book I
To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die
Of the Power of the Imagination
Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law
Book II
That Our Actions Are Inconsistent
Book III
Reader, this is an honest book. It warns you right at the door that I wrote it for private, family reasons and nothing more. I gave no thought to being useful to you, or to winning any glory for myself — my powers aren't up to a project like that. I wrote it for the particular benefit of my relatives and friends, so that when they've lost me (which must happen soon), they can recover here some traces of my character and my moods, and so keep their knowledge of me more whole and more alive.
If I'd been out to court the world's favor, I would have dressed myself up in borrowed beauty. Instead, I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, everyday manner, without strain or artifice — because it is myself I'm painting. My faults will show up here as they really are, along with my native shape, as far as public decency allows. If I had lived among those nations that are said to dwell still under the sweet liberty of nature's first laws, I assure you I would very gladly have painted myself entire, and entirely naked.
So, reader: I am myself the matter of my book. There's no reason you should spend your free time on a subject so frivolous and so empty.
Therefore farewell.
Montaigne, this first of March, 1580.
You've seen what happens to fields left fallow. If the soil is rich, it erupts with a hundred thousand kinds of weeds and useless wild growth; to get any honest work out of it, you have to break it up and sow it with the seeds you actually want. And women's bodies, they say, can sometimes produce on their own mere shapeless lumps of flesh, but for a true and natural birth they have to be sown with a different seed. Minds are the same. Unless you give a mind some definite subject to rein it in and hold it steady, it tumbles off into a thousand wild excursions, roving endlessly here and there through the vague fields of imagination — like light reflected off trembling water in a bronze bowl, as Virgil describes it, thrown by the sun or the shining moon, flickering across every surface and darting up to strike the highest ceiling.
And in that restless agitation, there is no piece of nonsense too empty for an idle mind to fill with a thousand fantasies and chimeras — "like a sick man's dreams, conjuring empty phantoms," as Horace says. A mind without a fixed aim loses itself — because, as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere.
Not long ago I retired to my own house, resolved, as far as I possibly could, to stay clear of all business and spend in privacy and rest the little time I have left to live. I thought the kindest favor I could do my mind was to leave it in complete leisure to entertain and amuse itself — which I hoped it could manage easily by now, having grown more settled and mature with time. But I find that "leisure always breeds a restless mind," as Lucan says. Quite the contrary of settling down, my mind has bolted like a horse that's thrown its rider, running a far wilder course on its own than any horseman would ever have put it to. It births so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one on top of another, without order or purpose, that — the better to study their strangeness and absurdity at my leisure — I have begun to set them down in writing. These are my attempts: my essais, as we say in French. And I'm hoping, in time, to make my mind ashamed of itself.
There is no man alive with less business talking about memory than me. I can find hardly a trace of one in myself, and I doubt there's another in the world so spectacularly unreliable as mine. All my other faculties are ordinary and average; but in this one I think I'm so rare and singular that I deserve to be famous for it.
Besides the natural inconvenience I suffer from it — and considering how necessary memory is, Plato was right to call it a great and powerful goddess — there's this: where I come from, when people want to say a man has no sense, they say he has no memory. So when I complain about the defect of mine, they correct me and refuse to believe me, as if I were accusing myself of being a fool. They can't see the difference between memory and understanding — which makes my case worse. But they do me wrong. Experience shows us daily, if anything, the opposite: that an excellent memory tends to come paired with shaky judgment.
They do me another wrong too. I am better at friendship than at anything else, and yet the very words that describe my infirmity make me out to be ungrateful. They question my heart on the evidence of my memory, and turn a natural defect into a defect of conscience. "He forgot this request," someone says, "or that promise. He doesn't remember his friends anymore. He forgot to say this, or do that, or keep quiet about the other thing, for my sake." True enough, I forget plenty. But neglect something a friend has actually entrusted to me? Never. It should be enough that I feel the misery and inconvenience of the thing, without being branded with malice on top of it — a vice that couldn't be more foreign to my temperament.
Still, I get a few comforts out of my infirmity. First, it's a flaw that has helped me correct a worse one that would easily have grown on me: ambition. A failing memory is unbearable in anyone who takes up public business. Also — as nature shows us in similar cases — she has strengthened my other faculties in proportion as she left this one bare. Otherwise I'd have been content to let my mind and judgment rest lazily on other people's reports, without ever putting them to work on their own strength, if other men's ideas and opinions had always been at my fingertips by courtesy of memory. And it keeps me from being talkative — for the warehouse of memory is always better stocked than the warehouse of invention. If my memory had stayed faithful to me, I'd have deafened every friend I have with chatter by now, since the subjects themselves would keep rousing what little gift I have for handling and arranging them, warming me up and pulling me along. That would have been a pity. I've watched it happen to some of my closest friends. Their memories hand them the whole subject, entire and fully present, so they start their story too far back and load it with so many useless details that if the story is good, they smother the good in it — and if it isn't, you're left cursing either the strength of their memory or the weakness of their judgment. It's hard to close off a story and cut it short once you're rolling; nothing shows the strength of a horse like a clean, sudden stop. Even speakers who stay on point — I see them wanting to stop and not managing it. While they hunt around for a graceful exit line, they keep rambling on, dragging through trivialities like men staggering on weak legs. Old men are the most dangerous company of all: they remember the past but forget how many times they've told you about it. I've watched stories from the mouth of a very great lord — genuinely entertaining stories — become unbearable by being repeated a hundred times to the same audience.
The second comfort is that I'm slower to remember the injuries people do me. As one ancient put it, I'd need an official register of insults — or a prompter, like Darius, who, so he wouldn't forget the offense the Athenians had given him, had a page repeat in his ear three times every time he sat down to dinner: "Sir, remember the Athenians." And then, too, the places I revisit and the books I reread always smile at me with a fresh novelty.
It's said with good reason that anyone without a sound memory should never take up the trade of lying. I know the grammarians draw a line between telling an untruth and telling a lie. To tell an untruth, they say, is to say something false that we ourselves believe is true; but to lie — by the definition of the Latin word our French comes from — is to say something we know in our conscience to be untrue. It's only this second kind of liar I'm talking about here. These people either invent their falsehoods wholesale, or they disguise and alter a true story until it ends up a lie.
When they disguise and alter a story, telling it differently each time to suit themselves, it's very hard for them to escape getting caught sooner or later. The true version of the thing took possession of the memory first — it got lodged there by way of real knowledge — so it keeps presenting itself to the imagination and shoulders out the falsehood, which can never get such firm and settled footing. The circumstances of the true version keep running through the mind and make them forget the fake ones, which have no parentage but their own invention.
When they invent the whole thing from scratch, there's no true impression to collide with the lie, so they would seem to be in less danger of tripping. But even so, an invention is a hollow body with nothing to grip; it slips easily out of any memory that isn't very sure of itself. I've had some amusing proof of this, at the expense of those professionals who shape everything they say to fit the business at hand — or to please whichever great man they're talking to. The circumstances they're so willing to enslave their word and conscience to keep changing, so their story has to change with them: they tell one man a thing is this, another that it's that, painting the same fact different colors for different audiences. And if those men ever compare notes and discover the trick, what becomes of the whole fine art? Besides, they trip themselves up, ridiculously, all the time — for what memory could possibly be big enough to hold all the different shapes they've forged for one and the same subject? I've known plenty of men in my day who envied the reputation this kind of cleverness brings. What they don't see is that once you have the reputation, the trick no longer works.
In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are men, and hold together as men, only by our word. If we really saw the horror and the weight of lying, we would hunt it down with fire and sword — and more justly than we hunt other crimes. I notice that parents routinely punish their children, and not very sensibly, for innocent little mistakes, tormenting them over thoughtless pranks that leave no mark and carry no consequence. Meanwhile lying — and a step below it, stubbornness — are the faults that ought to be fought from the moment they appear and at every stage of growth, because they grow up right along with the child. Once a tongue gets the knack of lying, you can't imagine how nearly impossible it is to break it of the habit. That's how it happens that otherwise honest men end up enslaved to this vice. I have a perfectly decent lad as my tailor, and I have never once caught him telling the truth — not even when it would have worked in his favor.
If falsehood, like truth, had only one face, we'd be on better terms with it: we could simply take the opposite of whatever the liar said as certain. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand faces, and an open field without edge or limit. The Pythagoreans make good finite and certain, and evil infinite and uncertain. There are a thousand ways to miss the target; there's only one way to hit it. For my own part, I hold this vice in such horror that I'm not sure I could bring my conscience to save me even from obvious, extreme danger by telling one brazen, deliberate lie.
One of the old church fathers says that a dog we know is better company than a man whose language we don't understand — so true is it, as Pliny adds, that a foreigner who shares no tongue with us hardly counts as a fellow man. And how much less sociable than silence is false speech?
King Francis I used to boast that he had used exactly this weapon to corner Francesco Taverna, ambassador of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, and a man famous in his day for his skill in talking. Taverna had been sent to make his master's excuses to His Majesty over an affair of very great consequence, which was this. The King, wanting to keep some channel into Italy — from which he had recently been driven out — and especially into the duchy of Milan, had decided to keep a gentleman of his own at the Duke's court: an ambassador in fact, but in appearance a private person, pretending to be there on his own personal business. For the Duke depended far more on the Emperor — especially just then, while negotiating a marriage with the Emperor's niece, daughter of the King of Denmark and now the dowager of Lorraine — and couldn't be seen dealing and conferring with us without serious damage to himself. A Milanese gentleman named Merveille, one of the King's own equerries, was judged right for the job, and was sent off with secret credentials and the instructions of an ambassador, along with letters of recommendation to the Duke about his own private affairs, to mask and color the business. But he stayed at that court so long that the Emperor eventually got wind of his real role there — which, as we suppose, is what caused what followed. On the pretext of a murder charge, the Duke had Merveille's trial dispatched in two days, and his head struck off at night, in prison.
Messire Francesco arrived with a long, counterfeit account of the affair all prepared — for the King had appealed to every prince in Christendom, and to the Duke himself, demanding satisfaction — and was given his audience at the morning council. To support his case, he laid out several plausible defenses of the deed: his master had never taken Merveille for anything but a private gentleman and his own subject, there purely on his own business; he denied absolutely ever having heard that the man belonged to the King's household, or that the King even knew him — let alone took him for an ambassador. The King, in his turn, pressed him with objections and questions, challenged him from every side, and finally cornered him with this: why, then, was the execution carried out at night, and as if by stealth? At which the poor flustered ambassador, trying to wriggle out gracefully, answered that the Duke, out of respect for His Majesty, would have been very sorry to see such an execution performed in daylight. You can guess the dressing-down he got when he came home, for tripping so clumsily in front of a prince with as fine a nose as King Francis.
Pope Julius II sent an ambassador to the King of England to stir him up against King Francis. The ambassador had his audience, and the King, before giving an answer, dwelt on the difficulties he would face in mounting a force big enough to attack so powerful a king, and gave some reasons for them. The ambassador, very unwisely, replied that he had considered the same difficulties himself, and had said as much to the Pope. From this remark — so squarely opposed to the whole point of his errand, which was to push England straight into war — the King of England drew the first hint of what he afterward found to be true: that this ambassador, in his own heart, leaned toward the French side. The King advised the Pope; the ambassador's estate was confiscated when he got home, and he came very close to losing his head.
Cicero says that to philosophize is nothing else than to prepare ourselves for death. And he has a point. Study and contemplation draw the soul partway out of us, set it working apart from the body — which is a kind of apprenticeship to death, a first resemblance of it. Or else it is because all the wisdom and reasoning in the world comes down, in the end, to one lesson: do not be afraid to die.
Honestly, either reason is mocking us, or it can have no other aim than our contentment. Its whole business is to make us live well and, as Scripture says, at our ease. Every opinion in the world agrees on this much: pleasure is our goal. The schools take different roads to it, but that is where they are all headed. Otherwise we would show them the door at once — who listens to a man who proposes misery and suffering as the destination?
On this point the squabbles of the philosophical sects are just words. Let us skip past such clever trifles, as Seneca says. There is more stubbornness and point-scoring in them than suits so sacred a profession. But whatever role a man takes on, he always mixes some of himself into the performance.
Let the philosophers say what they like: even in virtue, the thing we are all aiming at is pleasure. I enjoy rattling their ears with that word — they gag on it so. And if it means some supreme delight and contentment, that delight belongs to virtue more than to any other helper. This pleasure, being livelier, more sinewy, more robust, more vigorous, is only the more seriously pleasurable for it. We ought to have given virtue the name of pleasure — the kinder, gentler, more natural name — instead of the name for force we hung on it.
As for the lower sort of pleasure, if it deserved that lovely name at all, it should have had to win it in open competition, not hold it by privilege. I find it less free of troubles and crossings than virtue itself. Besides being momentary, fluid, and fragile, it has its vigils, its fasts, its labors, its sweat and its blood. It comes with so many kinds of sharp, wounding passions, and drags such a heavy boredom behind it, that it equals the harshest penance.
And we are wrong to think those discomforts act as spur and seasoning to its sweetness, the way one contrary quickens another in nature — and then to turn around and say, when we come to virtue, that the same difficulties make her grim, austere, and out of reach. In virtue, far better than in indulgence, they ennoble, sharpen, and heighten the divine and perfect pleasure she wins for us. A man who weighs her cost against her fruit makes himself unworthy of her; he understands neither the blessing nor how to use it. Those who keep preaching that the pursuit of virtue is steep and laborious, but the enjoyment of her delightful — what are they telling us, except that she is never any fun? What human effort ever arrives at the enjoyment? The most perfect men have had to settle for aspiring to her, approaching without ever possessing. But they are mistaken, because in every pleasure we know, the pursuit itself is pleasant. The attempt takes its flavor from the thing it reaches for; it is a good part of the result, the same flesh and blood as the result. The happiness that glitters in virtue shines through all her approaches and avenues, from the first gate to the farthest wall.
Now, of all the gifts virtue gives us, contempt for death is one of the greatest. It is what furnishes human life with a soft and easy tranquility, what gives us a pure and friendly taste for living — and without it every other pleasure goes dark. That is why all the rules of philosophy meet and agree on this one article. The philosophers do also teach us, with one voice, to despise pain, poverty, and the other accidents human life is exposed to, but not with the same urgency. Partly because those accidents are not so inevitable — most of mankind goes through life without ever tasting poverty, and some without sickness or sorrow, like Xenophilus the musician, who lived a hundred and six years in perfect, uninterrupted health. And partly because, at the very worst, death can cut all the other troubles short whenever we please. But death itself is inevitable. As Horace says, we are all herded the same way; everyone's lot tumbles from the urn sooner or later, and puts us aboard the boat for everlasting exile.
So if death frightens us, it is a perpetual torment, and one that nothing relieves. There is no direction it cannot come from. We can keep twisting our heads this way and that, as in enemy country, but it hangs over us always — like the stone over Tantalus, as Cicero says.
Our courts often send condemned criminals back to be executed at the scene of the crime. Lead them past fine houses on the way; lay on the best dinner you can. Sicilian delicacies will not coax out their flavor, says Horace, and no song of birds and harps will bring back sleep. Do you think the condemned can enjoy any of it? Do you think that with the journey's end standing in plain sight, the taste of all those treats would not curdle in their mouths? He counts the days, says Claudian; he measures his life by the length of the road, and is tortured by the blow to come.
The end of our race is death. It is the necessary target of our course, and if it terrifies us, how can we take a single step without trembling? The remedy ordinary people use is simply not to think about it. But what brutish stupidity can supply blindness that thick? That is bridling the donkey by the tail — setting a man, as Lucretius says, to plan his steps walking backwards. No wonder he keeps falling into the ditch.
People are frightened by the mere mention of death; most cross themselves at the word, as if it were the name of the devil. And because making a will has to do with dying, no one can be persuaded to pick up the pen until the doctor has passed final sentence on him — and then, between the pain and the terror, God knows what state of mind he is in to do it.
The Romans, because that poor syllable death grated so harshly on their ears and sounded so ominous, found a way to soften it and spin it out. Instead of saying "he is dead," they said "he has lived," or "he has ceased to live." As long as life got a mention, even life that was over, it carried some note of consolation. From them we borrowed our expression "the late Monsieur So-and-so."
Maybe, as the saying goes, the time we have lived is worth our money. I was born between eleven and noon on the last day of February, 1533, counting the year as we do now, from the first of January. It is just two weeks since I turned thirty-nine, and I reckon to live at least as long again. Meanwhile, to fret about a thing so far off would be folly. But then — the young and the old leave life on exactly the same terms. No one exits it any differently than if he had just walked in. And there is no man so old and decrepit that, with Methuselah in mind, he does not figure he has another twenty good years in him.
You fool — who has guaranteed you the term of your life? You are leaning on doctors' tales. Look at facts and experience instead. By the ordinary run of things, you have been living a long while now on special favor. You have already outlasted the usual span of life. Count your acquaintances if you doubt it: how many died before reaching your age, against how many got there? Even among the men who made their lives famous, take a list, and I will wager you find more who died before thirty-five than after. It is reasonable, and pious too, to take our example from the humanity of Jesus Christ himself — and he ended his life at thirty-three. The greatest of merely mortal men, Alexander, died at the same age.
And how many different ways death has of catching us off guard! As Horace says, no man can guess, hour to hour, what danger to dodge. Set aside fevers and pleurisies: who would ever have imagined that a duke of Brittany would be crushed to death in a crowd, as one was at the entry of Pope Clement, my neighbor, into Lyons? Have you not seen one of our own kings killed at a tournament? And did not one of his ancestors die of being jostled by a hog? Aeschylus, warned that a falling house would kill him, took every precaution — for all the good it did, since an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head out of the open sky. Another man choked on a grape seed. An emperor died of a scratch from a comb while having his hair done; Aemilius Lepidus from stumbling over his own threshold; Aufidius from bumping against the door on his way into the council chamber. And between the very thighs of women: Cornelius Gallus the praetor; Tigillinus, captain of the watch at Rome; Ludovico, son of Guido di Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; and — a worse example still — Speusippus, a philosopher of Plato's school, and one of our Popes. Poor judge Bebius granted one party in a lawsuit eight days' adjournment — and in the meantime death adjourned him; his own stay of life had run out. Caius Julius, a physician, was anointing a patient's eyes when death closed his own. And if I may bring in an example from my own blood: my brother, Captain Saint-Martin, twenty-three years old and already well proven in courage, was playing a match of tennis when the ball struck him a little above the right ear. There was no sign of wound or bruise; he did not even sit down to rest. But five or six hours later he was dead of the stroke that blow had caused.
With examples this frequent and this ordinary passing before our eyes every day, how can a man possibly shake off the thought of death, or stop feeling that it has us by the throat at every moment?
What does it matter, you will say, how it comes, so long as a man does not torment himself waiting for it? I am of that mind myself. If there were any way at all to duck the blow — even by crawling under a calfskin — I am not the man who would be ashamed of the trick. All I want is to pass my time at ease, and whatever recreations get me there, I take hold of, however inglorious and unexemplary you please. As Horace says, I would rather seem crazy and lazy, so long as my faults please me or at least escape my notice, than be wise and snarling about it.
But it is folly to think you can get there by that road. They come, they go, they trot, they dance — and of death, not a word. All very fine. Yet when it does come — to them, to their wives, their children, their friends — surprising them unguarded and unprepared, then what torments, what cries, what madness and despair! Have you ever seen anything so crushed, so changed, so confounded? We have to provide for it earlier than that. And this brutish carelessness, even if it could lodge in the head of a man of sense (which I think utterly impossible), sells us its merchandise far too dear. If death were an enemy we could dodge, I would advise borrowing the weapons of cowardice. But it is not. It catches the runaway and the coward as surely as the honest man standing his ground — it hounds the fleeing soldier too, as Horace says, and has no mercy on the soft knees and timid back of unwarlike youth. And no armor is tempered well enough to protect us: let a man hide, wary, under iron and brass, says Propertius, and death will still pull his head out of its shell.
So let us learn to stand our ground and fight him. And to begin stripping him of his greatest advantage over us, let us take exactly the opposite road from the usual one. Let us rob death of his strangeness. Let us keep him company, get used to him, have nothing more often in our minds than death. At every moment let our imagination picture him in all his shapes. When a horse stumbles, when a tile falls, at the smallest prick of a pin, let us say it at once — "Well, and what if that had been death itself?" — and stiffen and steady ourselves on the spot. In the middle of our feasting and fun, let us keep the refrain of our frail condition playing, never letting pleasure carry us so far away that we forget how many ways this jollity of ours is death's target, and how many fists he shakes at it. The Egyptians did just that: at the height of their feasts, with the good cheer at its best, they had the dried skeleton of a man carried into the room as a reminder to the guests. Believe each day that dawns to be your last, says Horace, and the unhoped-for hour will be all the more welcome when it comes.
Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us wait for him everywhere. To think about death in advance is to think about freedom in advance. He who has learned to die has unlearned to be a slave. There is nothing evil in life for the man who has fully grasped that losing life is not an evil. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint. When the miserable king of Macedon, his prisoner, sent to beg Paulus Aemilius not to parade him in his triumph, Paulus answered: "Let him make that request to himself."
In truth, in everything, if nature does not lend a hand, it is very hard for art and effort to get anywhere. By nature I am not melancholy, but I am a brooder, and there is nothing I have entertained myself with longer than thoughts of death — even in the most reckless season of my life, when my green youth, as Catullus has it, was running riot in its pleasant spring. Among the ladies, in the thick of the games, more than one onlooker probably thought I was chewing on some jealousy, or the uncertainty of some hope. In fact I was remembering some man or other who, a few days before, had come home from a party just like this one — his head as full of idleness, love, and good times as mine was then — and been carried off by a burning fever. For all I knew, the same fate was hanging at my ear. Soon the present will have been, says Lucretius, never to be called back.
Yet that thought wrinkled my forehead no more than any other. It is impossible not to feel the sting of such imaginings at first. But handle them, turn them over, come back to them, and in time they grow so familiar they are no trouble at all. Otherwise I, for one, would live in perpetual fright and frenzy — for no man ever trusted his life less, no man ever counted less on its length. Health, which I have so far enjoyed strong, vigorous, and rarely interrupted, does not stretch my hopes of living, and sickness does not shrink them. Every minute I feel myself slipping away. And one thought runs through my head constantly: whatever can be done tomorrow can be done today. Hazards and dangers, in truth, do little or nothing to hurry our end. If we consider the thousands of other threats still hanging over our heads, beyond the one that looks most pressing, we will find that healthy or sick, at sea or by the fireside, in battle or idle at home, we are all exactly as close to it as each other. No man is frailer than another, says Seneca, and no man surer of his tomorrow.
For anything I still have to do before I die, the longest stretch of leisure would look too short — even if the whole business would take an hour. Someone leafing through my notebooks the other day found a memo about something I wanted done after my death. I told him, and it was the plain truth, that though I had been only a league from home, healthy and cheerful, I had hurried to write it down on the spot, because I could not be sure of living until I got back. Since I am forever brooding over my own thoughts and settling them within myself, I am at every hour about as ready as I am ever going to be; and death, whenever he comes, can bring nothing with him that I have not expected for a long time. We should always be booted and spurred, as far as we can manage, and ready to go — and above all take care, when the time comes, to have no business left with anyone but ourselves. Why, asks Horace, do we tease so short a life with so many big projects? We will find work enough there without adding more.
One man complains, more than of death itself, that it cuts him off from a glorious victory. Another, that he must move out before marrying off his daughter or finishing his children's education. One mourns the loss of his wife's company, another his son's, as the chief comfort of his existence. For my part, I am — thank God — at this moment in such a state that I am ready to move out whenever it pleases Him, without regret for anything at all. I am loosening every worldly tie; my goodbyes are already half said to everyone but myself. No man ever prepared to quit the world more cleanly and completely, or shook himself looser from every claim it had on him, than I expect to do. The deadest deaths are the best:
"Wretch that I am," the dying man cries, "one disastrous day has stripped me of every prize life had to offer." And the builder laments: "My works stand unfinished — the great walls' proud towers left unmade."
We should plan nothing that takes so long to finish — or at least, nothing we burn so hotly to see completed. We are born for action. As the poet says, "when I die, let me be caught in the middle of my work."
I want a man to be doing things — to stretch out the business of living as far as he possibly can. And let death find me planting my cabbages, not caring a whit about death and even less about my unfinished garden. I watched a man die who, at his last gasp, complained of nothing so bitterly as that destiny was cutting the thread of the history he was writing — he had only gotten as far as our fifteenth or sixteenth king. What such men never add is that once you are dead, you will no longer want any of those things.
We need to rid ourselves of these common, harmful moods. This is why men first put burial grounds next to churches and in the busiest parts of town — to accustom ordinary people, women and children included, says Lycurgus, not to flinch at the sight of a corpse, and so that the constant spectacle of bones, graves, and funerals would keep reminding us of our fragile condition. The ancients went further: there was once a custom of livening up banquets with bloodshed — mixing the meal with the grim spectacle of armed men fighting to the death, some of them falling across the very cups and splashing the tables with blood.
The Egyptians, after their feasts, used to have a great image of death carried in before the company, while a man cried out: "Drink and be merry, for when you are dead you will look like this." In the same spirit, I keep death not only in my imagination but continually in my mouth. There is nothing I am so curious about, nothing I love learning more, than how men die — their words, their faces, their bearing — and no passages in history I read more closely. It shows in how I crowd my pages with examples; I have a particular fondness for the subject. If I were in the business of making books, I would compile an annotated register of the various deaths of men. He who would teach men to die would teach them to live. Dicaearchus did write one with a title like that, but he wrote it to another, less useful purpose.
Someone may object that the pain and terror of dying so far outrun anything we can imagine that the best fencer in the world will be out of his game when it comes to the real thrust. Let them say what they like: thinking it through in advance is still, beyond any doubt, an enormous advantage. And is it nothing to get even that far — to the threshold itself — without trembling, without fever? Besides, Nature herself lends us a hand and gives us heart. If the death is sudden and violent, we have no time to fear it. If it is slow, then I notice that as I sink deeper into a sickness, I naturally begin to feel a certain weariness and disdain for life. I find this resolution to die much harder to swallow when I am in good health than when I am burning with fever. The less grip I have on life's comforts, as I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, the less terrifying death looks. Which gives me hope that the farther I travel from the one and the nearer I come to the other, the more easily I will make the trade. Caesar said that things often look bigger at a distance than up close, and I have found the same: in full health, I dreaded sickness far more than I ever felt it once it arrived. The vigor and cheerfulness I live in now make the opposite condition look so out of proportion to this one that in imagination I inflate every misery to half again its true size, and dread it as far heavier than it turns out to be when it actually lands on me. I hope to find death the same.
Just watch how, through the ordinary changes and declines we suffer daily, nature hides from us the feel of our own decay. What does an old man have left of his youth and his better days? As the line goes, "alas — how small a share of life is left to the old!" When a worn-out old soldier of Caesar's guard came up to him to ask permission to kill himself, Caesar looked at his withered body and broken walk and answered, cheerfully: "So you think you're still alive, do you?"
If a man fell into old age all at once, I do not believe human nature could endure the change. But nature leads us by the hand, down a gentle, almost imperceptible slope, step by step, until she has eased us into that miserable state and made us at home in it. We feel no jolt when our youth dies in us — though that is, in truth, a harder death than the final death of a languishing body, the death of old age. The leap from a weary existence to no existence is not nearly so great as the leap from a sweet, flourishing life to a painful and troublesome one.
A body bent and bowed has less strength to carry a load; so does a soul. We have to raise her up firm and straight against the power of this adversary. As long as she fears death, she can never be at rest. But once she has steadied herself, she can boast of something almost beyond the human condition: that anxiety, anguish, fear — even the smallest disquiet — cannot live in her. No tyrant's glare can shake her settled calm; neither can the storm-wind that rules the wild Adriatic, nor the mighty hand of thundering Jove.
She has become sovereign over her own passions and appetites, mistress of necessity, shame, poverty, and every other injury of fortune. So let those of us who can, seize this advantage. This is the true and sovereign liberty here on earth — the one that arms us to defy violence and injustice and to laugh at prisons and chains. "I will keep you in shackles and chains," says the master, "under a savage jailer." — "A god will set me free the moment I choose." That god, I think, is death. Death is the finish line of all things.
Our religion itself has no surer human foundation than contempt for life. Reason alone invites us to it — for why fear losing a thing which, once lost, cannot be missed? And since so many kinds of death threaten us, isn't it worse to fear them all forever than to suffer one of them once? What does it matter when it comes, since it cannot be avoided? When someone told Socrates, "The thirty tyrants have sentenced you to death," he answered: "And nature, them."
What nonsense, to torment ourselves over the one step that delivers us from all torment! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, our death will bring the death of all things. So it is just as foolish to weep that we will not be alive a hundred years from now as to weep that we were not alive a hundred years ago. Death is the beginning of another life. We wept like this once before; entering this life cost us just as dearly; we stripped off our old veil then, too, when we came in.
Nothing that happens only once can be a grievance. Is it reasonable to spend so long fearing a thing so quickly over? Long life and short life are made all one by death — there is no long or short for things that no longer exist. Aristotle says there are little creatures on the banks of the river Hypanis that live only a single day. The one that dies at eight in the morning dies in its youth; the one that dies at five in the evening dies of decrepit old age. Which of us wouldn't laugh to see that flicker of a lifespan weighed out in happiness and misery? Yet our own — measured against eternity, or even against the duration of mountains, rivers, stars, trees, and some animals — is every bit as laughable.
But nature compels us to it. "Leave this world," she says, "as you entered it. The same passage you made from death to life, without suffering and without fear, make again from life to death. Your death is one piece of the order of the universe; it is a piece of the life of the world. Mortals live by lending life to one another, and like runners in a relay, they hand on the torch of life.
"Shall I unmake this beautiful arrangement of things for you? Death is the condition of your creation; death is a part of you; in running from it, you run from yourselves. This very being you enjoy is divided equally between life and death. The day of your birth was your first step toward the grave. The first hour that gave you life took an hour of it away. Being born, you began dying; the end hangs from the beginning.
"All the time you live, you steal from life; you live at life's own expense. The perpetual work of your life is to build death. You are in death the whole time you are in life — for when you are no longer in life, you are after death. Or, if you like it better this way: you are dead after life, but dying all the while you live — and death handles the dying far more roughly than the dead, more sharply, closer to the quick.
"If you have made your profit of life, you have had your fill of it. Go your way satisfied. Why not leave life the way a well-fed guest leaves a feast? But if you have not known how to use it — if it did you no good — what do you care about losing it? Why would you want to keep it longer? Why ask for more days, only to spend them as badly and lose them all over again?
"Life in itself is neither good nor evil. It is the stage where good and evil play, depending on what you make of it. And if you have lived one day, you have seen everything. One day is equal and alike to all days. There is no other light, no other darkness. This very sun, this moon, these stars, this whole arrangement of things — it is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and the same that will entertain your great-grandchildren. Your fathers saw nothing different; your descendants will see nothing new.
"And at the very worst, the whole cast and plot of my comedy plays itself out in a single year. If you have watched my four seasons turn, you have seen the infancy, the youth, the manhood, and the old age of the world. Then the year has played its part, and it knows no other trick but to begin again. It will always be exactly this. We circle in the same round, forever confined to it; the year turns endlessly in its own footprints. I have no plans to invent new entertainments for you. There is nothing more I can devise to please you — it is the same show, over and over.
"Make room for others, as others made room for you. Equality is the soul of fairness. Who can complain of being included in a destiny that includes everyone? Live as long as you like; you will not shave one moment off the time you must spend dead. It is all for nothing: you will be every bit as long in that condition you fear so much as if you had died in your nurse's arms. Outlast as many centuries as you please — death will still be eternal.
"And yet I will put you in a condition where you have nothing left to complain about. Don't you know that when you are dead there will be no other you, still alive, to stand at your grave and mourn you lying in it? You will not even miss the life you are so worried about now. No one, then, longs for himself or for living; no regret for ourselves touches us at all. Death is less to be feared than nothing — if anything could be less than nothing. It is much less to you, if less is possible, than what you can see to be nothing at all.
"Death does not concern you, dead or alive. Alive, because you are; dead, because you are no more.
"And no one dies before his hour. The time you leave behind you was no more yours than the time that passed before you were born — it concerns you just as little. Look back: that whole eternity of time before you existed was nothing to you. Wherever your life ends, it is complete there. The value of living lies not in the length of days but in the use you make of them. A man may have lived long and yet lived little. Use time while you have it. Whether you have lived enough depends on your will, not on your count of years. Did you imagine you would never arrive at the place you were walking toward without rest? There is no road without an end. And if company eases the way, isn't the whole world traveling the very same road? All things, when your life is over, will follow you.
"Doesn't everything move in the same dance you dance? Is there anything that does not grow old along with you? A thousand men, a thousand animals, a thousand other creatures die in the very instant that you die. No night has ever followed day, no dawn has ever followed night, that did not hear, mingled with the wails of infants, the cries of grief that keep company with death and dark funerals.
"Why shrink back, if there is no way to retreat? You have seen plenty of men who were glad to die, since dying delivered them from great miseries. But have you ever seen one man who was sorry he had died? It is pure foolishness to condemn a thing you have never experienced — not in your own person, nor in anyone else's.
"Why do you complain of me, and of destiny? Do we do you any wrong? Should you govern us, or should we govern you? Your age may not be finished, but your life is. A small man is as much a man as a giant; neither men nor their lives are measured by the yard. Chiron refused immortality when his father Saturn — the god of time and duration himself — told him what its conditions were. Honestly consider how much more unbearable and painful an everlasting life would be to man than the life I have given him. If you did not have death, you would curse me eternally for keeping it from you. I have deliberately mixed a little bitterness into it, to keep you, once you saw how convenient it is, from embracing it too greedily and too rashly. And to settle you in the moderation I ask — neither sick of living nor in a hurry to die — I have tempered both of them between sweetness and pain.
"I taught Thales, the most eminent of your sages, that living and dying are matters of indifference. So when someone asked him, 'Why don't you die, then?' he answered, very wisely: 'Because it makes no difference.'
"Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more the instruments of your life than they are the instruments of your death. Why fear your last day? It carries you no closer to your death than any day before it did. The last step does not cause the weariness — it only declares it. Every day travels toward death; the last one arrives."
These are the good lessons of our mother Nature.
I have often wondered why the face of death, whether we meet it in ourselves or in others, looks so much less dreadful to us in war than it does at home in our own houses — otherwise an army would be a parade of doctors and whimpering invalids — and why, since death is everywhere the same, peasants and plain working people meet it with so much more composure than everyone else. I honestly believe it is the terrible faces and trappings we dress it in that frighten us more than the thing itself: a whole new way of living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of stunned and grieving friends; a crowd of pale, blubbering servants; a darkened room ringed with burning candles; our bedside besieged by doctors and preachers — in short, nothing but horror and ghostliness all around us. We are shrouded and buried before we are dead. Children are frightened even of their best friends when they see them in a mask, and so are we. The mask must be pulled off things as well as off people. Once it is removed, we will find underneath only the very same death that a servant or a poor chambermaid died the other day, without any fear and without any fuss. Happy the death that leaves us no time to arrange such ceremonies.
"Fortis imaginatio generat casum," say the schoolmen — a strong imagination creates the event itself.
I am one of the people most susceptible to the power of imagination. Everyone gets jostled by it; some get knocked flat. It cuts right through me, and since I haven't the strength to resist it, my whole strategy is to avoid it. I could live on nothing but cheerful, healthy company. The mere sight of another man's suffering causes me real physical pain, and I often find I've borrowed someone else's sensations for my own. A man coughing nonstop in my presence sets my own lungs and throat itching. I'm more reluctant to visit the sick I love and feel bound to than the sick I don't care about and barely look at — because I catch the disease I'm worrying over and take it home with me. So it doesn't surprise me at all that imagination hands out fevers, and sometimes death, to people who give it too much room and entertain it too willingly.
Simon Thomas was a great physician in his day. I remember running into him once at Toulouse, at the house of a rich old man with bad lungs. Discussing the cure with his patient, Thomas told him that one excellent remedy would be to make my visits so pleasant that I'd come often — and then to fix his eyes on the freshness of my face, and his thoughts on the liveliness and vigor glowing out of my youth, and to fill all his senses with the flourishing age I was in; by which means his constitution might possibly improve. What he forgot to add was that mine, at the same time, might get worse.
Gallus Vibius strained his mind so hard to understand the essence and workings of madness that he wrenched his own judgment out of its seat and could never get it back — and could boast that he'd become a fool by too much wisdom. There are men whose fear beats the executioner to the job: like the prisoner whose blindfold was removed so his pardon could be read to him, and who was found stone dead on the scaffold — killed by nothing but the stroke of his own imagination. We startle, tremble, go pale, and blush under imagination's pushes; lying in bed we feel our bodies shaken by its power, sometimes nearly to the point of dying of it. And boiling youth heats up so far in its sleep that it satisfies its desires in a dream — so that, as Lucretius says, as if the whole act were really completed, young men pour out the flood and stain their bedclothes.
It's nothing new to see horns sprout overnight on a forehead that had none at bedtime — but what happened to Cippus, king of Italy, is still worth remembering. He had spent a day as a delighted spectator at a bullfight, dreamed all night of horns on his head, and by the sheer force of imagination grew real ones there. Passion gave the son of Croesus the voice nature had denied him. Antiochus fell into a fever because the beauty of Stratonice had stamped itself too deep into his soul. Pliny claims he saw Lucius Cossitius, who turned from a woman into a man on her own wedding day. Pontanus and others report the same metamorphosis happening in Italy in more recent times — and through the intense longing of the person concerned and of his mother, as Ovid has it, "Iphis the boy paid the vows he had made as a girl."
I myself, passing through Vitry-le-François, saw a man whom the Bishop of Soissons had confirmed under the name Germain, but whom everyone in town had known as a girl named Mary until the age of twenty-two. He was, when I saw him, heavily bearded, old, and unmarried. He told us that as he was straining in a jump, his male organs emerged — and to this day the girls of that town have a song warning each other not to take big strides, or they'll turn into men like Mary Germain. It's no great wonder if this kind of accident happens often. If imagination has any power in such matters, it is so constantly and so fiercely bent on this one subject that — rather than have it relapse again and again into the same thought and the same violence of desire — it might be simpler to give these young women the thing they long for, once and for all.
Some attribute the scars of King Dagobert and of Saint Francis to the force of imagination. It is said to lift bodies right off the ground, sometimes. Celsus tells of a priest whose soul would be carried off into such ecstasy that his body lay a long while without sense or breath. Saint Augustine mentions another man who, at the sound of any sorrowful or mournful cries, would immediately fall into a faint, so far out of himself that it was useless to call him, shout in his ears, pinch him, or burn him until he came back on his own. Then he'd say he had heard the voices as if from far away, and had felt the pinching and the burning. And to prove this was no stubborn act of defiance against his own senses, the man had, all that while, neither pulse nor breath.
It's very likely that visions, enchantments, and all extraordinary effects of that kind owe their credit mainly to the power of imagination working on ordinary, more pliable souls — minds whose belief is so easily captured that they think they see what they do not see.
And I'm still not satisfied that those famous "knots" — the wedding charms our whole age is so obsessed with that people talk of almost nothing else, the spells supposed to tie up a bridegroom and keep him from consummating his marriage — are anything more than the voluntary workings of apprehension and fear. I know this by experience, in the case of a particular friend of mine, a man I can vouch for as I would for myself, who could not possibly fall under any suspicion of weakness in this department, and just as little of being bewitched. He had heard a companion of his tell the story of an extraordinary failure that had overtaken him at the worst possible moment. Later, finding himself in the same situation, the horror of that story suddenly seized his imagination so violently that he met the same fate. And from then on, the miserable memory of his disaster kept running through his mind and tyrannizing over him, and he was prone to relapse into the same misfortune.
He found a remedy for this fantasy in another fantasy: by frankly confessing the weakness in advance, declaring it to the woman before anything began, the agitation of his soul was somewhat relieved — since the failure was now expected, the pressure on him weighed less. Later, at times when he was in no such fear, when his thoughts were free and disentangled and his body in its true and natural state — being then at leisure to have the part examined, so to speak, and the fact communicated to the other party — he was completely cured of the trouble. Once a man has acquitted himself properly with a woman a single time, he is never again in danger of failing with her, except from some genuine and excusable weakness.
This disaster, in fact, is only to be feared in encounters where the soul is strained beyond measure with desire or with reverence — and especially when the opportunity comes unexpected and urgent. There's no way for a man to defend himself from a surprise like that; it throws him entirely out of order. I have known men who protected themselves from the mishap by arriving half-satisfied from elsewhere, on purpose to take the edge off their ardor; and others who, having grown old, find themselves less impotent for being less able; and one man who was cured by a friend's assurance that he carried a counter-charm guaranteed to protect him from enchantments. That story is not a bad one, so you shall have it.
A count of a very great family, with whom I was close, married a beautiful lady who had previously been courted by a man who was present at the wedding. All the count's friends were worried — especially an old lady, his kinswoman, who was presiding over the festivities and hosting them in her own house. She suspected the rival would try foul play with these sorceries, and she told me her fear. I told her to leave it to me.
I happened to have with me a flat plate of gold engraved with celestial figures, a charm against sunstroke and headaches — to work, it had to sit exactly on the seam of the skull, held in place by a ribbon tied under the chin. A piece of nonsense first cousin to the very nonsense we're discussing. Jacques Pelletier, who was living in my house, had given it to me as a great rarity, and it struck me I could put it to some use. I privately warned the count that he might well meet the same bad luck other bridegrooms had met, especially with a certain person in the house who would be delighted to do him that kind of favor — but he should go to bed boldly. I would do him the office of a friend, and would not, at need, spare a miracle that lay in my power, provided he swore on his honor to keep it absolutely secret. He was simply to give me an agreed sign, when they came in during the night to bring him his wedding posset — the custom here is to carry the bridegroom a hot drink in the middle of his wedding night — if things had gone badly.
His ears had been so battered, and his mind so thoroughly worked over by the eternal chatter about this business, that when the moment came he really did find himself tied up by the trouble of his imagination, and gave me the sign. I whispered to him to get up, as if to chase us all out of the room, and — in a joking way — to snatch my nightgown off my shoulders (we were nearly the same height), throw it over his own, and keep it on until he'd done what I told him. Which was this: when we had all left, he was to withdraw as if to relieve himself, repeat certain words three times and perform certain motions three times, and at each of the three, tie the ribbon I'd put into his hand around his waist, setting the medal that hung from it — figures arranged just so — exactly over his kidneys. Then, having on the third time cinched the ribbon so well that it could neither come loose nor slip, he was to go back to his business with full confidence — and not forget to spread my gown over the bed so that it covered them both.
These monkey tricks are the heart of the whole effect. Our fancy, once seduced, believes that means so strange must surely flow from some secret science: their very emptiness gives them weight and authority. In short, it is certain my figures proved themselves more venereal than solar — more active than protective. It was a sudden whim, mixed with a little curiosity, that drew me into an act so contrary to my nature; for I am an enemy of all subtle and counterfeit dealings and hate every kind of trickery, even in sport, even to someone's advantage. The act may not be vicious, but the manner of it is.
Amasis, king of Egypt, married Laodice, a very beautiful Greek girl, and though he was perfectly capable everywhere else, found himself quite another man with his wife — he could not enjoy her at all. He was so enraged that he threatened to kill her, suspecting witchcraft. As usual in matters that live in the fancy, she steered him toward religion; he made his vows to Venus, and found himself divinely restored the very first night after his offerings and sacrifices.
Now women are wrong to greet us with that disdainful, coy, scowling face that puts out our fire even as it lights our desire. The daughter-in-law of Pythagoras said that a woman who goes to bed with a man should take off her modesty with her petticoat, and put it back on with the same. The soul of the attacker, rattled by alarm after alarm, easily loses the power to perform. And whoever imagination has once played this trick on, and humiliated with the shame of it — and she plays it only at first acquaintance, because then a man is most ardent and eager, and most afraid of failing at this first account he gives of himself — having begun badly, he falls into such fever and spite over the accident that the trouble tends to stay with him on every occasion after.
Married people, with all their time before them, should never force the thing or even attempt it unless they find themselves fully ready. It is less shameful to fail to christen the wedding sheets — when a man feels himself all agitation and trembling — and to wait for another, more private, more composed opportunity, than to make himself permanently miserable over having stumbled and been routed in the first assault. Until possession is fairly taken, a man who knows himself subject to this weakness should feel his way gradually, with small trials and light advances, rather than stubbornly stake everything on conquering, once and for all, his own mutinous and unwilling faculties. Those who know their member to be naturally obedient need only take care to out-maneuver their fantasies.
We have good reason to remark on the ungovernable liberty of this member: so inconveniently insistent when we have no use for it, and so inconveniently failing when we need it most; contesting authority with the will so imperiously, refusing every solicitation of hand and mind with such proud obstinacy. And yet — though his rebellion is universally complained of, and the evidence used to condemn him — if he had hired me to plead his case, I might well bring his fellow members under suspicion of having framed him, out of pure envy of the importance and sweetness of his particular office: of having conspired to arm the whole world against him by maliciously charging him alone with a crime they all commit.
Because consider: is there one part of our bodies that doesn't regularly refuse to work when the will commands, and work away when the will forbids? Every one of them has passions of its own that wake it or put it to sleep without asking our leave. How often do the involuntary movements of our face betray the thoughts we meant to keep secret, and expose us to the people in the room? The same cause that animates this member also animates — without our knowledge — the lungs, the pulse, and the heart; the sight of a pleasing object spreads a flame through us, a small fever, before we know it's happening. And is it only these veins and these muscles that rise and fall without the consent not just of our will, but of our very knowledge? We don't order our hair to stand on end or our skin to shiver with fear or desire. The hands often wander where we haven't sent them. The tongue seizes up, and the voice freezes, at its own hour. Even when we have nothing to eat and would gladly forbid it, the appetite for food stirs up the parts subject to it, exactly like that other appetite — and abandons us, just as unseasonably, whenever it sees fit.
The vessels that serve to empty the belly have their own dilations and contractions, beyond and without our consent, just like those that empty the bladder. And as for the case Saint Augustine cites to defend the prerogative of the will — he saw a man who could command his rear end to produce as many discharges as he pleased — his commentator Vives caps it with a contemporary example of a man who could break wind in tune. None of which proves that organ purely obedient; for is anything usually more tumultuous or more indiscreet? And let me add one I know myself, so rude and unruly that for forty years it has marched its master toward one continuous, unbroken eruption, and looks likely to keep at it till he dies of it. I could wish I knew only from books how often a man's belly, denied a single puff of escape, brings him to the very edge of an agonizing death; and that the emperor who gave us liberty to break wind anywhere had also given us the power to do it.
But our will, on whose behalf this whole indictment is brought — with how much better cause might we charge her with mutiny and sedition, with irregularity and disobedience? Does she always will what we would have her will? Doesn't she often will exactly what we forbid — and to our obvious harm? Does she let herself be governed by the conclusions of our reason any more than the rest do?
To finish: I would ask, on behalf of the gentleman my client, that the court consider this. In the matter at hand, his cause is inseparably and indistinguishably joined with an accessory — and yet he alone is prosecuted, on arguments and charges that cannot possibly be brought against her; since her business, though it is sometimes to invite inopportunely, is never to refuse, and her invitations are, moreover, tacit and quiet ones. The malice and injustice of his accusers is therefore plain to see. But however the lawyers and judges may quarrel, nature will go on her own way in the meantime — and she would have done no more than justice if she had granted this member some special privilege: author of the only immortal work of mortals. A divine work, according to Socrates; and love, the desire for immortality, itself an immortal spirit.
One man, perhaps, by just such an effect of imagination, leaves his scrofula — the king's evil — behind him here, while his companion, coming after, carries his back into Spain. And this is why, in such matters, the mind has to be prepared in advance for the thing that's to be done. Why do physicians work so hard, beforehand, on their patients' credulity, with so many false promises of a cure, if not so that the effect of imagination can make up for the fraud in their potions? They know very well — one of the masters of their trade has left it in writing — that there are men for whom the mere sight of medicine does the work.
All these fancies have come into my head from a story told me by an apothecary in my late father's household — a blunt Swiss, of a nation not much given to vanity or lying — about a merchant he had long known at Toulouse: a sickly man, much afflicted with kidney stones, who often needed enemas and had his physicians prescribe various kinds, depending on the turns of his disease. When the enema was brought, none of the usual formalities was skipped — he tested it himself, to feel whether it was too hot. There he lay, flat on his front, everything performed with full ceremony — except the injection itself. The apothecary would withdraw, the patient would be settled as if he had truly received it, and the effect was identical to the real thing. And if the physician judged the operation insufficient, he would administer two or three more doses, in exactly the same fashion. My witness swore that — since the man paid as if he'd really had the medicine — the sick man's wife once tried to save money by having plain warm water put in; the effect exposed the trick, that kind proving useless, and they had to return to the original method.
A woman convinced she had swallowed a pin in a piece of bread cried and wailed with an unbearable pain in her throat, where she thought she felt it sticking. But a clever fellow who was brought in, seeing no swelling and nothing wrong from the outside, judged it was only a fancy taken from some crust that had scratched her on the way down. He made her vomit, and secretly tossed a bent pin into the basin. The moment the woman saw it, believing she had thrown it up, she felt her pain vanish. And I myself knew a gentleman who, three or four days after entertaining a large company at his house, bragged as a joke — for there was nothing to it — that he had served them baked cat. One young lady who'd been at the feast took such horror at this that she fell into violent vomiting and fever, and nothing could be done to save her.
Even the animals are subject to the force of imagination as much as we are. Look at dogs, who die of grief for their lost masters, and bark and tremble and twitch in their dreams; horses kick and whinny in their sleep.
Now all of this can be set down to the close kinship of soul and body, trading their fortunes back and forth. But it's quite another thing when imagination works not on one's own body but on someone else's. Just as an infected body passes its sickness to those nearby — as we see with plague, smallpox, and sore eyes, which run through whole households and whole cities, and as Ovid says, "look at sore eyes and your own eyes grow sore; many ills pass from body to body" — so imagination, violently stirred, lets fly an infection that can strike a target outside itself. The ancients held that certain women of Scythia, when roused to fury against a man, could kill him with a look alone. Tortoises and ostriches hatch their eggs just by gazing at them — which suggests their eyes send out some projecting power. And the eyes of witches are said to be aggressive and harmful: "some eye, I know not whose, is bewitching my tender lambs," as Virgil's shepherd complains.
Magicians are not much of an authority with me. But we do see by experience that women stamp the marks of their fancy on the children they carry in the womb — witness the one who gave birth to a Moor; and the girl from near Pisa, presented to the Emperor Charles, King of Bohemia, all rough and covered with hair, whom her mother said she had conceived that way because of a picture of John the Baptist hanging inside her bed-curtains.
It's the same with animals: witness Jacob's sheep, and the hares and partridges that the snow turns white in the mountains. At my own house, a little while ago, a cat was seen watching a bird at the top of a tree; they fixed their eyes on each other for some time, and at last the bird dropped, dead, straight into the cat's claws — either dazzled by the force of its own imagination or drawn by some attracting power in the cat. Those who enjoy field sports have surely heard the story of the falconer who fastened his gaze on a kite in the air and wagered that he could bring it down by the sheer power of his sight — and did, so it was said.
For the tales I borrow, I send the bill to the consciences of those I had them from. The reasonings are my own, and they stand on the proofs of reason, not of experience. Everyone is free to add his own examples; and whoever has none should still believe — considering the number and variety of accidents in this world — that there are plenty of them. If I don't apply them well, let someone else apply them for me. In the subject I'm treating here — our habits and our impulses — testimony and instances, however fabulous, serve as well as true ones, provided they're possible. Whether it really happened or not, at Rome or at Paris, to John or to Peter, it is still some turn the human mind can take, and that is what I'm usefully studying. I see it and I profit from it, in shadow as well as in substance. And among the various readings the histories offer, I pick out the rarest and most memorable for my own use. There are authors whose whole purpose is to relate what has happened. Mine, if I could manage it, would be to relate what can happen. The schools quite reasonably permit you to invent comparisons when you have none at hand. I don't use that license, though; on this point my scruples outdo all historical authority. In the examples I bring in here — of what I've heard, read, done, or said — I have forbidden myself to alter even the smallest, most trivial circumstance. My conscience does not falsify one jot. What my ignorance may do, I cannot answer for.
This is what makes me wonder, sometimes, whether a theologian or a philosopher — men of such exact and tender conscience and prudence — is fit to write history at all. How can they stake their good name on the faith of the crowd? How can they answer for the opinions of men they've never met, or pass off their guesses as solid coin? They would refuse to give sworn testimony before a judge about actions performed under their own eyes, with several witnesses present; and there's no man alive they know so intimately that they'd stand full guarantee for his intentions. For my part, I think it less risky to write about the past than the present — exactly because the writer then only has to account for borrowed truth that everyone knows he took on trust.
Some people urge me to write the events of my own time. They fancy I see them with an eye less blinded by passion than most, and at closer range, because fortune has given me access to the heads of the various factions. What they don't consider is that I would not take the trouble for the glory of Sallust himself — sworn enemy that I am of obligation, of diligence, of perseverance; that nothing is so contrary to my style as extended narrative, when I keep breaking off in my own writing for sheer want of breath; that I have no gift for composition or development worth anything, and am more ignorant than a child of the phrases and even the words used for the most ordinary things. That is why I have undertaken to say only what I can say, and have cut my subject to fit my strength. Were I to take some guide and follow his pace, I might not be able to keep up; and in the freedom of my own liberty I might publish judgments which, on better reflection and by reason's lights, would be illegitimate and punishable.
Plutarch would tell us, of what he has handed down, that the work of making his examples true and accurate belongs to others; but that they are useful to posterity, and presented with a luster that lights our way to virtue — that is his own work. In an old story, unlike a dose of medicine, there's no great danger in whether it happened this way or that.
Whoever invented the story of the village woman and the calf understood the power of custom. She got into the habit of carrying a young calf in her arms, and kept it up every day as the animal grew — until, by sheer custom, she could carry it as a full-grown ox. For custom truly is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. Little by little, slyly and unnoticed, she slips in the foot of her authority. Then, once time has helped her settle and fix it with that gentle, humble beginning, she pulls off the mask and shows a furious, tyrannical face — and by then we no longer have the courage, or even the strength, to lift our eyes against her. At every turn we catch her forcing and violating the rules of nature. As Pliny says, custom is the most effective master of all things.
I would point to Plato's cave in his Republic, and to the doctors, who so often surrender the reasoning of their own art to custom's authority. And to that king who trained his stomach, by habit, to live on poison; and the girl Albertus tells of, who lived on spiders. In that new world of the Indies, great nations were found, in very different climates, who ate spiders too — kept stocks of them, raised them for the table, along with grasshoppers, mice, lizards, and bats. In a time when such delicacies were scarce, a toad sold for six crowns. They cook all this and serve it up with a choice of sauces. Other peoples were found there for whom our diet, and the meat we eat, were poisonous and deadly.
The power of custom is enormous, as Cicero says: hunters will spend whole nights in the snow, or let the mountain sun roast them; boxers, battered by the leaded glove, never let out a groan.
These strange examples will not seem so strange if we consider what we experience every day: how much custom numbs our senses. We don't even need the stories about the people who live by the cataracts of the Nile, or what philosophers believe about the music of the spheres — that the heavenly bodies, being solid and smooth, touch and rub against one another as they turn, and can't help producing a marvelous harmony, whose changes and cadences drive the rounds and dances of the stars; and yet the ears of every creature down here, deafened and dulled like the Egyptians' by the constant noise, cannot perceive it, however great it is. Blacksmiths, millers, pewterers, forgemen, and armorers could never live inside the perpetual racket of their own trades if it struck their ears with the violence it strikes ours.
My perfumed jacket pleases my own nose at first; after I've worn it three days running, only the bystanders enjoy it. Stranger still, custom can fix its impression on our senses even across long gaps and interruptions — ask anyone who lives near church towers and the frequent noise of the bells. I sleep at home in a tower where a great bell rings out the Ave Maria every morning and evening. The noise shakes the tower itself, and at first it seemed unbearable to me; now I'm so used to it that I hear it without the least annoyance, and often without waking at all.
Plato once scolded a boy for playing at nuts. "You're scolding me for a very small thing," said the boy. "Custom," Plato replied, "is no small thing."
I find that our worst vices take their first bent in our most tender infancy, and that the heart of our education is in the nurse's hands. Mothers are delighted to watch a child wring a chicken's neck, or amuse itself by hurting a dog or a cat. And there are wise fathers in this world who take it as a fine mark of a martial spirit when they hear a son insult a poor peasant or a servant who doesn't dare answer back, or see him lord it over them — and a great sign of cleverness when he cheats a playmate with some piece of malicious trickery. Yet these are the true seeds and roots of cruelty, tyranny, and treason. They sprout there, and afterward shoot up vigorously and grow to monstrous size, cultivated by custom.
It is a very dangerous mistake to excuse these ugly inclinations because the child is young and the stakes are small. First, it is nature speaking — and her voice is all the more honest, her inward thoughts all the more undisguised, while she is weak and young. Second, the ugliness of cheating does not depend on the difference between gold coins and pins. I'd rather draw the conclusion the other way: since he cheats at pins, why wouldn't he cheat at coins? — instead of saying, as people do, "it's only pins; he would never do it for money." Children should be carefully taught to hate vices for their own substance. The natural deformity of those vices should be shown to them so plainly that they not only avoid them in their actions but loathe them in their hearts — so that the very thought of them, under whatever mask, is hateful.
I know this much about myself. Because I was brought up from childhood to deal plainly and straight, and took an aversion to every kind of trickery even in my childish games (and note this: the games of children are not games; they should be judged as their most serious actions), there is no game so small in which I don't feel — from inside, naturally, without study or effort — an extreme aversion to cheating. I shuffle and cut and make as much clatter with the cards, and keep as strict an account of farthings, as if they were gold doubloons. Winning or losing against my wife and daughter is the same to me as when I play in earnest with others, for serious money. At all times and in all places, my own eyes are enough to keep watch on my fingers. No one watches me more closely, and there is no one whose opinion I respect more.
The other day I saw, at my own house, a little fellow from Nantes, born without arms, who has trained his feet so well to do the work his hands should have done that they've half forgotten their natural job. In fact, he calls them his hands. He cuts things with them, loads and fires a pistol, threads a needle, sews, writes, takes off his hat, combs his hair, plays cards and dice — all with as much dexterity as anyone with the usual, more suitable limbs to help him. The money I gave him — he earns his living by showing off these feats — he took in his foot, the way we take it in our hand. I've seen another, still a boy, who flourished a two-handed sword and, if I may put it this way, handled a halberd with nothing but the movements of his neck and shoulders, having no hands; tossed them into the air and caught them again, threw a dagger, and cracked a whip as well as any coachman in France.
But custom shows her effects far more plainly in the strange impressions she stamps on our minds, where she meets less resistance. What can't she impose on our judgments and beliefs? Is there any opinion so fantastic — leaving aside the gross impostures of religions, which have so strangely besotted so many great nations and so many intelligent men; for that lies beyond the reach of human reason, and any error is more excusable in those who haven't been granted, by divine bounty, an extraordinary light from above — is there any opinion so extravagant, I say, that custom hasn't planted it and established it as law in whatever part of the world she pleased to exercise her power? So that old exclamation hits the mark exactly: as Cicero says, isn't it a shame for a natural philosopher — an observer and hunter of nature — to go looking for the testimony of truth in minds soaked through with custom?
I believe no fancy so absurd or ridiculous can enter the human imagination that it doesn't meet with the example of some public practice somewhere — and consequently get a footing and backing from our reason. There are peoples where the fashion is to turn your back on the man you greet, and never look at the person you mean to honor. There is a place where, whenever the king spits, the greatest ladies of his court hold out their hands to receive it; and another nation where the most eminent persons around him stoop to take up his excrement in a linen cloth.
Let me steal a little room here for a story. A French gentleman always blew his nose with his fingers — a thing very much against our fashion — and in defending himself for it (he was a man famous for his repartee), he asked me what privilege that filthy excretion enjoyed, that we should keep a fine handkerchief ready to receive it, and then — even better — fold it up carefully and carry it around in our pockets all day. Surely, he said, that was far more nauseating than seeing it thrown away, as we throw away everything else the body discards. I found he wasn't entirely without a point; and after I'd been in his company a while, his slovenly habit had grown familiar to me — though we make a face at it when we hear it reported of another country.
Miracles are miracles according to our ignorance of nature, not according to nature's essence. Being continually accustomed to a thing blinds the eye of our judgment. Barbarians are no more a wonder to us than we are to them, and with no more reason — as everyone would admit if, after touring those remote examples, we could settle down to reflect on our own and compare the two fairly. Human reason is a dye soaked almost equally into all our opinions and manners, whatever form they take — infinite in matter, infinite in diversity.
But back to my point. There are peoples where no one but his wife and children speaks to the king except through a tube. In one and the same nation, the virgins display openly the parts that modesty should tell them to hide, while the married women carefully cover and conceal them. A custom somewhere else is a kind of cousin to that one: there, chastity matters only in marriage, for unmarried women may give themselves to as many men as they please, and if they become pregnant, they may lawfully take medicine, in the sight of everyone, to destroy the child.
And in another place, if a tradesman marries, all the wedding guests of his own condition lie with the bride before he does — and the more of them there are, the greater her honor, and the higher the opinion of her capacity and strength. If an officer marries, it's the same; the same with a laborer or a man of low condition — except then it falls to the lord of the place to perform that office. And yet a severe fidelity is strictly required during the marriage afterward.
There are places where brothels of young men are kept for the pleasure of women; where the wives go to war alongside their husbands, and take their share not only of the dangers of battle but of the honors of command. Places where they wear rings not only through their noses, lips, cheeks, and toes, but heavy links of gold thrust through their nipples and buttocks; where at dinner they wipe their fingers on their thighs, their genitals, and the soles of their feet.
Places where children don't inherit — brothers and nephews do; and elsewhere nephews only, except in the succession of the prince. Where, to maintain their system of common property, sovereign magistrates take universal charge of the farming and distribute the produce according to each person's need. Where they mourn the death of children and feast at the death of old men. Where ten or twelve sleep in one bed, men and their wives together. Where women whose husbands die violent deaths may marry again, and the others may not. Where the condition of women is held in such contempt that they kill their female infants and buy wives from their neighbors to supply the need. Where husbands may repudiate their wives without showing any cause, but wives cannot leave their husbands for any cause whatever. Where husbands may sell their wives if they prove barren. Where they boil the bodies of their dead, then pound them to a pulp, mix it with their wine, and drink it. Where the most coveted burial is to be eaten by dogs — elsewhere, by birds.
Where they believe the souls of the blessed live in perfect freedom, in delightful fields stocked with every delicacy, and that it is these souls, repeating the words we utter, that we call Echo. Where they fight in the water and shoot their arrows with deadly accuracy while swimming. Where, as a sign of submission, they hunch their shoulders up and hang their heads down — and take off their shoes when they enter the king's palace. Where the eunuchs who guard the sacred women have their lips and noses cut off besides, so that no one can love them. Where the priests put out their own eyes, the better to know their demons and receive their oracles.
Where every man makes himself a god of whatever he likes best — the hunter of a lion or a fox, the fisherman of some fish — with idols for every human action and passion; and there the sun, the moon, and the earth are the chief deities, and the way to swear an oath is to touch the ground while looking up at the sky. Where both meat and fish are eaten raw. Where the greatest oath is to swear by the name of some dead person of good reputation, laying a hand on his tomb. Where the new year's gift the king sends each year to the princes who are his vassals is fire: when it is brought, all the old fire is put out, and the neighboring peoples are bound to come fetch the new fire, each for themselves, on pain of high treason. Where, when the king retires from governing to give himself wholly to devotion (which happens often), his next successor is obliged to do the same, and the right to the kingdom passes to the third in line. Where they vary the form of government as affairs seem to demand: depose the king when they think fit, set up certain elders to govern in his place, and sometimes hand it over to the common people. Where men and women alike are both circumcised and baptized. Where the soldier who, in one battle or several, has managed to present seven enemy heads to the king is made a noble. Where they live in that rare and unsociable belief that the soul is mortal. Where the women give birth without pain or fear. Where the women wear copper plates on both legs; and if a louse bites them, they are bound, as a point of courage, to bite it back; and they dare not marry until they have first offered their virginity to the king, if he cares to accept it.
Where the ordinary greeting is to touch a finger to the ground and then point it up toward the sky. Where the men carry loads on their heads and the women on their shoulders. Where the women make water standing and the men squatting. Where they send their blood as a token of friendship, and offer incense, as to gods, to the men they wish to honor. Where kindred may not marry — not just to the fourth degree, but to any degree however remote. Where children nurse for four years, and often twelve — and in that same place it is held fatal to give a child the breast on its first day of life. Where correcting the boys belongs especially to the fathers, and the girls to the mothers — the punishment being to hang them by the heels in the smoke. Where they circumcise the women. Where they eat every kind of herb, with no scruple but the badness of the smell. Where everything stands open — the finest houses, furnished in the richest style, without doors, windows, trunks, or chests to lock — and a thief there is punished double what he would be anywhere else. Where they crack lice with their teeth like monkeys, and find it horrible to see one killed with a fingernail. Where in all their lives they never cut their hair or pare their nails; and in another place, they pare the nails of the right hand only, letting the left grow for ornament and show. Where they let the hair on the right side grow as long as it will and shave the other side; and in the neighboring provinces, some let their hair grow long in front and some behind, shaving the rest close.
Where parents rent out their children to their guests, and husbands their wives. Where a man may get his own mother with child, and fathers make use of their own daughters or sons, without scandal. Where, at their solemn feasts, they lend their children to one another, with no regard for nearness of blood. In one place men feed on human flesh; in another, it is counted a pious duty for a man to kill his father at a certain age. Elsewhere, fathers decide the fates of their children while they are still in their mothers' wombs — these to be kept and carefully raised, those to be abandoned or done away with. Elsewhere the old husbands lend their wives to young men; and in another place wives are held in common, without offense; and in one place in particular, the women count it a mark of honor to wear as many gaily fringed tassels on the hem of their dress as they have had lovers.
Moreover, hasn't custom made a whole republic of women, by themselves? Hasn't she put weapons in their hands, raised them armies, and made them fight battles? And doesn't she teach the most ignorant common folk, by her bare precept, lessons that all the philosophy in the world could never beat into the heads of the wisest men? For we know of entire nations where death was not only despised but welcomed with the greatest celebration; where children of seven let themselves be whipped to death without changing expression; where riches were in such contempt that the poorest citizen would not have stooped to pick up a purse of gold crowns. And we know of regions rich in every kind of provision where, all the same, the most ordinary diet — and the one they liked best — was nothing but bread, cress, and water. And didn't custom work that miracle in Chios, that in seven hundred years no maid or wife was ever known to commit an act against her honor?
To sum up: in my opinion, there is nothing custom does not do, or cannot do; and Pindar had every reason to call her the ruler of the world.
The man who was seen beating his father answered, when reproached for it, that it was the custom of his family: his father had beaten his grandfather the same way, his grandfather his great-grandfather — "and this boy," he said, pointing to his son, "will beat me when he comes to my age." And the father whom his son was dragging and hauling through the streets ordered him to stop at a certain door, because he himself had dragged his own father only that far — that being the fixed limit of the hereditary outrage the sons of that family traditionally practiced on the fathers. It is as much by custom as by infirmity, says Aristotle, that women tear their hair, bite their nails, and eat coal and earth — and more by custom than by nature that men abuse one another's bodies.
The laws of conscience, which we claim are born of nature, are born of custom. Each of us holds an inward reverence for the opinions and manners approved and received among his own people; he cannot break from them without great reluctance, or conform to them without applauding himself. In times past, when the people of Crete wanted to curse someone, they prayed the gods to entangle him in some bad custom.
But the principal effect of custom's power is to seize and grip us so completely that it is hardly in us to wrestle free of her grasp, or to come back to ourselves enough to consider and weigh what she commands. The truth is, because we drink her in with our mother's milk, and because the face of the world presents itself in this posture to our first sight, we seem born on the condition of following this track. And the common notions we find in repute all around us, poured into our minds with our fathers' seed, appear to be the universal and natural ones. From which it comes to pass that whatever is off the hinges of custom is believed to be off the hinges of reason — how unreasonably, for the most part, God knows.
If everyone who heard a good maxim did what those of us who study ourselves have learned to do — stopped at once to ask how it touches his own private case — he would discover that it was less a fine saying than a sharp lash across the everyday stupidity of his own judgment. But people take the precepts and warnings of truth as addressed to the public at large, never to themselves. Instead of applying them to their own conduct, they file them away in memory — ignorantly, and to no profit at all. But back to the empire of custom.
People raised in liberty, who have answered to no authority but their own will, look on every other form of government as monstrous and against nature. People used to monarchy do exactly the same. And whatever chance fortune gives them to change — even when they have just escaped, at enormous cost, from one master who weighed on them — they run, at the same cost, to set up another. They cannot manage to hate subjection itself.
It is custom's doing that everyone is content with the spot where nature planted him. The Highlanders of Scotland do not pine for Touraine, and the Scythians do not pine for Thessaly. When Darius asked certain Greeks what it would take to get them to adopt the Indian custom of eating their dead fathers — for that was the Indian practice, in the belief that the noblest tomb they could give them was inside their own bodies — the Greeks answered that nothing on earth could hire them to do it. But when he then tried to persuade the Indians to give up their custom and burn their fathers' bodies in the Greek manner, they were even more horrified at the suggestion. Everyone does the same, for habit hides from us the true face of things. As Lucretius says, nothing is at first so grand or so marvelous that, little by little, we do not come to wonder at it less.
I once took it on myself to defend one of our own practices — one accepted with absolute authority for many leagues around — and not content, as people usually are, to prop it up with law and precedent, I dug down to its origin. I found the foundation so weak that I, whose job was to convince others, very nearly talked myself out of it. This is the recipe Plato relies on, in his Laws, to cure the unnatural loves of his age — and he rates it sovereign: that public opinion condemn them, that the poets and every other kind of writer tell horrible stories about them. By the power of that recipe, the most beautiful daughters no longer tempt their fathers' lust, nor the handsomest brothers their sisters' desire; the mere fables of Thyestes, Oedipus, and Macareus, sung into the tender brains of children, have planted the wholesome belief there. Chastity is, in truth, a great and shining virtue, and its usefulness is well enough known. But to argue for it from nature, at its true value, is exactly as hard as it is easy to argue for it from custom, laws, and precepts. The fundamental, universal reasons are dark and difficult to dig out, and our masters either skim over them or, not daring to touch them at all, dive straight into the shelter of custom, where they puff themselves up and crow to their hearts' content. Yet those who refuse to be drawn from the original source commit a still greater error and land in wild opinions — witness Chrysippus, who scattered through so many of his writings how little he made of incestuous unions, however close the relation.
Whoever would shake himself free of custom's violent prejudice will find a good many things accepted with total, unquestioning conviction that have no support at all except the hoary head and wrinkled face of ancient usage. But once the mask is off and things are referred to the verdict of truth and reason, he will feel his judgment turned completely upside down — and yet set back on much surer footing. For example, I will ask him: what could be stranger than to see a whole people bound to obey laws they have never understood? Tied, in everything domestic — marriages, gifts, wills, sales, purchases — to rules they cannot possibly know, since the rules are neither written nor published in their own language, so that they must buy both the interpretation and the use of them? This is not the clever advice Isocrates gave his king — to make his subjects' trade and business free, open, and profitable, and their quarrels and lawsuits costly, loaded with heavy fees and penalties. It is something far more monstrous: putting reason itself up for sale, and turning the laws into merchandise. I count myself lucky that, as our historians tell it, the first man to stand up to Charlemagne when he tried to impose Latin and imperial laws on us was a Gascon gentleman — a countryman of mine.
And what could be more savage than a nation where, by lawful custom, the office of judge is bought and sold, where verdicts are paid for in cash, and where justice may be legitimately denied to anyone who cannot afford it? Where this trade stands in such repute that it creates, alongside the three ancient estates of church, nobility, and people, a fourth estate of wrangling lawyers — who, holding the laws in their hands and sovereign power over men's lives and fortunes, form a body apart from the nobility. From which it follows that we have double laws — the laws of honor and the laws of justice — flatly opposed on many points. The nobles condemn a man who swallows an insult as harshly as the courts condemn a man who avenges one. By the code of arms, whoever puts up with an affront is stripped of rank and honor; by the civil law, whoever takes revenge to clear his name incurs the death penalty. Go to court to repair an injury to your honor, and you disgrace yourself; refuse to go, and the law censures and punishes you. Of these two so different systems, both answering to one sovereign, the one is in charge of peace, the other of war; one takes the profit, the other the honor; one the wisdom, the other the virtue; one the word, the other the deed; one justice, the other valor; one reason, the other force; one wears the long robe, the other the short — and so they split the world between them.
As for indifferent things, like clothes — anyone wishing to call them back to their true purpose, which is the service and comfort of the body, and on which their original grace and fitness depend, will find plenty to work with. For the most fantastical inventions imaginable, I give you, among others, our flat caps; that long tail of velvet hanging from our women's heads with its particolored trimmings; and that vain and useless model of a member which we cannot decently so much as name — and which we nevertheless parade in public. Still, none of these considerations will persuade a man of understanding to break with the common fashion. On the contrary, it seems to me that all singular, private fashions are marks of folly and vain affectation rather than of sound reason, and that a wise man ought, inwardly, to withdraw his soul from the crowd and keep it free there, with full power to judge things as they are — but outwardly, to follow the fashion of his time completely. Public society has no claim on our thoughts; but everything else — our actions, our labors, our fortunes, our very lives — we are to lend and surrender to its service and to common opinion. So did that good and great Socrates, who refused to save his life by disobeying the magistrate, even a thoroughly wicked and unjust magistrate. For it is the rule of rules, the general law of laws, that everyone observe those of the place where he is. As the Greek line has it, it is good to obey the laws of one's country.
And now to another point. It is very doubtful whether any change in an accepted law, whatever it may be, can bring a benefit as manifest as the danger and trouble of altering it. A government is a structure of many different parts and members, joined and fitted together so tightly that you cannot stir a single brick or stone without the whole body feeling it. The lawgiver of the Thurians ordained that whoever proposed to abolish an old law or establish a new one should present himself to the people with a halter around his neck — so that if the innovation was not approved by everyone, he could be hanged on the spot. And the lawgiver of Sparta spent his life extracting from his citizens a faithful promise that none of his laws would be broken. The Spartan magistrate who so roughly cut the two strings Phrynis had added to the lyre never stopped to ask whether the addition improved the harmony or made the instrument fuller and more complete. It was enough to condemn the invention that it was a novelty — an alteration of the old way. That is also the meaning of the old rusty sword carried before the magistracy of Marseilles.
For my own part, I have a great distaste for novelty, whatever face or pretense it wears, and I have reason — I have been an eyewitness of the great evils it produces. The evils that have pressed on us for so many years are not all its doing; but one may fairly say it has accidentally fathered and bred the mischief and ruin that have come since, even the mischief done without it and against it. It is innovation, chiefly, that we must accuse for these disorders. Alas, as Ovid says — I suffer wounds made by my own weapons.
Those who give the first shake to a state are nearly always the first to be swallowed in its ruin. The fruits of public upheaval are rarely enjoyed by the man who set it in motion; he beats and stirs the water for another man's net. The unity and weave of this monarchy, this grand edifice, having been ripped and torn in its old age by this thing called innovation, has lain open ever since — a rent giving easy entrance to every injury. Royal majesty comes down with difficulty from the summit to the middle; from the middle to the bottom, it falls and tumbles headlong. But if the inventors do the greater mischief, the imitators are the more vicious — throwing themselves into examples whose horror and punishment they have felt themselves. And if there is any degree of honor in doing harm, the latecomers must concede to the first movers the glory of the invention and the courage of the first attempt. Every kind of new disorder draws, from that primal and ever-flowing spring, its examples and precedents for unsettling our government. In the very laws made to remedy the first evil, we can read the beginnings and the pretexts of every sort of wicked enterprise. What Thucydides said of the civil wars of his time is happening to us: to flatter the public vices, men christened them with new and milder names, sweetening and disguising their true titles — and all this, if you please, to reform our conscience and our belief. "Fine words, truly," as Terence says. But the fairest pretext for innovation is of very dangerous consequence; as Livy puts it, no change from the ancient ways deserves the benefit of the doubt.
And to speak my mind freely: it argues a strange self-love and a vast presumption to prize one's own opinions so highly that the public peace must be overthrown to establish them — to usher in so many certain evils, and so dreadful a corruption of manners, as civil war and political upheaval always bring in their train, and to usher them into the bowels of one's own country. Is there worse housekeeping than to set up so many certain, known vices against errors that are merely contested and debatable? Are there worse kinds of vice than those committed against a man's own conscience and the natural light of his own reason? The Roman Senate, in its dispute with the people over the administration of religion, was bold enough to pay them off with this evasion: that such matters concerned the gods more than the Senate, and the gods themselves would see that their rites were not profaned. It matches the oracle's answer to the people of Delphi who, fearing a Persian invasion in the Median war, asked Apollo what to do with the holy treasure of his temple — hide it, or carry it elsewhere? He answered that they should move nothing, and look after themselves; he was sufficient to take care of what belonged to him.
The Christian religion bears every mark of the highest usefulness and justice, but none more plainly than its strict command to all alike: obey the civil magistrate; uphold and defend the laws. And what a wonderful example divine wisdom has left us of this — that to accomplish the salvation of mankind, and to conduct its glorious victory over death and sin, it would do so no other way than at the mercy of our ordinary forms of justice, submitting the progress and outcome of so high and so saving a work to the blindness and injustice of our customs and usages, sacrificing the innocent blood of so many of the elect, and the long loss of so many years, to the ripening of that priceless fruit. There is a vast difference between the man who follows the forms and laws of his country and the man who undertakes to regulate and change them. The first pleads simplicity, obedience, and example in his excuse; whatever he does cannot be charged to malice — at worst, it is misfortune. For who is there, asks Cicero, whom antiquity cannot move, attested and sealed by the fairest monuments? And as Isocrates says, falling short is nearer to moderation than overshooting. The other man is playing a far riskier game. Whoever takes it on himself to choose and to alter usurps the authority of judging, and had better look hard at what he is doing — had better be sure he sees clearly the defect in what he would abolish and the virtue in what he would introduce.
This very ordinary consideration is what settled me in my station and kept even my most extravagant, unruly youth under the rein: not to load my shoulders with so great a weight as to make myself answerable for a science of that importance — not to dare, in this, what in my better and riper judgment I would not dare in the easiest matters I had been taught, where rashness of judgment costs nothing. It seems to me deeply unjust to try to subject public, established customs and institutions to the weakness and instability of a private and particular fancy — for private reason has only a private jurisdiction — and to attempt against divine law what no government would tolerate against the civil laws. Human reason has far more dealings with civil laws, and yet even they are sovereignly judged by their own proper judges; the utmost skill can do no more than expound and extend the law and custom received — never twist it, never innovate upon it. If divine providence has sometimes gone beyond the rules to which it has necessarily bound us, that is no license for us to do the same. Those are masterstrokes of the divine hand — not for us to imitate, but to admire: extraordinary examples, marks of express and particular purpose, of the order of miracles, set before us as displays of its almighty power, equally beyond our rules and our strength. It would be folly and impiety to try to reproduce them. We are not to follow them, but to contemplate them with the deepest reverence — acts of God's own person, and not for us. Cotta puts it very aptly: in matters of religion, he says, I follow the high priests Coruncanius, Scipio, and Scaevola — not Zeno, Cleanthes, or Chrysippus.
God knows, in our present quarrel — this civil war, where there are a hundred articles to strike out and put in, great and weighty ones — how many men can truly boast of having exactly and thoroughly weighed the grounds and reasons of the two parties? It is a number, if it makes a number at all, that would hardly trouble our peace. But all the rest — where are they headed? Under what flags do they march, in what quarter do they camp? Their remedies work like other weak and badly applied medicines: the humors they meant to purge they have only heated and aggravated by the struggle, and left in us still. The potion was too weak to purge, but strong enough to weaken us. It does not work; we keep it in our bodies; and all we reap from the operation is internal cramps and aches.
So it is, nevertheless, that Fortune — who keeps her authority above anything we can do or say — sometimes confronts us with a necessity so urgent that the laws simply must give a little ground. And when you are resisting the spread of an innovation that forces its way in by violence, holding yourself everywhere and in everything within bounds and rules — against men who have the power, men for whom anything is lawful that advances their design, who recognize no law or rule except what serves their purpose — that is a dangerous obligation and an intolerable inequality. For as Seneca says, putting faith in the treacherous opens the door to harm.
The ordinary discipline of a healthy state makes no provision for these extraordinary accidents. It presupposes a body that stands firm in its principal members and functions, and a common consent to obedience and observance. Proceeding lawfully is a cold, heavy, constrained business, and no match for proceeding headstrong and unbridled. To this day it is thrown in the teeth of those two great men, Octavius and Cato — in the civil wars of Sulla and of Caesar — that they would rather let their country suffer the last extremities than rescue their fellow citizens at the expense of its laws, or be guilty of any innovation. For in truth, in those final necessities where there is no other remedy, it would perhaps be wiser to stoop and yield a little, to take the blow, than to resist with no possibility of doing good and so give violence the occasion to trample everything underfoot. Better to make the laws do what they can, when they cannot do what they would. So did the Spartan king who suspended them for twenty-four hours; so did the man who, for once, shifted a day in the calendar; so did Alexander the Great, who made a second May out of the month of June. The Spartans themselves, those most religious observers of their country's laws, found themselves pinched by one of their own edicts, which expressly forbade choosing the same man twice as admiral — while their affairs absolutely required that Lysander take that command again. So they made one Aratus admiral; true — but Lysander went along as general of the navy. By the same subtlety, one of their ambassadors, sent to Athens to obtain the repeal of a certain decree, was told by Pericles that it was forbidden to take down the tablet on which a law had once been posted. He advised Pericles simply to turn it around — for that was not forbidden. And Plutarch praises Philopoemen for this: that being born to command, he knew how to command not only according to the laws, but to command the laws themselves, when the public necessity required it.
I have never met a father who would disown his son, however stunted or misshapen the boy turned out. That doesn't mean the father can't see the defects — unless he's completely drunk on paternal affection, he sees them perfectly well. But the boy is still his.
It's the same with me. I see better than anyone that what I write here amounts to the daydreams of a man who only nibbled the outer crust of learning in his youth, and kept nothing but a vague, shapeless picture of it. A little of everything and nothing of the whole — the French way. I know, in general terms, that medicine exists, and law; that mathematics has four branches; and roughly what each of these is aiming at. Maybe I even know, in a general way, what the sciences claim to do for our lives. But to dig deeper than that — to have worn out my brains studying Aristotle, the reigning monarch of modern learning, or to have devoted myself seriously to any single branch of knowledge — I have never done it. There is no art whose basic outlines I could sketch. The lowest schoolboy in the lowest form can call himself more learned than I am; I couldn't even quiz him on his first lesson. If I'm ever forced to try, I have to save face by asking him some broad, clumsy questions about general things — testing his natural intelligence with a lesson as foreign to him as his lessons are to me.
I have never settled down seriously with any book of solid learning except Plutarch and Seneca. And with those, like the Danaides with their leaking jars, I am forever filling up and forever draining out. Some of it drips onto this paper; almost none of it stays in me. History is my real hunting ground when it comes to reading. Poetry too, which I love with a special tenderness — because, as Cleanthes said, just as a voice forced through the narrow tube of a trumpet comes out sharper and stronger, so a thought packed into the harmony of verse springs out harder and hits the mind with a cleaner, more pleasing blow.
As for the natural faculties I have — and these essays are exactly that, an attempt to test them — I feel them bending under the load. My imagination and judgment only grope along in the dark, tripping and stumbling. And when I have gone as far as I can go, I am never satisfied; I can still see more country ahead of me, vast and blurred, wrapped in clouds I cannot get through. I write about whatever comes into my head, using nothing but my own natural equipment. So when I happen — as I often do — to stumble in some good author across the very subjects I've tried to handle (as I did just recently in Plutarch, on the power of imagination), and I see how weak and limp I look next to those better writers, so heavy, so flat — I pity myself, or despise myself, take your pick.
Still, I take comfort in this: my opinions often have the honor and good luck of matching theirs. I'm walking the same road, even if I'm a long way behind, and at least I can say, "Yes — that's exactly it." I also have one ability not everyone is blessed with: I can see the enormous distance between them and me. And despite that, I let my own inventions run their course, low and feeble as they are, without patching or plastering over the flaws the comparison exposes. Frankly, you need a strong back to keep pace with those people.
The reckless scribblers of our age do the opposite. Into their laborious nothings they paste whole passages and pages of ancient authors, hoping the borrowed brilliance will dress up their own work. It does the reverse. The contrast is so glaring that their own writing looks more sallow and deformed beside it — they lose far more than they gain.
The philosophers Chrysippus and Epicurus took the two opposite extremes here. Chrysippus stuffed his books not just with other authors' sayings but with entire works — in one of them, the whole Medea of Euripides — which led Apollodorus to remark that if you removed everything that wasn't his, you'd be left with blank paper. Epicurus, on the other hand, left behind three hundred volumes without a single quotation in any of them.
The other day I had a little adventure of this kind. I was reading a French book, dozing my way through a long stretch of words so dull, so insipid, so empty of wit or common sense that they were French words and nothing more. After this long, tedious slog I suddenly hit a passage that was lofty, rich, soaring up to the clouds. If the slope up to it had been gradual, or the climb gentle, there might have been some excuse. But it was a sheer cliff, so completely cut off from everything around it that the first six words launched me into another world — and from up there I could see how deep and low the valley was that I'd come from. I have never had the heart to go back down into it since. If I decked out one of my own pieces with rich plunder like that, it would only spotlight the dullness of everything else I'd written.
Criticizing in others a fault I commit myself seems no more unreasonable to me than condemning — as I often do — other people's faults when I find them in me. Faults should be called out wherever they live; no sanctuary. I know perfectly well how boldly I keep trying to rise to the level of what I steal, to make my own style march alongside it — even with the rash hope of fooling my reader's eye so they can't tell the difference. But when I manage it, it's as much by careful placement as by any invention or strength of my own. Besides, I don't take on the whole army of these champions, or even fight any one of them hand to hand. I engage them in quick raids and light skirmishes. I don't grapple; I test their strength and never push as far as I pretend to. If I could actually hold my own with them, I'd be doing well — because I only ever attack them where they are strongest.
But to cover yourself head to toe in another man's armor, as I've seen some do, so that not even your fingertips show; to build a whole work out of old inventions patched together here and there with your own rubbish (easy enough for anyone with a bit of schooling, on an ordinary subject), and then to try to hide the theft and pass it off as your own — that is first of all dishonest and small-minded. Having nothing of their own worth a reputation, these people try to buy one with goods they have no title to. And second, it's ridiculous: they settle for the ignorant applause of the crowd, won by a pitiful con, while cheapening themselves in the eyes of intelligent readers — who turn up their noses at all this borrowed plaster, and whose praise is the only praise worth having. For my part, there is nothing I would not rather do than that. I only say so much about others to better explain myself.
None of this is aimed at the writers of centos — the patchwork poems — who announce themselves as exactly that. I have known some very clever ones in my time, particularly one writing under the name Capilupus, not to mention the ancients. These are genuinely intelligent men who show it both in that form and in others — Lipsius, for instance, in the learned and laborious weave of his Politics.
However that may be, and however trifling these foolish efforts of mine are, I never meant to hide them — any more than I'd hide a portrait of myself, bald and graying, in which the painter has given you not some ideal face but my own. These are my personal opinions and fancies. I offer them as what I believe, not as what anyone else ought to believe. My only aim here is to reveal myself — and tomorrow's self may be a different one, if some new lesson happens to change me. I have no authority to be believed, and I don't want any; I'm too aware of how badly educated I am to go instructing anyone else.
Now — someone who had read the previous chapter told me at my house the other day that I should have said more about the education of children.
Well, madam, if I had any competence on this subject, I couldn't put it to better use than as a gift to the little man who will soon make his happy arrival (you are too generous to begin with anything but a boy). Having played such a part in arranging your marriage, I have a certain personal stake in the greatness and prosperity of everything that comes of it. Besides, you have had first claim on my service for so long that I'm bound to wish honor and advantage on everything that concerns you. But truthfully, all I understand about the matter is this: the greatest and hardest problem in human knowledge is the raising of children.
It's like farming. The work before planting, and the planting itself, is sure, plain, and well understood. But once the thing planted comes to life — that's when the real work begins: more skill, more care, far more difficulty in cultivating it and bringing it to perfection. So with people. Getting children is easy; once they're born, then comes the trouble, the worry, the care of training them up properly. At that tender age the signs of their inclinations are so faint, the promises so unreliable, that it's nearly impossible to build any solid judgment on them. Look at Cimon, look at Themistocles, and a thousand others who completely defied the expectations people had of them. Bear cubs and puppies show their natural temperament right away. But people, the moment they grow up, take on habits, sign up for opinions, conform to laws and customs, and easily alter — or at least disguise — their real disposition. And yet nature's bent is hard to force. The result is that, having picked the wrong road, we often spend enormous effort and years of a child's life training him for things he is by his nature completely unsuited for. Even so, in this difficulty, my opinion is clear: aim them at the best and most rewarding studies, and don't fuss too much over those faint childhood omens — to which Plato, in his Republic, gives far too much weight, I think.
Madam, learning is a great ornament and a marvelously useful tool, especially for people raised to your level of fortune. In truth it can't do its proper work in mean and lowly hands. It is far readier to lend its strength to conducting a war, governing a people, or negotiating the friendship of princes and foreign nations than to constructing a syllogism, arguing a lawsuit, or prescribing a dose of pills. So, madam — confident that you won't leave this essential piece out of your children's education, you who have tasted its sweetness yourself and come from a learned line (we still have the writings of the old Counts of Foix, the ancestors of both you and your husband the Count, and your uncle, Monsieur de Candale, brings out new ones every day, extending your family's claim on this quality for ages to come) — I will presume to offer your ladyship one particular notion of my own, contrary to the usual method. It is all I can contribute to your service in this business.
The duties of the tutor you choose for your son — and the whole success of his education hangs on that choice — involve many other important parts that I won't touch, since I have nothing worthwhile to add to the standard advice. And on the point where I do presume to advise, he should follow me only as far as it seems sensible to him.
So: for a boy of good family who pursues learning not for profit (an aim too low to deserve the grace and favor of the Muses, and one that puts a man in service and debt to others), and not so much for show as for his own inner use — to furnish and enrich himself within, wanting to turn out an accomplished gentleman rather than a mere scholar — for such a boy, I would have his people take care to choose him a tutor with a well-made head rather than a well-filled one. Look for both, certainly; but of the two, value character and judgment above raw learning. And let this man do his job by a new method.
Tutors ordinarily never stop thundering in our ears, as if they were pouring knowledge into a funnel, while our job is simply to repeat back what we've been told. I'd have the tutor correct this from the start. According to the capacity of the mind in his hands, he should put it through its paces — letting the boy taste things for himself, choose and discern for himself; sometimes clearing the path for him, sometimes letting him clear it alone. I don't want the tutor doing all the inventing and all the talking; I want him to listen to his pupil talk in turn. Socrates, and Arcesilaus after him, had their students speak first and spoke to them afterward. As Cicero says, the authority of the teacher is very often an obstacle to those who want to learn.
It's good to make the boy trot out in front, like a young horse, so the tutor can judge his gait and figure out how much to slow his own pace to match the pupil's strength. Get that proportion wrong and we ruin everything. Knowing how to hit it, and stay within it, is one of the hardest things I know; it takes a lofty and very well-tempered soul to stoop to a child's pace and guide it. I walk more firmly and surely uphill than down.
Those who follow our usual practice — one lesson, one pace, for a roomful of boys with completely different minds and abilities — are profoundly mistaken. No wonder that out of a whole crowd of pupils, barely two or three get anything worthwhile from their schooling.
Let the master demand an account not just of the bare words of the lesson but of its meaning and substance; and let him judge the boy's progress not by the testimony of his memory but by the testimony of his life. Make him take what he has just learned and turn it into a hundred different shapes, fit it to a hundred different subjects, to see whether he has truly grasped it and made it his own — pacing the instruction by Plato's method of teaching. Spitting food back up exactly as you swallowed it is proof of rawness and indigestion. The stomach hasn't done its work unless it changes the form and condition of what it was given to digest.
Our minds work only on credit, tied and bound to the lead of someone else's fancy, captive to the authority of someone else's lesson. We've been so broken to the harness that we have no free stride of our own. Our vigor and liberty are gone. As Seneca says, they never come out of wardship.
I was privately taken, in Pisa, to meet a worthy man — but such an Aristotelian that his standing thesis was this: the touchstone and measure of all sound thinking and all truth is conformity to Aristotle's teaching; outside of that, everything is emptiness and chimera, since Aristotle saw everything and said everything. That position, interpreted a bit too broadly and unfairly, once landed him in serious and lasting danger from the Inquisition in Rome.
Let the tutor make the boy sift everything he reads, and lodge nothing in his head on bare authority or on trust. Aristotle's principles should be no more sacred to him than those of Epicurus or the Stoics. Set the whole range of opinions in front of him: he will choose if he can — and if he can't, he'll remain in doubt. As Dante says, "doubting pleases me no less than knowing."
If he embraces the opinions of Xenophon and Plato through his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs; they will be his. Whoever follows another follows nothing. He finds nothing — he isn't even looking for anything. As Seneca says, we are under no king; let each man claim himself.
Let him at least know that he knows. He should absorb the spirit of these thinkers, not memorize their precepts. And let him cheerfully forget where he got it all, so long as he knows how to make it his own. Truth and reason belong to everyone; they're no more the property of the first man who said them than of the last man to repeat them. It is no more "according to Plato" than according to me, since he and I see and understand it the same way. Bees raid the flowers here and there, but afterward they make honey of it, and the honey is all their own — no longer thyme or marjoram. In the same way, the boy will transform and blend his borrowings into a work that is entirely his: namely, his judgment. His education, his labor, his study aim at nothing but forming that.
He owes no one a list of his sources; he owes only what he has made of them. Plunderers and borrowers parade their houses and their purchases — not how they got the money. You never see the fees and kickbacks of a lawyer; you see the alliances he builds, the honors won for his family. No one publishes his income; everyone publishes what he's acquired.
The whole profit of our study is to become better and wiser. It is the understanding, Epicharmus said, that sees and hears; the understanding that turns everything to use, that arranges everything, that acts and rules and reigns. Everything else is blind, deaf, and soulless. And we make the understanding timid and servile by never letting it do anything on its own. Who ever asked his pupil what he thinks of rhetoric or grammar, or of this or that sentence of Cicero? Our masters jam these things into our memories fully feathered, like oracles where the letters and syllables are the very substance of the matter. Knowing by heart is not knowing; it is only holding on to what you've handed your memory for safekeeping. What a man truly knows, he can deploy at will, without checking with the author or fumbling through the pages of his book.
A purely bookish learning is a poor, paltry learning. It may serve as decoration, but it is no foundation to build on — as Plato says when he calls constancy, faith, and sincerity the true philosophy, and the other sciences, aimed at other ends, mere face paint. I'd love to see Paluel or Pompey, those two famous dancers of my day, teach us capers just by performing them while we sat still in our seats — which is exactly how these men propose to train the understanding without ever setting it in motion. Or to see us learn to ride, handle a pike, play the lute, or sing without the bother of practice — just as they want to make us judge well and speak well without ever exercising us in judging or speaking.
In this kind of education, everything that crosses our path is textbook enough: a page's prank, a servant's blunder, a joke at the table — each one a fresh subject.
For the same reason, mixing with people is enormously useful, and so is travel in foreign countries. Not to come home — as most of our young gentlemen do — with a report on the exact circumference of the Pantheon, or the richness of Signora Livia's petticoats, or how much longer and broader Nero's face is on some ruined statue than on some old medal. Come home instead able to describe the temperaments, the manners, the customs, and the laws of the nations you visited — and to have whetted and sharpened your wits by rubbing them against other people's. I would send a boy abroad very young, and first of all — to kill two birds with one stone — to those neighboring nations whose language is furthest from our own, because if the tongue isn't trained to it early, it grows too stiff to bend.
It's also the general opinion that a child should not be raised in his mother's lap. Mothers are too tender. Their natural affection makes even the most sensible of them so overfond that they can't bring themselves to correct their children's faults, or to let them be toughened by hardship and risk, as they ought to be. A mother cannot bear to see her boy come home dusty and sweating from his exercise, or drink something cold when he's hot, or climb onto an unruly horse, or face a rough fencer with a foil in his hand, or so much as fire a gun. But there's no help for it: whoever wants to raise a boy to be worth anything as a man must spare him nothing while he's young, and must regularly break the rules of medicine. As Horace says, let him live under the open sky, and in the thick of danger.
It isn't enough to toughen his soul; you must toughen his muscles too. The soul is crushed if the body doesn't help carry the load — it's too much work to manage both jobs alone. I know to my own cost how mine groans under the burden, saddled as it is with a body so delicate and so quick to complain, forever leaning its whole weight on her. And I often notice in my reading that our masters pass off as greatness of soul and strength of mind what is really toughness of skin and hardness of bone. I have seen men, women, and children born with constitutions so hard and insensible that a sound beating means less to them than a flick of the finger would mean to me — people who won't cry out, flinch, or shrink under a serious thrashing. When wrestlers imitate the philosophers in endurance, it's strength of sinew, not stoutness of heart. Now, being trained to work hard is being trained to bear pain: labor, as Cicero says, hardens us against suffering.
A boy must be broken in to the toil and roughness of exercise — trained up to bear dislocations, colic, cautery, even prison and the rack. For by bad luck he may come to the worst of these; the way the world goes, such things fall on the good as well as the bad. We have the proof in front of us: in our present civil war, whoever draws his sword against the laws threatens the honestest men with the whip and the noose.
There is this too: at home, the tutor's authority — which ought to be absolute over the boy in his charge — is constantly checked and undermined by the presence of the parents. Add to that the deference the whole household pays the boy as the master's son, and his awareness of the estate and the greatness he stands to inherit, and you have, in my opinion, no small handicaps at that tender age.
And yet even in this conversing with men that I spoke of just now, I've noticed a vice: instead of gathering observations from others, we make it our whole business to put ourselves on display. We're more concerned with showing off our own merchandise than with stocking up on new goods. Silence and modesty are very useful qualities in conversation. So train the boy to be sparing with his knowledge once he has it — a careful manager of it — and not to object to or correct every silly remark or ridiculous story told in his presence. It is rude and unbecoming to carp at everything that doesn't suit our own taste. Let him be content with correcting himself, and not seem to condemn in others everything he wouldn't do himself, or to set himself against common custom. As Seneca says, one can be wise without showing off, wise without arousing envy.
Let him avoid those overbearing airs of authority, and that childish ambition of wanting to seem more polished and accomplished than he is — by which carriage he will only expose himself — and of treating every chance to interrupt and correct as too precious to pass up, hoping to come away with a reputation for being something special. Just as only great poets get to take poetic license, only great and illustrious souls get to set themselves above custom. If Socrates and Aristippus sometimes acted against the manners of their time, Cicero warns, no one should think he has the same permission: they earned that liberty by great and divine merits.
Teach him not to enter an argument or a debate except against an opponent worthy of him — and even then, not to use every little trick that might happen to serve, but only the arguments that serve him best. Teach him to be choosy in selecting his reasons, to despise irrelevance, and therefore to prize brevity. Above all, teach him to surrender and submit to truth the moment he spots it, whether it appears in his opponent's argument or in his own second thoughts. He's not auditioning for a professor's chair, where one performs a set racket of words and syllogisms; he is bound to no argument except as his own judgment approves it. Nor is arguing a trade where the freedom to recant and change your mind on reflection gets sold for cash. As Cicero says, no necessity compels him to defend everything that has been prescribed and ordered.
If his tutor shares my temperament, he will shape the boy's will to be a very good and loyal subject to his prince, deeply attached to him and brave in his quarrel — but he will also cool in him any desire to be tied to that service by anything beyond public duty. Setting aside the other costs to the liberty every honest man ought to keep, a judgment bought and mortgaged by personal obligations is either blinded and less free to do its work, or stained with ingratitude and indiscretion. A man who is purely a courtier can have neither the power nor the will to speak or think anything but well of a master who, out of so many millions of other subjects, picked him by hand to feed and advance. That favor, and the profit flowing from it, cannot help corrupting his freedom and dazzling him — and not without some show of reason. You can hear it: these people speak a different language from everyone else in the nation, and not much of what they say in that courtly dialect is to be believed.
Let his conscience and his virtue shine through his speech, with reason as their only guide. Make him understand that admitting an error he has discovered in his own argument — even if no one but himself has noticed it — is an act of judgment and honesty, which are the main things he is after. Obstinacy and contentiousness are common qualities, most at home in small souls. To revise and correct yourself, to abandon a bad position at the very height and heat of the argument — these are rare, great, philosophical qualities.
Advise him, when he's in company, to keep his eyes and ears in every corner. I find that the seats of greatest honor are usually grabbed by the men with the least in them, and that great fortune and great ability rarely travel together. I've been at tables where, while the people at the head of the room were discussing the beauty of the tapestries or the flavor of the wine, plenty of fine things said at the lower end were lost and thrown away. Let him sound out the talent of every man — a peasant, a bricklayer, a passing stranger. Something can be learned from each of them in his own line, and something from their talk will turn out useful one day or another. Even the folly and foolishness of others will teach him something: by noticing everyone's graces and manners, he'll build a taste for the good ones and a contempt for the bad.
Plant in his mind an honest curiosity to inquire into everything. Whatever is singular or rare near wherever he happens to be, let him go and see it — a fine house, a noble fountain, an eminent man, the field of an ancient battle, the routes of Caesar and Charlemagne. Let him learn, as Propertius has it, which land lies locked in frost, which crumbles with heat, which wind sets fairest for Italy. Let him look into the manners, the revenues, and the alliances of princes — things very pleasant to learn and very useful to know.
In this conversing with men, I mean also — and chiefly — those who live only in the records of history. Through books he will keep company with the great and heroic souls of the best ages. It's an idle and empty study for those who make it so by going at it carelessly; but for those who do it with care and attention, it's a study of priceless fruit and value — the only study, Plato tells us, that the Spartans kept for themselves. What profit won't he reap, where the business of men is concerned, from reading the Lives of Plutarch? But let my tutor remember what his teaching is really aimed at, and stamp on his pupil's memory not so much the date of the fall of Carthage as the characters of Hannibal and Scipio; not so much where Marcellus died as why it was unworthy of his duty that he died there. Let him teach him not so much the narrative of history as how to judge it.
History, in my opinion, is the subject we each take to with the most different measures. I have read a hundred things in Livy that another man hasn't read, or hasn't noticed; and Plutarch read a hundred more there than I could ever find — more, perhaps, than the author ever put in. For some it's purely a grammar exercise; for others it's the very anatomy of philosophy, by which we get into the most hidden parts of our nature. There are in Plutarch many long discussions richly worth careful reading, for in that kind of writing he is, to my mind, the greatest master of all. But there are a thousand other matters he has only brushed against — where he merely points his finger to show which way we may go if we like, or contents himself with one sharp hit at the very nerve of the question, leaving us to grope out the rest. Take the place where he says that the people of Asia served a single master because they could not pronounce one syllable: No. That remark may well have given La Boétie the matter and the occasion for his "Voluntary Servitude." Even watching Plutarch pick out some slight action in a man's life, or a single word that hardly seems worth that much, is a whole discourse in itself. It's our loss that men of understanding are so immoderately fond of brevity; their reputation gains by it, no doubt, but in the meantime we are the poorer. Plutarch would rather we praised his judgment than his knowledge; he would rather leave us hungry to read more than stuffed with what we've already read. He knew very well that you can say too much even on the best subject — and that Alexandridas was right to rebuke the man who made excellent but endless speeches to the Spartan magistrates: "Stranger, you say what you should say, but not the way you should say it." People with thin, spare bodies pad themselves out with clothes; people thin on matter pad themselves out with words.
The human understanding is wonderfully brightened by daily conversation with men, for otherwise we sit squeezed and heaped up inside ourselves, with our sight reaching no farther than the end of our own nose. When someone asked Socrates where he was from, he did not answer "Athens" but "the world." He, whose imagination was fuller and wider than ours, embraced the whole world as his city and extended his acquaintance, his society, and his affection to all mankind — not like us, who look no farther than our feet. When the vines of my village are nipped by frost, my parish priest concludes at once that the wrath of God has gone out against the entire human race, and that the cannibals must already have caught the pip. Seeing our civil wars, who doesn't cry out that the machinery of the world is coming apart and the Day of Judgment is at hand — never considering that far worse has been seen before, and that meanwhile, in a thousand other parts of the earth, people are having a perfectly lovely time? For my part, considering the license and impunity that always ride along with such upheavals, I'm amazed the wars are so moderate, and that there isn't more mischief done. To the man with hailstones rattling about his ears, the whole hemisphere seems one storm and tempest. It's like the ridiculous Savoyard who said, very gravely, that if that simpleton of a French king had only managed his fortune properly, he might in time have risen to be steward of the household to the Duke of Savoy. The fellow's shallow imagination simply could not conceive of anything greater than a Duke of Savoy. And in truth we are all in this error without noticing it — an error of great weight and great harm. But whoever can call up before his mind's eye, as in a painting, the great image of our mother Nature in her full majesty and luster; whoever reads in her face her endless, constant variety; whoever finds himself in that picture — and not just himself but a whole kingdom — as no more than the prick of a fine pencil point against the whole: that man alone sizes things at their true scale and grandeur.
This great world — which some multiply further, as species under one genus — is the mirror in which we must look to know ourselves from the right angle. In short, this is the book I would have my young gentleman study with the most attention. So many temperaments, so many sects, so many judgments, opinions, laws, and customs teach us to judge our own sanely, and train our understanding to recognize its imperfection and its natural weakness — which is no small lesson. So many upheavals of states and kingdoms, so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, teach us not to make any great marvel of our own. So many great names, so many famous victories and conquests drowned and swallowed in oblivion, make ridiculous our hope of immortalizing our name by capturing ten cavalrymen or some henhouse known to history only because it fell. The pride and pomp of so many foreign courts, the swollen majesty of so many grandeurs, steady our eyes to bear the luster of our own without blinking. So many millions of men buried before us encourage us not to be afraid of going to find such good company in the other world. And so on with everything else. Pythagoras used to say that our life is like the great crowded gathering at the Olympic games: some exercise their bodies to carry off the glory of the prize; others bring merchandise to sell for profit; and some — by no means the worst sort — come for no other advantage than to watch, to consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of other men's lives, the better to judge and steer their own.
To these examples may fitly be joined all the most profitable lessons of philosophy, which all human actions ought to take as their rule. A pupil shall be taught — as Persius puts it — what it is right to wish for; what use coined money really has; how much we owe to our country and our dear ones; what God commanded us to be, and what post we hold in the human scheme; what we are, and to what purpose we were born. He shall be taught what it is to know and what it is to be ignorant; what the aim of study ought to be; what valor, temperance, and justice are; the difference between ambition and greed, servitude and obedience, license and liberty; by what marks a man may recognize true, solid contentment; how far death, pain, and disgrace really deserve our fear; and, as Virgil says, how to shun each hardship — or how to bear it.
He shall be taught by what secret springs we move, and what drives our shifting moods and indecisions. For it seems to me that the first ideas his understanding should be steeped in ought to be the ones that regulate his conduct and his sense — that teach him to know himself, and how to die well and how to live well. Among the liberal arts, let's begin with the art that makes us free. They all serve life in some measure, as everything else does in some measure too; but let's choose the one that serves it directly and by profession. If we could once confine the duties of human life within their just and natural limits, we'd find that most of the sciences in circulation are of no use to us — and that even in the useful ones there are useless stretches and hollows we'd do better to leave alone, keeping to Socrates' direction and limiting our studies to what has real and honest utility. Dare to be wise, says Horace — begin! The man who keeps putting off the hour of living well is like the bumpkin waiting for the river to flow past before he crosses: but the river flows, and will roll on flowing, to the end of time.
It's great foolishness to teach our children what influence Pisces has, or fierce Leo, or Capricorn washed by the western sea — the science of the stars and the motion of the eighth sphere — before teaching them the science of themselves. What do I care, says Anacreon, for the Pleiades or the stars of Taurus? Anaximenes wrote to Pythagoras: "Why should I trouble myself hunting out the secrets of the stars, with death or slavery always before my eyes?" — for the kings of Persia were just then preparing to invade his country. Everyone ought to say the same: "Assaulted as I am by ambition, greed, rashness, and superstition, with so many other enemies of life inside me, shall I sit and ponder the wobbles of the world?"
After he has been taught what will make him wiser and better, then you may entertain him with the elements of logic, physics, geometry, and rhetoric; and whichever science he then leans to, his judgment being already formed and fit to choose, he will quickly master. His instruction should come sometimes by conversation, sometimes by reading. Sometimes his tutor will put the author himself into his hands — whichever he judges right for him — and sometimes only the marrow and substance of it. And if the tutor isn't bookish enough himself to find all the fine passages the books hold for his purpose, some man of learning can be attached to him, to supply on every occasion the provisions he needs and pass them along to the pupil. Who can doubt that this way of teaching is easier and more natural than the method of Gaza, where the precepts are so tangled and harsh, and the words so empty, so fleshless and meaningless, that there is nothing to take hold of — nothing that quickens and lifts the mind — whereas here the mind has something to bite on and digest? This fruit is not only far fairer beyond comparison; it also ripens far earlier.
It's a thousand pities that matters stand as they do in our age: that philosophy, even among intelligent men, has become an empty and fantastic name, a thing of no use and no value either in opinion or in fact. I think the cause is those quibbles and petty sophistries that have camped in all the approaches to her. People are badly wrong to paint her for children as inaccessible, with a frowning, grim, terrifying face. Who put that false mask on her — that pale, haggard, ghostly look? There is nothing gayer, brisker, merrier — I almost said friskier. She preaches nothing but holiday and good cheer; a sad, anxious face is proof she doesn't live in that house. When the grammarian Demetrius found a knot of philosophers sitting and chatting together in the temple at Delphi, he said to them, "Either I'm much mistaken, or by your cheerful, pleasant faces you're in no very deep discussion." To which one of them, Heracleon of Megara, replied: "Knitting your brows belongs to people puzzling over whether some verb doubles its letter, or hunting the derivation of comparatives and superlatives. Philosophical talk delights and cheers those who have it; it never sours them or casts them down." As Juvenal says, you can read the hidden torments of a mind in a sick body — and read its joys too: the face takes either look from the mind.
The soul that houses philosophy ought to be so healthy that it makes the body healthy too. Her peace and contentment should shine all the way to the surface; her ease should mold the outward bearing into her own shape, arming it with a graceful confidence, a lively and cheerful carriage, a calm and contented face. The most unmistakable sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness; her state, like everything above the moon, is always clear and serene. It is Baroco and Baralipton — those barbarous passwords of school logic — that leave their disciples so grubby and smoke-stained, not she; they don't know her except by hearsay. What! She is the one who calms the storms and tempests of the soul, who teaches famine and fever to laugh and sing — and not by some imaginary celestial machinery, but by natural, visible reasons. She has virtue for her goal; and virtue is not, as the schoolmen claim, perched on the summit of a steep, rugged, unclimbable cliff. Those who have actually approached her find just the opposite: she lives on a fair, fertile, flowering plain, from which she sees everything spread below her; and anyone can reach her who knows the way, by shady, green, sweetly blooming avenues, down a slope as gentle and smooth as the curve of the sky. It's because they have never visited this supreme virtue — beautiful, triumphant, loving, as delicious as she is courageous, the sworn and implacable enemy of anxiety, sorrow, fear, and constraint, with nature for her guide and fortune and pleasure for her companions — that they have gone and invented, out of their own weakness, this ridiculous image of her: sad, quarrelsome, sulky, threatening, scowling. They've set her on a rock, off by herself among thorns and brambles, and made of her a hobgoblin to frighten people.
But the tutor I have in mind — one who knows his real duty is to fill his pupil with affection for virtue, not just reverence toward it — will be able to explain that the poets have always played to the popular mood, and to make the boy see that the gods placed far more toil and sweat on the road to Venus's chamber than on the road to Minerva's. And when the lad's own feelings begin to stir, the tutor will set before him, as a mistress worth wanting, a Bradamante or an Angelica — a natural, active, generous beauty, vigorous rather than soft, the kind dressed like a heroic youth in a glittering helmet, instead of one tricked out in curls and ribbons like a flirt. He'll then count his own taste truly brave and manly when he chooses exactly the opposite of what that soft shepherd of Phrygia chose.
Such a tutor will teach him this new lesson: that the height and value of true virtue lie in the ease, usefulness, and pleasure of practicing it. Virtue is so far from being difficult that boys can master it as well as men, the simple as well as the clever. Her instrument is order, not force. Socrates, her first favorite, deliberately set aside all strain so as to slip into the natural ease of her path. She is the nursing mother of all human pleasures. By making them just, she makes them pure and lasting. By moderating them, she keeps them fresh and keeps our appetite alive. By cutting off the ones she refuses, she sharpens our taste for the ones she allows — and like a kind and generous mother, she allows in abundance everything nature asks for, right up to satisfaction if not exhaustion. Unless we want to claim that the rule which stops the drinker before he's drunk, the glutton before he's sick, and the lecher before he's caught the pox is somehow pleasure's enemy.
If ordinary good fortune fails her, virtue does without it and builds another fortune of her own — one that doesn't wobble and slip like the first. She can be rich, powerful, and learned, and she knows how to lie on soft, perfumed beds. She loves life; she loves beauty, glory, and health. But her own special office is to know how to use these good things with judgment, and how to lose them without despair — an office far more noble than burdensome, and without it the whole course of a life runs unnatural, turbulent, and deformed. That is where the monsters on the rocks and cliffs really belong: in the picture of a life without her.
If this pupil turns out to have so contrary a nature that he'd rather hear some idle yarn than the true account of a noble expedition or a wise conversation; if, when the drumbeat fires up his companions' young blood, he drifts off after another drummer calling him to a street dance or a bear-baiting; if he wouldn't honestly find it sweeter and finer to come back dusty, sweaty, and victorious from a battle than to come back from tennis or a dance with the prize — then I see no remedy except for his tutor to apprentice him early to a pastry cook in some good town, even if he's the son of a duke. This follows Plato's rule: that children should be placed in life not according to their father's wealth or rank, but according to the capacities of their own souls.
Since philosophy is the thing that teaches us how to live, and since childhood needs that lesson as much as every other age, why don't we give it to children early? The clay is moist and soft, as Persius says — now, right now, is the time to hurry and shape it on the fast-turning wheel. Instead, we begin teaching people how to live when life is nearly over. A hundred students have caught the pox before they ever get to Aristotle's lecture on temperance. Cicero said that even if he lived two men's lifetimes, he would never find leisure to study the lyric poets — and I find our quibbling academics more deplorably useless still. The boy we're raising has even less time to spare: he owes only the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life to education; the rest belongs to action. So let's spend that short time on what's necessary. Away with the thorny subtleties of logic-chopping — they're abuses, things that will never improve a single life. Take the plain discourses of philosophy instead. Learn first how to choose them rightly, then how to apply them. They're easier to understand than one of Boccaccio's stories. A child fresh from his nurse can take them in more readily than he can learn to read and write. Philosophy has lessons fit for childhood just as it has lessons fit for feeble old age.
I'm with Plutarch on this: Aristotle did not spend his time troubling his great pupil with the knack of building syllogisms or the elements of geometry, but with planting in him good principles about courage, boldness, greatness of spirit, temperance, and contempt for fear. With that ammunition, Aristotle sent him out — still a boy, with no more than thirty thousand foot soldiers, four thousand horsemen, and forty-two thousand crowns — to conquer the empire of the whole earth. As for the other arts and sciences, Plutarch says Alexander praised their excellence and charm, and held them in great honor, but was never so swept away as to want to practice them himself. Young men and old, as Persius says, draw from philosophy a settled aim for the mind, and provisions for miserable gray hairs.
Epicurus, at the start of his letter to Meniceus, says that the youngest should not refuse to philosophize, and the oldest should not grow weary of it. Whoever says otherwise seems to imply that the season for living happily either hasn't arrived yet or is already past. For all that, I would not have this pupil of ours imprisoned and made a slave to his book, nor handed over to the gloom and bad temper of some sour-natured pedant.
I would not have his spirit cowed and broken by putting him to the rack, as some do — tormenting him fourteen or fifteen hours a day and turning him into a pack-horse. Nor, if he turns out to have a solitary, melancholy temperament and an excessive appetite for his books, would I think it wise to feed that mood in him; it makes a boy unfit for ordinary human company and pulls him away from better occupations. How many men have I seen in my time made stupid by an immoderate thirst for knowledge! Carneades was so drunk on it that he couldn't find time to comb his hair or trim his nails. Nor would I have the boy's generous manners spoiled by the rudeness and barbarism of someone else's. There used to be a proverb about French intelligence: early to bloom, quick to fade. And it's true — nothing is more charming and promising than the children of France, but they routinely cheat the hopes people form of them, and grown to manhood they show nothing remarkable at all. I have heard sensible people say that it's these colleges of ours, the ones we send our young people to — and of which we have far too many — that turn them into such animals.
But for our young gentleman, a study, a garden, the table, his bed, solitude, company, morning and evening — every hour will be the same to him, and every place a classroom. For philosophy, the shaper of judgment and character, will be his principal lesson, and she has the privilege of having a hand in everything. The orator Isocrates, asked at a banquet to speak about his art, gave an answer the whole company rightly applauded: "This is no time for what I can do; and what it is time for, I cannot do." Delivering orations and staging debates in a company gathered to laugh and eat well would have been badly out of tune — and the same could be said of all the other sciences. But philosophy, at least the part of her that deals with man and his offices and duties, is different: all the wise have agreed that her conversation is so sweet she should be welcome at every game and every dinner party. When Plato invited her to his banquet, we see how gently and gracefully she entertained the company, fitting herself to the time and place even while speaking of the loftiest things. As Horace says, she profits poor and rich alike — and neglected, she hurts young and old alike.
By this method of teaching, my young pupil will be far better occupied than his schoolmates at the college. But just as the steps we take pacing in a gallery, though three times as many, tire us less than the same steps on a fixed journey, so our lesson — happening as if by accident, with no set time or place, woven into everything we do — will sink in without his even noticing. Even his games and exercises will become a solid part of his study: running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, riding, fencing. I want his outward bearing, his manners, and the carriage of his body trained at the same time as his mind. It is not a soul we are educating; it is not a body. It is a man, and we must not split him in two. As Plato says, we shouldn't fashion one without the other, but drive them together like two horses harnessed to the same coach. And listening to him, doesn't he actually seem to give more time and care to exercising the body, trusting that the mind gets her workout at the same time?
For the rest, this education should be conducted with a severe gentleness — the very opposite of our pedants' practice. Instead of coaxing children toward learning by apt and kindly ways, our teachers present them with nothing but rods and canes, horror and cruelty. Away with this violence! Away with this compulsion! Nothing, I'm convinced, so dulls and degrades a well-born nature. If you want your boy to dread shame and punishment, don't harden him to them. Harden him instead to heat and cold, to wind and sun, to the dangers he ought to hold cheap. Wean him from all softness and fussiness in his clothes and his bed, his food and his drink. Get him used to everything, so he doesn't grow into a pretty Sir Paris, a carpet-knight, but a sinewy, hardy, vigorous young man. I have been of this opinion from childhood to the age I've reached now, and I hold it still.
But among other things, the discipline of most of our colleges has always disgusted me. They might have done less damage by erring on the indulgent side. A college is a genuine jail for captive youth. The boys are made debauched by being punished for debauchery before they've committed any. Just drop in while lessons are in session: you'll hear nothing but the shrieks of boys under torture and the thundering of schoolmasters drunk with rage. What a charming way to give tender, timid souls a love of their book — a furious face and a rod in the hand! A cursed and ruinous way of proceeding. Besides, as Quintilian rightly observed, this tyrannical authority carries dangerous consequences with it — especially our style of whipping. How much more fitting it would be to see their classrooms strewn with green leaves and fresh flowers than with the bloody stumps of birch and willow! If it were left to me, I would paint the schoolhouse with pictures of Joy and Gladness, with Flora and the Graces, as the philosopher Speusippus did his. Where children's profit is, let their pleasure be there too. Food that's good for a child should be sweetened with sugar; food that's bad for him, soured with gall.
It is marvelous to see how much care Plato takes, in his Laws, over the gaiety and amusements of the young people of his city — how long and often he dwells on their races, sports, songs, leaps, and dances, whose ordering and patronage, he says, antiquity entrusted to the gods themselves: to Apollo, Minerva, and the Muses. He goes on at length with endless rules for physical exercise. About book-learning he says very little, and seems to recommend poetry in particular only for the music's sake.
Every oddity in our manners and habits should be avoided as unfit for living among other people. Who wouldn't be astonished by a constitution like that of Demophoon, steward to Alexander the Great, who sweated in the shade and shivered in the sun? I've seen men flee the smell of a ripe apple faster than they'd flee gunfire; others terrified of a mouse; others who vomit at the sight of cream, or nearly faint when a feather bed is being shaken out. Germanicus could endure neither the sight nor the crowing of a rooster. There may, I grant, be some hidden cause and natural aversion in such cases; but in my opinion a man could conquer it if he took it in hand early. Training has worked so well on me — though not without some effort, I admit — that except for beer, my appetite adapts itself to any food you like.
Young bodies are supple, so that is the age to bend and shape them to every fashion and custom. Provided a young man can keep his appetite and his will within proper bounds, then in God's name make him fit for all nations and all companies — even, if need be, for excess and disorder, where the customs of the place call for it. Let him be able to do everything, and love to do nothing but what is good. The philosophers themselves don't excuse Callisthenes for losing the favor of his master Alexander the Great by refusing to match him cup for cup. Let the lad laugh, play, and carouse with his prince. Even in revelry, I'd want him to outdo the rest of the company in stamina and skill — so that if he refrains from doing wrong, it's never for lack of strength or knowledge, but purely for lack of will. As Seneca says, there is a vast difference between not wanting to sin and not knowing how.
I once thought I was paying a compliment to a certain lord — a man as free of these excesses as any in France — by asking him, in front of very good company, how many times in his life he had gotten drunk in Germany while there on the King's business. He took it exactly as intended, answered "Three times," and told us the whole story of his sprees. I know men who, lacking this talent, have been at a serious disadvantage negotiating with that nation. And I have often marveled at the wonderful constitution of Alcibiades, who could shift himself into such different styles without any damage to his health — now outdoing the Persians in pomp and luxury, now the Spartans in austerity and thrift; as reformed in Sparta as he was self-indulgent in Ionia. As Horace says, every shade of life, every station and circumstance, suited Aristippus. That's the kind of man I would make of my pupil — one, as Horace also says, who wears his patched cloak with patience, and would wear a changed fortune just as well, playing either part with equal grace.
These are my lessons. The one who puts them into practice will profit more than the one who merely has them read to him and only knows them. If you see him, you hear him; if you hear him, you see him. God forbid, says someone in Plato, that philosophizing should mean nothing more than reading a great many books and learning the arts. As Cicero says, the masters of that fullest of all arts — the discipline of living well — pursued it with their lives rather than their reading.
Leo, prince of the Phliasians, asked Heraclides Ponticus what art or science he professed. "I know neither art nor science," he answered, "but I am a philosopher." Someone sneered at Diogenes that an ignorant man had no business dabbling in philosophy. "Then I dabble in it," he replied, "with all the more reason." And when Hegesias begged him to read a certain book aloud, Diogenes said: "You amuse me. You choose real, natural figs over painted ones — so why not choose exercises that are real and natural over written ones?"
Our boy will not so much recite his lesson as practice it. He will repeat it in his actions. We shall see whether there is prudence in his undertakings, whether there is sincerity and justice in his conduct, grace and judgment in his speech; whether there is constancy in his sickness, modesty in his fun, temperance in his pleasures, order in his household, and indifference at his table — whether what he eats and drinks is meat or fish, wine or water. He should be a man, as Cicero says, who treats his learning not as a display of knowledge but as the law of his life — who obeys himself and abides by his own rules.
The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine. Zeuxidamus, asked why the Spartans did not write down their rules of valor and give them to their young men to read, answered that it was because they wanted to accustom them to deeds, not entertain them with words. Compare such a man, after fifteen or sixteen years of that schooling, with one of our college Latinists, who has thrown the same years away learning nothing but how to talk. The world is nothing but babble, and I have hardly ever met a man who didn't say too much rather than too little. Yet half our lives are embezzled this way: we're kept four or five years just learning words and stitching them into clauses; as many again shaping them into a long discourse, neatly divided into four or five parts; and another five years, at least, learning how to blend and interweave them in some subtle, intricate fashion. Let's leave all that to the people who make a profession of it.
Going to Orleans one day, I met, on the plain this side of Cléry, two pedants traveling toward Bordeaux, walking about fifty paces apart; and a good way behind them I spotted a troop of horsemen with a gentleman at their head — the late Comte de la Rochefoucauld. One of my servants asked the first of these masters of arts who the gentleman was who was coming along behind him. The pedant, who hadn't seen the riders and assumed his companion was meant, answered comically: "He is not a gentleman; he is a grammarian, and I am a logician." Now we, who are trying to breed exactly the opposite — not a grammarian or a logician but a gentleman — can leave these two to squander their leisure. Our business lies elsewhere.
Let our pupil only be well stocked with matter, and the words will follow all too readily; if they won't come on their own, he'll drag them after him. I've heard people excuse themselves on the grounds that they can't express what they mean — claiming their heads are full of fine things they simply can't deliver for lack of eloquence. That is a dodge, nothing more. Want to know what I think? Those fine things are shadows of half-formed notions they can't make sense of inside themselves, and so can't bring out. They don't yet understand what they're trying to say. Watch them hem and stammer at the moment of delivery and you'll see their struggle isn't with the birth at all — it's still back at the conception. They are only licking their shapeless embryo into form. For my part I hold — and Socrates insists on it — that whoever has a clear, living idea in his mind will get it out in one language or another, and if he's mute, in signs. As Horace says, once the thing is grasped, the words follow willingly. Another writer put it just as poetically in prose: when things take possession of the mind, says Seneca, the words come courting. And Cicero again: the things themselves seize the words to express them.
Our pupil may know nothing of ablatives, conjunctives, substantives, or grammar — but then, neither does his footman, or a fishwife on the Petit Pont, and they'll give you a bellyful of talk if you'll listen, and probably trip over their language as little as the finest masters of arts in France. He knows no rhetoric, nor how to butter up "the courteous reader" in a preface — and he doesn't care to. The truth is, all that pretty paintwork is wiped out in a moment by the shine of one plain, blunt truth. Those flourishes serve only to amuse the crowd, which can't digest more solid and nourishing food — as Aper demonstrates plainly in Tacitus.
The ambassadors of Samos came to Cleomenes, king of Sparta, armed with a long, elegant oration meant to stir him to war against the tyrant Polycrates. He heard their whole performance with great gravity and patience, and then gave them this answer: "As for your opening, I don't remember it — nor, therefore, the middle; and as for your conclusion, I will not do it." A very pretty answer, it seems to me, and a pack of learned orators left beached on the sand. And what about that other man? The Athenians were choosing between two architects for a great public building. The first, a slick, self-satisfied fellow, presented himself with a long rehearsed speech on the project and swayed the crowd in his favor. The other settled it in a few words: "Athenians, what this man says, I will do." When Cicero was at the full blaze of an eloquent harangue, many of the listeners were struck with admiration — but Cato only laughed and said, "We have an entertaining consul."
Coming before or coming after, a good maxim or a thing well said is always in season. If it doesn't quite fit what went before or what follows, it is still good in itself. I am not one of those who think good rhyme makes a good poem. Let the poet stretch a short syllable or clip a long one if he likes — what does it matter? If the invention is there, if wit and judgment have done their work well, I'll say: here is a good poet, but a bad rhymer.
Horace describes a writer of this kind: a man with a fine nose for things but rough at building verses. Take such a work, Horace says, and strip away the rhythm and meter — put the first word last and the last word first — and you will still find the scattered limbs of a poet. The pieces will be beautiful all by themselves. That is what Menander meant when a friend scolded him: the day was approaching when he had promised a comedy, and he hadn't even started it. "It's finished and ready," Menander said. "All but the verses." Having worked out the subject and arranged the scenes in his head, he counted the rest as nothing.
Since Ronsard and Du Bellay raised the reputation of our French poetry, every little dabbler, as far as I can see, puffs up his words as grandly and rolls out his cadences almost as harmoniously as they do. More sound than sense, as Seneca says. For the common run of writers, there have never been so many poetasters as there are now. They find it easy enough to copy the rhymes; what they fall infinitely short of copying is the rich descriptions of the one master and the delicate invention of the other.
But what will become of our young gentleman if someone attacks him with the sophistic subtlety of a syllogism? "A Westphalia ham makes a man drink; drinking quenches thirst; therefore a Westphalia ham quenches thirst." Why, let him laugh at it. Laughing is wiser than trying to answer it. Or let him borrow that pleasant dodge of Aristippus: "Why should I bother to untie it, when it gives me this much trouble tied?" When someone tried this dialectical juggling on Cleanthes, Chrysippus cut him short: "Save those toys for playing with children, and stop distracting the serious thoughts of a grown man with such foolery." If these absurd subtleties — twisted and prickly sophisms, Cicero calls them — are designed to plant a falsehood in him, they are dangerous. But if they amount to nothing more than making him laugh, I don't see why a man needs to be fortified against them.
Some writers are so ridiculous they will go a mile out of their way to chase down a fine word — the kind, as Quintilian says, who don't fit words to their subject, but go hunting for subjects to fit their words. And as Seneca puts it, the kind who are lured by some pretty-sounding phrase into writing about something they never meant to touch. For my own part, I would rather drag in a good sentence by the head and shoulders to serve my purpose than bend my purpose to go hunting for a sentence. Words exist to serve; they should follow a man's meaning — and let Gascon step in where French won't do the job. I want the matter to be so compelling, so completely possessing the imagination of the listener, that he has no attention left over for the words.
The way of speaking I love is natural and plain, the same on paper as in the mouth — a sinewy, muscular way of expressing yourself, short and pithy; not so much elegant and polished as prompt and forceful. The speech with real savor, says an old epitaph, is the speech that strikes home. Rather hard than tiresome; free of affectation; irregular, loose-jointed, and bold, where every piece stands as a body of its own. Not the style of a pedant, a preacher, or a lawyer, but rather a soldier's style — which is what Suetonius calls Julius Caesar's, though I confess I can't see why he calls it that.
I have always been ready to imitate that careless dress you still see among the young men of our day — cloak slung over one shoulder, cap tilted to one side, a stocking sagging — which expresses a kind of proud disdain for foreign frills and a contempt for the artificial. But I find that same carelessness even better employed in a way of speaking. All affectation is ungraceful in a courtier, especially in our French gaiety and freedom; and in a monarchy every gentleman ought to be shaped to the court's model. So an easy, natural negligence wears well. I no more like a fabric where you can see every knot and seam than a fine figure so thin you can count the bones and veins. Language in the service of truth, says Seneca, should be plain and unstudied; and again: who speaks with elaborate care, unless he wants to sound affected?
Eloquence that draws all the attention to itself cheats the very subject it was meant to advance. Just as it is a ridiculous vanity in dress to make ourselves conspicuous by some private, peculiar fashion, so in language the hunt for novel phrases and unheard-of words comes from a childish, schoolmasterish ambition. Let me be bound to use no other words than the ones spoken in the markets of Paris! Aristophanes the grammarian completely missed the point when he criticized Epicurus for his plain way of speaking, since the whole aim of his oratory was simply to be understood.
The imitation of words is so easy that a whole people picks it up at once; the imitation of inventing, and of applying words fitly, comes much more slowly. Most readers, finding two robes alike, mistakenly believe the bodies inside are alike too. But force and sinew cannot be borrowed; only the gloss and the outward finery — the words and delivery — can. Most of the people I talk with speak the same language I am writing here; whether they think the same thoughts, I couldn't say.
The Athenians, Plato says, cultivate fullness and elegance of speech, the Spartans brevity, and the Cretans fertility of thought rather than fertility of language — and the Cretans have it right. Zeno used to say he had two sorts of students: one sort curious to learn things — these were his favorites — and the other caring for nothing but words. Not that fine speaking isn't a good and admirable quality. But it is not so excellent or so necessary as some make it out to be, and it scandalizes me that we should spend our whole lives on nothing else. I would first want to understand my own language, and the language of my neighbors, with whom I do most of my business and most of my talking.
Greek and Latin are great ornaments, no doubt, and of great use. But we buy them too dear. I will tell you here of one way to get them cheaper — a way tested on my own person — and whoever likes may use it. My late father made the most careful inquiry a man could make, among men of the greatest learning and judgment, after an exact method of education. They warned him about the drawback of the usual practice: they had him believe that the tedious years we spend learning languages that cost the ancients nothing were the sole reason we could never reach the grandeur of soul and the perfection of knowledge of the old Greeks and Romans. I don't believe that's the only reason. Still, the expedient my father hit upon was this. In my infancy, before I could speak at all, he put me in the care of a German — a man who later died a famous physician in France — who knew not a word of our language and was fluent and expert in Latin. This man, whom my father had brought from his own country and kept on a great salary for this one purpose, had me constantly in his hands. Two others of lesser learning were joined to him, to attend me and relieve him; and these spoke to me in no language but Latin.
As for the rest of the household, it was an unbreakable rule that neither my father himself, nor my mother, nor manservant, nor chambermaid would speak anything in my presence except whatever scraps of Latin each had managed to learn in order to chatter with me. It is hard to imagine how much the whole family got out of this. My father and mother picked up enough Latin to understand it perfectly well, and to speak it as much as ordinary needs required; so did the servants who were most about me. In short, we Latined it at such a rate that the language spilled over into the neighboring villages, where to this day you can find Latin names for craftsmen and their tools, planted there by custom.
As for me, I was more than six years old before I understood French or Périgordin any better than Arabic. And without art, book, grammar, or rule — without the whip, and without the cost of a single tear — I had learned by then to speak Latin as pure as my master's own, for I had no other language to mix in with it. If, for instance, they wanted to give me a written exercise in the college manner, where other boys received it in French, mine had to be given in bad Latin, for me to turn into good. And Nicolas Grouchy, who wrote a book on Roman assemblies; Guillaume Guerente, who wrote a commentary on Aristotle; George Buchanan, that great Scottish poet; and Marc Antoine Muret, whom both France and Italy acknowledged as the best orator of his time — all of them my private tutors — often told me afterward that as a small child I had that language so fluent and ready that they were afraid to strike up a conversation with me. Buchanan in particular, whom I later saw in the suite of the late Marshal de Brissac, told me he was planning to write a treatise on education and meant to take his model from mine; he was then tutor to that Comte de Brissac who later proved so valiant and gallant a gentleman.
As for Greek, of which I have barely a smattering, my father planned to have me taught that too by a device — but a new one, by way of sport, tossing declensions back and forth like those games of counters by which people learn geometry and arithmetic. For among the other advice he had received, he had been told to make me relish learning and duty by my own free will and desire, and to bring up my soul in complete liberty and delight, without severity or constraint. And he observed this to the point of superstition, if I may put it that way. Some people hold that it troubles the tender brains of children to be jerked suddenly and violently out of sleep in the morning — sleep being a thing they are sunk in far more deeply than we are — so my father had me wakened every day by the sound of a musical instrument, and was never without a musician for the purpose. This one example will let you judge the rest, and it is enough by itself to commend both the prudence and the affection of so good a father — who is in no way to blame if he harvested no fruit answering to so exquisite a cultivation.
Two things were the cause of that. First, a sterile and unsuitable soil. Though I had a strong, healthy constitution and a disposition gentle and tractable enough, I was at the same time so heavy, slack, and drowsy that they couldn't pull me out of my idleness even to play. What I saw, I saw clearly enough; and underneath that sluggish temperament I nursed a bold imagination, and opinions beyond my years. But my mind was slow, and would move no faster than it was led; my understanding tardy, my invention limp; and on top of everything, an incredible lack of memory. No wonder nothing much could be extracted from all that. And second: like those people who, impatient with a long and steady cure, will try every prescription and remedy going, the good man — terribly afraid of failing in a thing he had set his whole heart on — finally let himself be overruled by the common opinion, which always trails after its leader like a flight of cranes. He fell in with the custom of the day, no longer having around him the men from Italy who had given him his first model of education, and sent me at six years old to the College of Guienne, then the best and most flourishing in France. And there, nothing could be added to the care he took — choosing me the ablest private tutors, securing every other advantage, reserving several special arrangements contrary to the usual college practice. But for all these precautions, it was a college still. My Latin promptly went bad, and since then, through disuse, I have lost all command of it. All that this novel education did for me was to vault me, on arrival, into the upper forms. By thirteen, when I left the college, I had finished my whole course, as they call it — and in truth with nothing to show for it that I can honestly brag of now.
My first taste for books came from the pleasure of reading the fables of Ovid's Metamorphoses. At about seven or eight years old I gave up every other amusement to read them — partly because that language was my own mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew, and by its subject the best suited to my age. As for Lancelot of the Lake, Amadis of Gaul, Huon of Bordeaux, and that whole heap of trash that children love best, I had never so much as heard their names — and to this day I don't know what's in them — so strict was the discipline I was raised under. But Ovid was enough to make me neglect my assigned lessons. And here I had the enormous luck of dealing with an understanding tutor, who knew how to look the other way, discreetly, at this and other truancies of the same kind. By that means I ran through Virgil's Aeneid, then Terence, then Plautus, then some Italian comedies, drawn on by the sweetness of the subject. If he had been fool enough to break me of this diversion, I truly believe I would have carried nothing away from school but a hatred of books, as almost all our young gentlemen do. He managed the business cleverly — pretending to see nothing, and sharpening my appetite by letting me devour those books only in the time I could steal from my regular studies. For the chief qualities my father wanted from the men he had entrusted with my education were good nature and good humor; and to tell the truth, my character had no vices in it but sloth and want of mettle. The danger was not that I would do ill, but that I would do nothing. Nobody predicted I would turn out wicked — only useless. They foresaw idleness, not malice.
And so it has turned out. The complaints I hear about myself run like this: "He is idle; cold in the duties of friendship and kinship, and in public duties; too private; too disdainful." Even the most hostile do not say, "Why did he take that? Why didn't he pay this man?" — but, "Why won't he part with anything? Why doesn't he give?" I would take it as a favor if people expected from me no extra works of generosity beyond those. But they are unjust: they demand from me what I do not owe far more rigorously than they demand from others what they do owe. In condemning me to it ahead of time, they wipe out the pleasure of the act and rob me of the gratitude that would be its proper reward — whereas any good deed from my hands ought to count for more, precisely because I have never received any. I can dispose the more freely of my fortune the more it is mine, and of myself the more I am my own. All the same, if I were any good at publishing my own actions, I could perhaps answer these reproaches very well — and could give certain people to understand that they are not so much offended that I do too little, as that I could do a great deal more than I do.
Yet for all this heavy disposition of mine, my mind, when it withdrew into itself, was not without strong movements, and sound, clear judgments about whatever objects it could reach — and it could digest them alone, without any help. And among other things, I genuinely believe it would have been completely impossible to make it submit to violence and force. Shall I tell you about one faculty of my youth? I had great confidence of face, and flexibility of voice and gesture, in throwing myself into whatever part I undertook to act. Before I had well entered my twelfth year — as Virgil puts it — I was playing the leading roles in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, Guerente, and Muret, which were staged with great dignity in our College of Guienne. Our principal, Andreas Goveanus, was in this, as in every other part of his office, beyond comparison the best in France; and I was reckoned one of the best actors.
It is an exercise I see nothing wrong with in young people of good family. I have since watched our princes, following the example of some of the ancients, perform in person, handsomely and creditably; in Greece it was even allowed to persons of quality to make a profession of it. Livy tells how a secret was entrusted to Aristo the tragedian — a man of good family and fortune, neither of which was tarnished by his profession, since nothing of the kind was held a disgrace among the Greeks.
I have always called it impertinence to condemn these entertainments, and injustice to bar comedians worth seeing from our good towns, grudging the people that public pleasure. Well-governed states take care to assemble their citizens not only for the solemn duties of devotion but for sports and spectacles too. Fellowship and friendship grow from it. And besides, what diversion could be more orderly and regular than one performed in full view of everyone, often in the presence of the magistrate himself? For my part, I think it reasonable that a prince should sometimes treat his people at his own expense, out of a kind of fatherly goodness and affection; and that in populous cities there should be theaters built for such entertainments — if only to draw people away from worse and private doings.
To come back to my subject: there is nothing like coaxing the appetite and the affections. Otherwise all you produce is so many donkeys loaded down with books. By dint of the whip, you hand them their pocketful of learning to carry. But to do the job properly, learning shouldn't merely be lodged with them; it should be married to them.
Watching a painter who works for me, I had a mind to imitate his method. He picks out the fairest spot, the middle of each wall, and puts there a picture labored over with all his skill; and the empty space around it he fills with grotesques — odd, fantastic figures with no charm except their variety and the extravagance of their shapes. And honestly, what are these things I scribble but grotesques and monstrous bodies, patched together from assorted parts, with no definite shape, and no order, sequence, or proportion except by accident? As Horace says, a lovely woman ends, below the waist, in a fish.
In this second part I keep pace with my painter well enough; but I fall far short of him in the first and better part, because my skill doesn't stretch to attempting a rich, polished picture, finished according to the rules of art. So I decided to borrow one from Étienne de La Boétie — one that will honor and adorn all the rest of this work. I mean a discourse he called Voluntary Servitude, though those who never knew him have since renamed it, aptly enough, Against One. He wrote it in his youth, as an exercise, in honor of liberty against tyrants. It has long since passed through the hands of men of learning and judgment, and won high and deserved praise, for it is finely written, and as full as a thing can be.
And yet one can fairly say it falls far short of what he could do. If, in the riper age when I had the good luck to know him, he had taken up a plan like mine — to put his thoughts in writing — we would have seen many rare things, things that would have come very near rivaling the best of the ancients. In natural gifts especially, I know no one comparable to him. But he left nothing behind except that treatise — and even that by chance; I believe he never saw it again after it first left his hands — and some observations on that Edict of January which our civil wars have made famous, which may yet find their place elsewhere. That was all I could recover of his remains — I, to whom, with so loving a remembrance, on his deathbed, he willed his library and his papers — besides the little volume of his works that I have since had printed.
And I owe this treatise a particular debt, because it was the occasion of our first acquaintance. It was shown to me long before I ever saw him, and gave me my first knowledge of his name; and so it set going the friendship which, for as long as God was pleased to leave us together, we kept up so perfect, so inviolate, and so entire that you will hardly read of its like — and among the men of our own day there is no sign or trace of any such thing in practice. So much has to come together to build it that it is much if fortune manages it once in three centuries.
There is nothing nature seems to have made us for so much as society; and Aristotle says the good lawgivers took more care of friendship than of justice. Now the highest point of its perfection is this: that it exist for its own sake. Generally, all the attachments that pleasure, profit, or public or private need creates and feeds are so much the less beautiful and noble — so much the less friendships — to the degree that they mix into friendship some other cause and aim and reward than friendship itself. Nor do the four ancient kinds — natural, social, hospitable, erotic — make up a true and perfect friendship, whether taken separately or together.
That of children for parents is really respect. Friendship feeds on a communication that cannot exist between them, the gap being too great; and it might even offend against the duties of nature. Not all a father's secret thoughts are fit to share with his children, for fear of breeding an unbecoming familiarity; and the warnings and corrections, which are among the chief offices of friendship, cannot properly be performed by son toward father. There have been nations where custom had the children kill their fathers, and others where the fathers killed their children, to keep one from standing in the other's way in life; and naturally what the one expects depends on the other's ruin. There have been great philosophers who made nothing of this natural tie. Aristippus, for one: when they pressed him about the affection he owed his children, seeing they had come out of him, he started spitting, and said that this had come out of him too — that we also breed worms and lice. And there was that other man, whom Plutarch tried to reconcile with his brother, who said: "I don't value him the more for having come out of the same hole."
Brother is, in truth, a fine name and full of affection — which is why he and I made it our name for each other. But the tangling of interests, the dividing of estates, the fact that one's wealth must be the other's poverty — these strangely loosen and weaken the brotherly tie. Brothers pushing their fortunes and advancement along the same path can hardly help jostling and blocking each other at every step. Besides, why should the harmony of character, mind, and inclination that breeds true and perfect friendship be found in these relations? Father and son may be of entirely opposite temperaments, and brothers too. He is my son, he is my brother — but he is hot-tempered, ill-natured, or a fool. And then, the more these are friendships that law and natural obligation lay upon us, the less there is in them of our own choice and free will; and our free will produces nothing more promptly and properly its own than affection and friendship. Not that I haven't tasted, in my own person, everything that kind of bond can give. I had the best and most indulgent father that ever was, even into his extreme old age, and he came of a family famous and exemplary for generations in the matter of brotherly concord — he was himself, as Horace says of himself, known for a father's love toward his brothers.
Nor can we bring in here the love we bear to women, though it is an act of our own choice, or set it in this rank. Its fire, I confess — and the goddess who mixes a sweet bitterness into love is no stranger to me, as Catullus admits — is more active, more scorching, more sharp. But it is a rash and fickle flame, wavering and inconstant, a fever that comes and goes in fits, and that holds us only by one corner. The fire of friendship is general and universal, but temperate and even — a constant, settled warmth, all gentleness and smoothness, with nothing harsh or stinging in it. What's more, love is nothing but a frantic desire for what flees from us. It is Ariosto's hunter, who chases the hare through heat and cold, over mountain and shore, prizes it nothing once he sees it caught, and only runs hard after the thing that runs away. As soon as love crosses into the territory of friendship — that is, into an agreement of wills — it droops and goes out. Enjoyment destroys it, because its end is bodily, and bodies get their fill. Friendship, on the contrary, is enjoyed in exact proportion as it is desired. It rises, grows, and feeds only on enjoyment, because it is spiritual, and the soul grows finer with use. Under this perfect friendship those fleeting affections found a place in me too, in my younger years — to say nothing of him, who confesses more than enough of them in his verses. So I had both passions in me, but always so that I could tell them apart; and they were never in any degree of comparison — the first holding its course in so lofty and proud a flight that it looked down with disdain at the other beating along far below it.
As for marriage: besides being a bargain where only the entrance is free — its continuance is forced and compelled, hanging on something other than our will — and a bargain ordinarily struck for other ends, it comes with a thousand foreign tangles to unravel, enough to snap the thread and trouble the course of a living affection. Friendship has no business or traffic with anything but itself. Add to this, to tell the truth, that the ordinary capacity of women is not up to the kind of converse and communication that feeds this sacred bond; nor do their souls seem firm enough to bear the strain of so hard and lasting a knot. And certainly, if it were not for that — if there could be such a free and willing relationship in which not only the souls had this entire enjoyment, but the bodies also shared in the union, so that the whole person was engaged — the friendship would no doubt be fuller and more complete. But there is no example yet of that sex arriving at it, and by the common consent of the ancient schools it is excluded.
And that other Greek licence is justly abhorred by our morals. Besides, since their practice required so necessary a disparity of age and difference of office between the lovers, it answered no better than the love of women to the perfect union and harmony we are asking for here. For what is this love of friendship, Cicero asks — why does no one love an ugly young man, or a handsome old one? Even the picture the Academy paints of it will not, I think, contradict me when I say this: that the first frenzy, breathed by the son of Venus into the lover's heart at the sight of the flower and prime of a budding youth — a frenzy to which they allow all the insolent and passionate excesses that an immoderate ardor can produce — was founded simply on outward beauty, the false image of bodily generation. It could not be founded on the soul, which was still hidden from sight, only just springing up, too young to show what it would become. If that frenzy seized a base spirit, the means of his courtship were rich presents, favor and advancement to office, and other such trash — which they by no means approve. If it fell on a nobler soul, the means were noble in proportion: instruction in philosophy; precepts to revere religion, to obey the laws, to die for the good of one's country; examples of valor, prudence, and justice — the lover laboring to make himself acceptable by the grace and beauty of his soul, that of his body being long since faded, and hoping by this fellowship of mind to establish a firmer and more lasting bond.
When this courtship came to its effect in due season — for what they do not require in the lover, namely leisure and discretion in his pursuit, they strictly require in the one loved, since he has to judge an inner beauty, hard to know and slow to discover — then there was born in the beloved the desire of a spiritual conception, by the mediation of a spiritual beauty. In him, this was the principal thing; the bodily part was accidental and secondary — the exact reverse of the lover. For this reason they rank the beloved higher, and maintain that the gods do too; and they greatly blame the poet Aeschylus for giving the lover's part, in the loves of Achilles and Patroclus, to Achilles, who was in the first beardless flower of his youth and the handsomest of all the Greeks. After this general communion was established, the sovereign and worthiest part presiding and performing its proper offices, they say great benefit came of it, both to private men and to the public; that it made the strength of the countries where it was received, and was the chief safeguard of liberty and justice — witness the wholesome loves of Harmodius and Aristogiton. So they called it sacred and divine, and held that nothing was its enemy but the violence of tyrants and the baseness of the common people. In the end, all that can be granted to the Academy is that this was a love which finished in friendship — which agrees well enough with the Stoic definition of love, as Cicero reports it: love is the attempt to form a friendship out of the appearance of beauty.
I come back to my own description, which is juster and truer: only those friendships deserve the name, as Cicero says, that are fortified and confirmed by mature judgment and length of time.
For the rest, what we commonly call friends and friendships are nothing but acquaintances and familiarities, knit by some chance or convenience, by means of which our souls hold a little conversation. But in the friendship I am speaking of, the souls mix and blend into each other so completely that they wear away the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again. If you pressed me to say why I loved him, I feel it could only be expressed by answering: Because it was he; because it was I.
There is, beyond all my reasoning and beyond everything I can say in particular, some inexplicable and fated force that brokered this union. We were seeking each other before we ever met, on the strength of what we heard of each other — which worked on our affections more than, in reason, mere reports should. I think it was some ordinance of heaven. We embraced each other in our names. And at our first meeting, which happened by chance at a great town feast, we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well known to each other, so bound to each other, that from then on nothing was as near to us as each other. He wrote an excellent Latin satire, since published, in which he excuses and explains the haste of our understanding, so quickly grown to its perfection. Having so little time to last, and having begun so late — for we were both grown men, and he some years the older — it had no time to lose, and no reason to pattern itself on those slow, regular friendships that need so many precautions of long preliminary acquaintance.
This friendship has no model but itself, and can be compared only to itself. It was not one special consideration, nor two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand. It was some quintessence of the whole mixture which, having seized my entire will, led it to plunge and lose itself in his; which, having seized his entire will, led it to plunge and lose itself in mine, with an equal hunger and an equal striving. I say lose, in all truth, for we kept back nothing for ourselves — nothing that was either his or mine.
When Laelius, in the presence of the Roman consuls — who, after condemning Tiberius Gracchus, were prosecuting everyone who had been close to him — came to ask Caius Blosius, Gracchus's dearest friend, how much he would have done for him, Blosius answered: "Everything." "What, everything?" said Laelius. "And what if he had commanded you to set fire to our temples?" "He would never have commanded me that," Blosius replied. "But what if he had?" Laelius pressed. "I would have obeyed him," said the other. If he was as perfect a friend to Gracchus as the histories report, he had no need to provoke the consuls with that last bold confession; though he might well have stood firm in the assurance he had of Gracchus's will. But those who condemn his answer as seditious do not really understand the mystery, and fail to presuppose what was true: that he held Gracchus's will in his sleeve, both by the power of a friend and by his perfect knowledge of the man. They were friends more than citizens — friends more than friends or enemies of their country, or friends of ambition and upheaval. Having given themselves absolutely to each other, each held absolutely the reins of the other's inclination. Suppose this team driven by virtue and guided by reason — and without that it cannot be harnessed at all — and Blosius's answer is exactly what it ought to have been. If their actions ever flew out of the handle, then by my measure of friendship they were neither friends to each other nor friends to themselves.
Besides, that answer sounds no worse than mine would, if someone asked me, "If your will commanded you to kill your daughter, would you kill her?" and I answered yes. That implies no consent to the deed, because I have no shadow of doubt about my own will — and just as little about the will of such a friend. All the eloquence in the world has no power to dislodge me from the certainty I have of his intentions and judgments. Not one action of his could be put before me — whatever face it wore — without my finding its motive at first sight. Our souls pulled so exactly together, they regarded each other with so ardent an affection, and with the same affection laid open to each other the very bottom of our hearts, that I not only knew his soul as well as my own, but in any business of mine I would sooner have trusted myself to him than to myself.
Let no one set those other, common friendships in the same rank as this. I know them as well as the next man, and the most perfect of their kind too; but I advise against mixing up their rules — you would be badly deceived. In those other friendships you must walk with the bridle in your hand, with prudence and caution; the knot is not tied so tight that there is no cause to mistrust it. "Love him," said Chilo, "as if you must one day hate him; and hate him as if you must one day love him." This precept, which would be an abomination in the sovereign and ruling friendship I am describing, is perfectly sound in the practice of ordinary and customary ones — to which you may also apply the saying Aristotle had so often in his mouth: "O my friends, there is no friend."
In this noble commerce, the services and benefits that feed other friendships do not even deserve to be counted. The reason is the complete fusion of our wills. For just as the kindness I have for myself gets no increase from the help I give myself in time of need — whatever the Stoics say — and just as I feel no gratitude to myself for any service I do myself, so the union of such friends, being truly perfect, makes them lose the very feeling of such duties, and hate and banish from between them these words of division and difference: benefit, obligation, gratitude, request, thanks, and the rest. Everything being actually common between them — wills, thoughts, judgments, goods, wives, children, honor, and life — and their agreement being that of one soul in two bodies, by Aristotle's very apt definition, they can neither lend nor give anything to each other. That is why the lawmakers, to honor marriage with some imagined resemblance to this divine bond, forbid gifts between husband and wife: to infer by it that everything should belong to both of them, and that they have nothing to divide or share out.
In the friendship I am speaking of, if one could give to the other, it is the one receiving the kindness who would oblige his friend. For since each of them, above everything, is looking for the chance to do the other good, the one who supplies the matter and the occasion is the generous one — giving his friend the satisfaction of doing for him the very thing he most desires. When the philosopher Diogenes was short of money, he used to say he asked his friends to give it back, not to give it.
And to show how this works in practice, here is a singular old example. Eudamidas of Corinth had two friends, Charixenus of Sicyon and Areteus of Corinth. Coming to die a poor man, his two friends being rich, he made his will like this: "I bequeath to Areteus the keeping of my mother, to support and provide for her in her old age. To Charixenus I bequeath the marrying of my daughter, and the giving of as large a dowry as he can manage. And in case one of them should die, I substitute the survivor in his place." Those who first saw this will had a good laugh at it. But the heirs, once they were told, accepted it with extraordinary satisfaction; and when Charixenus died five days later, and both charges fell to Areteus alone, he kept the old woman with great care and tenderness, and of the five talents he had in his estate, he gave two and a half in marriage with his own only daughter, and two and a half in marriage with the daughter of Eudamidas — and held both weddings on the same day.
This example is very full — except for one objection: the plurality of friends. For the perfect friendship I am speaking of is indivisible. Each gives himself so entirely to his friend that he has nothing left to share elsewhere. On the contrary, he is sorry he is not double, triple, quadruple — sorry he does not have several souls and several wills, so as to confer them all on this one object. Common friendships can be divided up: you can love the beauty of this man, the easy temper of that one, the generosity of a third, a father's affection in a fourth, a brother's in a fifth, and so on. But this friendship that possesses the whole soul, and rules there with absolute sovereignty, cannot possibly be doubled. If two friends called for your help at the same moment, which would you run to? If they asked contrary services of you, how could you serve both? If one trusted to your silence a thing it mattered for the other to know, how would you get clear? A single, ruling friendship dissolves every other obligation. The secret I have sworn to reveal to no other, I can impart without perjury to him who is not another: he is myself. It is a great enough miracle for a man to double himself; those who talk of tripling do not know the height of the thing. Nothing is extreme that has its match. And whoever supposes that of two friends I love one as much as the other, and that they love each other and love me just as I love them, multiplies into a brotherhood the most single and unified thing in the world — the thing of which even one example is the hardest in the world to find.
The rest of that story fits very well with what I was saying. For Eudamidas grants it to his friends, as a kindness and a favor, to be of use to him in his need. He leaves them heirs to his own generosity, which consists in putting into their hands the means of doing him good. And without doubt the force of friendship shows far more richly in his act than in Areteus's. In short, these are effects beyond the imagining of anyone who has not tasted them. They make me honor beyond measure the answer of that young soldier to Cyrus, who asked him how much he would take for a horse that had just won him the prize in a race — whether he would trade it for a kingdom: "No indeed, Sire. But I would gladly let him go to gain a true friend by it, if I could find a man worthy of such an alliance." He did not speak badly when he said "if I could find." You can easily enough find men fit for a superficial acquaintance. But in this kind, where a man deals from the very bottom of his heart and holds nothing back, you can be sure that every spring of the works must be perfectly true and perfectly sure.
In partnerships that hold only by one end, we need only guard against the flaws that touch that particular end. It cannot matter to me what religion my doctor or my lawyer holds; that consideration has nothing in common with the services of friendship they owe me. And in the household dealings between me and my servants, I take the same line. I hardly ask whether a footman is chaste; I ask whether he is diligent. A gambling muleteer troubles me less than a weak one, a foul-mouthed cook less than an ignorant one. I do not set up to tell the world what it should do — plenty of others meddle with that — only to give an account of what I do in it. As Terence has it: this is my way; as for you, do as you find needful.
At table I prefer the witty to the wise; in bed, beauty before goodness; in conversation, the best talker, sincere or not. And so with everything else. There was a man caught astride a stick, playing horses with his children, who asked the one who surprised him to say nothing of it until he was a father himself — judging that the fondness which would then be born in his own soul would make him a fair judge of the sight. So I, too, could wish I were speaking only to people who have experienced what I am telling. But knowing how far such a friendship lies from common practice, and how rare it is, I do not expect to meet a single good judge of it. For even the discourses antiquity has left us on the subject seem flat and weak to me beside the feeling I have of it. And in this point the facts outdo the very precepts of philosophy. As Horace says, while I have my senses, there is nothing I would set against an agreeable friend.
Old Menander called that man happy who had managed to meet even the shadow of a friend. He certainly had reason to say so, especially if he spoke from experience. For in truth, if I compare all the rest of my life — though by God's grace I have passed it pleasantly enough, comfortably, and, except for the loss of such a friend, free of any heavy affliction, in great tranquility of mind, content with my natural and original advantages without hunting after others — if I compare the whole of it, I say, with the four years I was given to enjoy the sweet company and society of that excellent man, it is nothing but smoke, nothing but a dark and tedious night.
Since the day I lost him — a day forever bitter to me, forever honored, for so, you gods, you willed it, as Virgil says — I have only dragged out a languishing life. Even the pleasures that offer themselves to me, instead of consoling me, double my grief at his loss. We went halves in everything; it seems to me now that by outliving him I am stealing his share. I had resolved, as Terence's character says, that it was not right for me to enjoy any pleasure while the partner of all my pleasures was gone.
I was already so accustomed to be always two, everywhere and in everything, that it seems to me now I am no more than half of myself. If an untimely blow carried off that half of my soul, as Horace asks, why do I linger here, the other half — not so dear now, and not whole? The same day was the ruin of us both.
There is no action or thought of mine in which I do not miss him — as I know he would have missed me. For just as he surpassed me by infinite degrees in virtue and every other ability, so he did in the duty of friendship. What shame or measure can there be, Horace asks, in mourning a head so dear? And Catullus's lament for his brother says it for me: O brother, torn from me in my misery — with you all our joys have gone, the joys your sweet love fed while you lived. Dying, brother, you shattered all my happiness; my whole soul is buried with you; since your death I have driven from my mind these studies and every delight of the mind. Shall I never speak with you, never hear you speak again? Never see you again, brother dearer than life itself? At least I will love you always.
But let us hear this boy of sixteen speak for a while.
Because I have found that this work has since been brought out, and to a bad end, by men who aim to disturb and change the state of our government without troubling themselves whether they will improve it — and because they have mixed it in among writings of their own making — I have changed my mind about placing it here. And so that the author's memory may take no harm with those who could not know his opinions and his conduct at close hand, I tell them that he treated this subject in his boyhood, only by way of exercise, as a common theme worked over in a thousand books. I have no doubt he believed what he wrote, for he was conscientious enough not to lie even in jest. And I know besides that, had the choice been his, he would rather have been born in Venice than in Sarlat — and with reason. But he had another maxim sovereignly imprinted on his soul: to obey, and most religiously to submit to, the laws under which he was born. There never was a better citizen, or one who cared more for his country's quiet, or a sharper enemy of the commotions and innovations of his time. He would far sooner have used his talents to put out those civil fires than to give them anything to feed on. His mind was cast in the mold of better ages than ours.
So, in exchange for that serious work, I will substitute another from the same hand, written in the same season of his life — but of a gayer and more playful air.
When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy and got his first good look at the army the Romans had sent against him, he said: "I don't know what kind of barbarians these are" — the Greeks called all foreigners barbarians — "but there is nothing barbarous about the way this army is arranged." The Greeks said much the same about the army Flaminius brought into their country, and Philip, looking down from a hill at the order and layout of the Roman camp in his kingdom, said it too. Which shows how careful we ought to be about swallowing common opinion. We should judge things by the eye of reason, not by popular report.
For a long time I had a man living in my house who had spent ten or twelve years in the New World — the one discovered in our own century, in the region where Villegaignon landed and which he named Antarctic France. The discovery of so vast a country seems to me worth thinking about seriously. And I cannot promise that another one won't turn up tomorrow, since so many men wiser than we are have been wrong about this already. I am afraid our eyes are bigger than our stomachs — that we have more curiosity than capacity. We grab at everything and catch nothing but wind.
Plato has Solon tell a story he heard from the priests of Saïs in Egypt: that long ago, before the Flood, there was a great island called Atlantis, sitting right at the mouth of the Straits of Gibraltar, larger than Africa and Asia put together. Its kings owned not just the island but a stretch of the mainland too — across Africa as far as Egypt, and into Europe as far as Tuscany — and they set out to swallow Asia as well, and to subdue every nation bordering the Mediterranean all the way to the Black Sea. They overran Spain, Gaul, and Italy, and pushed into Greece, where the Athenians stopped them. Some time after, the Athenians, the invaders, and the island itself were all swallowed by the Flood.
It is quite likely that this tremendous rush of water made strange changes in the dwelling places of the earth. They say it was the sea that split Sicily from Italy — "these lands, once a single country, were torn apart by violence and vast ruin," as Virgil has it — and Cyprus from Syria, and the island of Negropont from the mainland of Boeotia; and that elsewhere it joined lands that had been separate, filling the channels between them with sand and mud. "What was long a sterile marsh, where oars dipped, now feeds neighboring cities and feels the weight of the plough," says Horace.
But there is no real chance that this island was the New World we have just discovered. Atlantis practically touched Spain, and it would take an unbelievable flood to shove it back more than twelve hundred leagues. Besides, our modern navigators have nearly established that the New World is no island at all but solid mainland — joined to the East Indies on one side and to the lands under the two poles on the other, or, if it is cut off from them, cut off by a strait so narrow that it hardly earns the name of island on that account.
It seems that in this great body of the world, as in our own, there are two kinds of motion: one natural, the other feverish. When I consider what my own river, the Dordogne, has done in my lifetime to the right bank as it flows down — how much ground it has gained in twenty years, undermining the foundations of house after house — I can see this is no ordinary disturbance. If it had always moved at this pace, or were to keep it up, the face of the world would be turned upside down. But rivers change their moods: sometimes they wear at one bank, sometimes the other, and sometimes they keep quietly to their channel. I am not talking about sudden floods, whose causes everyone understands. In Médoc, along the seashore, my brother the Sieur d'Arsac watches an estate of his lie buried under the sand the sea vomits up ahead of itself. The rooftops of some buildings can still be seen; his rents and farmland have turned into miserably thin pasture. The locals say the sea has been driving at them so hard in recent years that they have lost four leagues of land. These sands are her advance scouts — and we can see great dunes of moving sand marching half a league ahead of her, conquering ground.
The other ancient testimony that people try to attach to this discovery is in Aristotle — at least if that little book of Unheard-of Wonders is really his. He tells us there that certain Carthaginians, having struck out across the Atlantic beyond the Straits of Gibraltar and sailed a very long time, finally discovered a great fertile island, all covered with woods and watered by broad, deep rivers, far from any mainland. They — and others after them, drawn by the goodness and richness of the soil — went there with their wives and children and started a colony. But the senate of Carthage, seeing its population draining away little by little, issued an express ban, on pain of death, against anyone else going, and drove out the new settlers — fearing, it is said, that in time they would multiply enough to supplant Carthage herself and ruin the state. But Aristotle's tale fits our new lands no better than Plato's.
This man of mine was a plain, simple fellow — which makes him the more likely to tell the truth. Your refined sort of man is far more curious, true, and notices much more; but then he glosses it. To give weight to what he says and win you over, he cannot resist improving the story a little. Such men never show you things as they are; they show you things as they appeared to them, or as they would like them to appear to you. And to earn a reputation for judgment and make their account more convincing, they happily pad out the facts with inventions of their own. What we need is either a man of scrupulous honesty, or one so simple that he lacks the raw material to build false stories and make them look plausible — a man with nothing to gain from a lie. Mine was that man. And besides, he brought to my house, at various times, several sailors and merchants who had made the same voyage. So I am content with his information, without troubling to ask what the cosmographers say about it.
What we need are topographers who would give us exact accounts of the particular places they have actually been. But because a man has had the advantage over us of seeing the Holy Land, he claims the privilege of telling us news about all the rest of the world too. I wish everyone would write what he knows, and only as much as he knows — and not just on this subject but on every subject. A man may have precise knowledge and experience of the nature of one river or one spring, and on everything else know no more than the next fellow; yet to put his little scrap of learning into circulation, he will undertake to write the whole science of nature. From this vice great troubles grow.
Now, to return to my subject: I find that there is nothing barbarous or savage about this nation, from anything I have been told — except that everyone calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice. And indeed we have no other measure of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the place we live in. There — always there — is the perfect religion, the perfect government, the perfectly polished way of doing everything.
These people are wild in the same sense that we call fruits wild — wild, the way we call fruits wild that nature produces by herself, in her own ordinary course. When in truth, the ones we ought to call wild are those we have altered by our tricks and twisted out of the common order. In the first, the genuine virtues and properties — the most useful and natural ones — are alive and vigorous; in the second, we have bastardized them, adapting them to the pleasure of our own corrupted taste. And even so, our taste has to admit that several of the fruits of those countries, grown without any cultivation at all, have a flavor and delicacy excellent enough to rival the best of ours.
It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother, nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works with our own inventions and ornaments that we have very nearly smothered her. Yet wherever she shines in her own purity, she puts our vain, frivolous efforts wonderfully to shame. "The ivy grows best where it grows by itself; the arbutus is loveliest in the lonely cave; and birds sing the sweeter for having no training," as Propertius says. With all our straining we cannot even copy the nest of the smallest bird — its structure, its beauty, its convenience — or so much as the web of a poor spider. All things, says Plato, are produced by nature, by fortune, or by art: the greatest and most beautiful by one of the first two, the least and most imperfect by the last.
These nations, then, seem to me barbarous only in this sense: that they have received very little shaping from the human mind, and are still very close to their original simplicity. The laws of nature still govern them, hardly corrupted at all by ours — and in such purity that I am sometimes sorry we did not learn of them earlier, in the days when there were men better able to judge them than we are. I am sorry Lycurgus and Plato never knew them. For it seems to me that what we actually see in these nations surpasses not only all the pictures the poets have painted of the golden age, and all their inventions for imagining a happy condition of man, but the very conception and desire of philosophy itself. The philosophers could never imagine a simplicity as native and pure as the one we see with our own eyes; they could never believe that human society could be held together with so little artifice and human solder.
This is a nation, I would tell Plato, in which there is no kind of commerce; no knowledge of letters; no science of numbers; no word for magistrate or political superiority; no servants; no riches and no poverty; no contracts, no inheritances, no divisions of property; no occupations but easy ones; no respect for any kinship except the common kind; no clothing; no agriculture; no metal; no use of wheat or wine. The very words for lying, treachery, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness — unheard of. How far short of this perfection would he find his imaginary Republic? These are "men fresh from the gods," as Seneca says; "these are the ways nature first taught," says Virgil.
For the rest: they live in a country very pleasant and temperate, so that, my witnesses tell me, a sick person is a rare sight. They assure me they never saw a single native palsied, bleary-eyed, toothless, or bent with age. They are settled along the seacoast, walled in on the landward side by great high mountains, with a strip about a hundred leagues wide between. They have a great abundance of fish and meat that bear no resemblance to ours, and they eat them with no preparation beyond plain cooking. The first man who rode a horse there — though he had made friends among them on several earlier voyages — so terrified them with his centaur shape that they shot him dead with arrows before they could recognize him.
Their buildings are very long, big enough to hold two or three hundred people, made of the bark of tall trees set with one end in the ground and leaning together at the top, supporting one another like some of our barns, whose roofs slope all the way down and double as walls. They have wood so hard they cut with it, making their swords of it, and grills for cooking their meat. Their beds are of woven cotton, slung from the roof like our sailors' hammocks, each man with his own — for the wives sleep apart from their husbands. They rise with the sun and eat, immediately, enough for the whole day; that is their only meal. They drink nothing with it — like certain Eastern peoples Suidas mentions, who never drank at meals — but they drink many times through the rest of the day, and sometimes heroically. Their drink is made from a certain root and is the color of our claret; they only drink it lukewarm. It keeps no more than two or three days; it has a slightly sharp, lively taste, goes nothing to the head, is good for the stomach — laxative for newcomers, but a very pleasant drink for anyone used to it. In place of bread they use a certain white substance, like preserved coriander. I have tasted it: sweet, and a little flat.
The whole day is spent in dancing. The young men hunt wild animals with bows and arrows, while some of the women busy themselves warming the drink — that is their chief duty. In the morning, before they begin to eat, one of the old men preaches to the whole household, walking from one end of the building to the other and repeating the same sentence many times until he has finished the circuit — for the houses are a good hundred yards long. He commends only two things to them: courage against their enemies and love for their wives. And he never fails to note, in closing, that it is the wives who keep their drink warm and well seasoned. You can see, in several places — my own house among them — the style of their beds, their ropes, their swords, the wooden bracelets they tie on their wrists for battle, and the long canes, open at one end, whose sound keeps the rhythm of their dances. They shave their whole bodies, and more cleanly than we do, with no razor but one of wood or stone. They believe the soul is immortal, and that those who have deserved well of the gods are lodged in the part of the sky where the sun rises, and the damned in the west.
They have priests and prophets of some sort, who very rarely show themselves to the people, living as they do in the mountains. When one arrives there is a great festival and a solemn gathering of many villages — each longhouse, as I have described it, makes a village, and they stand about a French league apart. The prophet speaks to them in public, exhorting them to virtue and to their duty; but their whole moral science contains just the two articles: resolution in war and affection for their wives. He also prophesies things to come, and the outcomes they should expect from their undertakings, and steers them toward war or away from it. But he had better get it right: if he fails in his prediction, and things fall out otherwise than he foretold, he is cut into a thousand pieces — if they catch him — and condemned as a false prophet. For that reason, a prophet who has once guessed wrong is never seen again.
Divination is a gift of God; that is why abusing it ought to be punished as fraud. Among the Scythians, when the diviners missed the mark, they were laid, bound hand and foot, on carts full of brushwood drawn by oxen, and burned there. Those who handle matters within the reach of ordinary human ability can be excused for doing their best. But these others, who come to us boasting of an extraordinary faculty beyond our understanding — shouldn't they be punished for failing to deliver on their promise, and for the recklessness of their fraud?
They have constant wars with the nations beyond their mountains, further inland — and they go to them naked, with no weapons but bows and wooden swords pointed like our boar-spears. Their steadiness in battle is astonishing, and the fighting never ends without great slaughter, for as to running away — they do not know what it is. Every man brings home as his trophy the head of an enemy he has killed and mounts it over his door. They treat their prisoners well for a long time, giving them every comfort they can think of; then the man who owns a prisoner calls a great assembly of his friends. He ties a rope to one of the prisoner's arms and holds the end of it, standing back out of reach, and gives the other arm to his dearest friend to hold the same way; and the two of them, before the whole assembly, kill him with their swords. That done, they roast him, eat him together, and send portions to absent friends.
They do not do this for food, as the ancient Scythians did, but as the extreme form of revenge. The proof: when they saw that the Portuguese, who were allied with their enemies, used a different sort of execution on those they captured — burying them to the waist, shooting the exposed half full of arrows, and then hanging them — these people of the other world (men who had sown the knowledge of plenty of vices among their neighbors, and were far greater masters of every kind of wickedness than they were) decided that such a revenge must mean something, and must hurt more than their own. So they began to abandon their old method and follow this one.
I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such an act. I am very sorry that, judging their faults so correctly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; more barbarity in tearing apart, by rack and torture, a body still full of feeling, in roasting it by degrees, in having it bitten and mangled by dogs and pigs — as we have not only read but seen, within living memory, not between old enemies but between neighbors and fellow citizens, and, what is worse, under the banner of piety and religion — than in roasting and eating a man after he is dead.
Chrysippus and Zeno, the two heads of the Stoic school, thought there was no harm in using our dead bodies any way we need to, including for food — as our own ancestors did when, besieged by Caesar in the town of Alesia, they resolved to outlast the famine on the bodies of the old men, the women, and the others who were useless for fighting. "The Gascons, it is said, prolonged their lives on such food," says Juvenal. And our physicians think nothing of using corpses in every sort of way for our health, applying them outside or prescribing them within. But no opinion was ever so unruly as to excuse treachery, disloyalty, tyranny, and cruelty — which are our everyday vices.
So we may well call these people barbarians by the rules of reason, but not by comparison with ourselves, who outdo them in every kind of barbarity. Their warfare is wholly noble and generous, and has as much excuse and beauty as that human disease can have. Among them it rests on one foundation only: rivalry in courage. They are not fighting to conquer new land; what they have is so naturally fruitful that it supplies, without labor or worry, everything they need, in such abundance that they have no reason to enlarge their borders. And they are happy in this too — that they desire only what their natural needs demand; everything beyond that is simply useless to them. Men of the same age call one another brothers; the younger ones are children; the old men are fathers to everyone. The old leave the full possession of their goods to all heirs in common, undivided, with no other title than the one nature gives every creature by bringing it into the world.
If their neighbors cross the mountains to attack them, and win, the victor's prize is glory — the advantage of having proved the better in valor and virtue. They have no other use for the goods of the conquered; they turn around and go home, where they lack nothing they need, and lack nothing of that greatest good of all: knowing how to enjoy their condition happily, and to be content with it. And the others, in their turn, do the same. They ask of their prisoners no ransom but this — an admission of being beaten. But in a whole century you will not find one who would not rather die than make that confession, or yield, by a single word or look, one inch of an unbreakable courage. There is not a man among them who would not rather be killed and eaten than so much as open his mouth to ask to be spared. They treat their prisoners with complete freedom and generosity, so that life will be the dearer to them — and meanwhile entertain them with threats of their coming death, of the torments they will suffer, of the preparations under way, of the chopping of their limbs, and of the feast at which they will be the only dish. All of it for one purpose: to wring some soft or submissive word from them, or to make them want to run — to gain the advantage of having frightened them and bent their constancy. Because, rightly understood, that is the only point in which true victory consists. "There is no victory unless the enemy admits it in his own mind," as Claudian says.
The Hungarians, a very warlike people, never used to press their advantage further than bringing the enemy to surrender. Once they had forced that confession, they let him go unharmed and unransomed — at most making him give his word never to bear arms against them again. Plenty of the advantages we gain over our enemies are borrowed, not truly ours. To have stronger arms and legs is the quality of a porter, not a virtue. Agility is a dead, physical quality. It is a stroke of luck when our enemy stumbles, or has the sun in his eyes. To be a good fencer is a trick of training and skill, which may land on a coward or a nobody. The worth and value of a man lie in his heart and his will; there his true honor lives. Valor is strength not of legs and arms but of courage and soul; it does not lie in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own. The man who falls still fierce in his courage — who "fights on his knees if his legs fail him," as Seneca says — the man who, facing certain death, gives up not an ounce of his assurance, who as he dies still throws his enemy a hard and scornful look: that man is beaten not by us but by fortune. He is killed, not conquered. The bravest men are sometimes the unluckiest.
So there are defeats more triumphant than victories. Those four sister victories, the fairest the sun ever looked on — Salamis, Plataea, Mycale, and Sicily — would never dare set all their combined glory against the glory of the annihilation of King Leonidas and his men at the pass of Thermopylae. Who ever ran more gloriously, more ambitiously, toward winning a battle than Captain Ischolas ran toward losing one? Who ever worked more ingeniously to save himself than he did to destroy himself? He was assigned to hold a pass in the Peloponnese against the Arcadians. Considering the terrain and the odds, he saw it was utterly impossible — every man who faced that enemy would stay on that ground forever. On the other hand he judged it unworthy of his own courage, his greatness of spirit, and the Spartan name to fail in his duty. Between these two extremes he took a middle road: the youngest and fittest of his men he saved for the defense and service of their country, and sent home; with the rest, whose loss would matter less, he resolved to hold the pass and make the enemy buy their entry as dearly as he possibly could. So it fell out. Surrounded on every side by the Arcadians, he and his men made a great slaughter of them and were cut to pieces, every one. Is there a trophy raised to victors that was not better earned by these losers? True conquest plays its part in the fight, not in the outcome; the honor of valor is in fighting, not in winning.
But to return to my story. These prisoners, far from showing the smallest weakness under all the terrors heaped on them, do the opposite: through the two or three months they are kept, they wear a cheerful face. They urge their masters to hurry up and put them to the test. They defy them, insult them, taunt them with their cowardice and with the count of battles they have lost to the prisoners' own people. I have a song composed by one of these prisoners, in which he dares them all to come and dine on him, and welcome — for they will be eating, at the same time, their own fathers and grandfathers, whose flesh has fed and nourished his body. "These muscles," he says, "this flesh, these veins — they are yours, poor fools that you are. You do not see that the substance of your ancestors' limbs is still in them. Taste carefully, and you will find the flavor of your own flesh." There is nothing of the barbarian in that invention. Those who paint these people dying show the prisoner spitting in his executioners' faces and making faces at them. And it is certain that to the last breath they never stop defying and taunting them, in word and gesture. Truly, here are real savages by our standards — for either they must be, or we must be. There is an astonishing distance between their ways and ours.
The men there have several wives, and the higher their reputation for courage, the more wives they have. One genuinely remarkable thing about their marriages: the same jealousy our wives use to keep us from the friendship and intimacy of other women, their wives use to win it for them. Caring more for their husbands' honor than for anything else, they take pains to seek out and bring in as many companions as they can — since that is a testimony to the husband's worth. Our wives will cry miracle; it is not. It is a properly matrimonial virtue, and of the highest order. In the Bible, Sarah, and Leah and Rachel, the wives of Jacob, gave their beautiful handmaids to their husbands. Livia furthered the appetites of Augustus, against her own interest. And Stratonice, the wife of King Deiotarus, not only gave a lovely young chambermaid to her husband's bed but carefully raised the children he had by her, and helped them to their father's throne.
And so that no one thinks all this is done out of simple, slavish bondage to custom, under the pressure of ancient habit, without thought or judgment — because their souls are too dull to do anything else — I should show you a few samples of what they are capable of. Besides the war song I quoted, I have another of their songs, a love song, which begins like this: "Stay, adder, stay — so that my sister may copy the pattern of your markings, and make from it a rich ribbon to give my beloved; so shall your beauty and the elegant order of your scales be honored forever above all other serpents." That first phrase, "Stay, adder," is the refrain of the song. Now I have spent enough of my life with poetry to say this: not only is there nothing barbarous in this invention, it is downright Anacreontic. Their language, by the way, is a soft language, pleasant to the ear, with endings rather like Greek.
Three of these people — not knowing how dearly their peace and happiness will one day pay for acquaintance with the corruptions of our side of the world, and that this contact will be their ruin, which I suppose is already well under way; poor men, to let themselves be cheated by the appetite for new things, and to have left the sweetness of their own sky to come and look at ours! — three of them were at Rouen when the late King Charles the Ninth was there. The king talked with them a long while; they were shown our manners, our pomp, the shape of a fine city. Afterward someone asked their opinion — wanted to know what they had found most remarkable in all they had seen. They named three things. I have forgotten the third, and I am sorry for it; but two I still remember.
They said, first, that they found it very strange that so many tall, bearded men, strong and well armed, who stood around the king — they probably meant the Swiss of his guard — should consent to obey a child, instead of choosing one of themselves to command. Second — they have a way of speaking in which they call men halves of one another — they said they had noticed among us men gorged and stuffed with every sort of comfort, while their halves stood begging at their doors, gaunt with hunger and poverty; and they found it strange that these needy halves could endure such injustice without taking the others by the throat or setting fire to their houses.
I talked with one of them a long while; but my interpreter was so bad, and so hampered by his own stupidity from grasping what I meant, that I could get hardly anything worthwhile out of him. When I asked the man what benefit he got from his rank among his own people — for he was a captain, and our sailors called him king — he said: to march first into war. Asked how many men followed him, he pointed to a stretch of ground, meaning as many as that space would hold — perhaps four or five thousand men. Asked whether his authority lapsed when the war ended, he said this much of it remained: when he visited the villages that depended on him, they cut paths for him through the thick of their woods, so that he could travel at his ease.
None of that sounds bad at all — but what of that? They don't wear pants.
Let's skip the long old debate between the active life and the solitary one. And as for the fine sayings that ambition and greed hide behind — that we are not born for ourselves but for the public — let's appeal boldly to the people actually in public life. Let them put their hands on their hearts and tell us whether titles, offices, and the bustle of the world aren't really pursued for private advantage at public expense. The corrupt methods men use nowadays to climb to the heights their ambition aims at show plainly enough that the ends can't be worth much.
Tell ambition this: she's the one who gives us a taste for solitude in the first place. What does she avoid more than company? What does she crave more than elbow room?
A man can behave well or badly anywhere. But if Bias is right that the greater part of men is the worse part, or the Preacher that there's not one good man in a thousand — good men, as Juvenal says, being scarcer than the gates of Thebes or the mouths of the Nile — then the contagion in a crowd is very dangerous. You must either imitate the vicious or hate them, and both are risky: to grow like them because they are many, or to hate the many because they are unlike you.
Merchants who go to sea are right to be careful that the people who board with them aren't blasphemers or scoundrels — they consider such company unlucky. That's why Bias said cheerfully to some shipmates who were calling on the gods in the middle of a dangerous storm, "Quiet — keep your voices down, so they don't realize you're here with me." And a more striking case: Albuquerque, viceroy of the Indies for King Emmanuel of Portugal, in extreme danger of shipwreck, hoisted a young boy onto his shoulders for one reason only — that in their shared danger the boy's innocence might serve as his protection and recommend him to God's favor, and so get him safely to shore.
It's not that a wise man can't live content anywhere, alone even in the thick of a palace crowd. But given the choice, the philosopher will tell you he'd flee the very sight of the crowd. He'll endure it if he must; left to himself, he'll choose to be alone. He can't feel sufficiently rid of vice while he still has to wrestle with it in other men. Charondas punished as wicked those convicted of keeping wicked company. There is nothing so unsociable and so sociable as man: unsociable by his vice, sociable by his nature. And Antisthenes, I think, gave a poor answer to the man who reproached him for keeping bad company, when he said that physicians live well enough among the sick. For if physicians do help the sick get healthy, they certainly damage their own health through the contagion, the constant sight of disease, and the daily handling of it.
Now the goal, as I take it, is always the same: to live more at leisure and at one's ease. But people don't always take the right road to it. They often think they've quit business altogether when they've only traded one job for another. There's hardly less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom. Wherever the mind is tangled up, it's tangled entirely; and domestic chores are no less bothersome for being less important. Besides, by shaking off the court and the marketplace, we haven't shaken off the chief torments of life. As Horace says, it's reason and prudence that banish care, not a house with a commanding view of the sea. Ambition, greed, indecision, fear, and runaway desires don't stay behind just because we leave the country — black care, as Horace also says, sits right behind the horseman. They follow us into cloisters and philosophy schools. Neither deserts, nor caves, nor hair shirts, nor fasting can shake them off: the fatal arrow stays lodged in our side.
Someone told Socrates that a certain man hadn't been improved at all by his travels. "I believe it," said Socrates, "for he took himself along with him." Why do we go looking for lands warmed by a different sun? What exile from his country ever escaped from himself too?
If a man doesn't first unload himself and his mind of the burden weighing on him, moving around will only make it press harder and sit heavier — the way a ship's cargo is less trouble when it's stowed snug and settled. You do a sick man more harm than good by moving him from place to place; you drive the disease in deeper by jostling it, just as stakes sink deeper and stand firmer the more you work them up and down in the hole where they're meant to stay. So it's not enough to get away from the public; it's not enough to change your ground. A man must get away from the crowd's habits that have taken up residence inside him. He must sequester himself and take possession of himself again. You say you've broken your chains? The dog who finally snaps his chain after a long struggle still drags a good length of it from his neck as he runs. We carry our chains with us. Our liberty isn't absolute; we keep glancing back at what we've left behind, and our imagination is still full of it. Unless the mind is purged, as Lucretius says, what battles and dangers we take on in spite of ourselves — what bitter anxieties, what terrors, what wreckage from pride, lust, anger, luxury, and sloth!
Our disease is in the mind, and the mind cannot escape from itself — the fault, says Horace, lies in a mind that never gets away from itself. So the mind must be called home and shut up inside itself. That is true solitude, and it can be enjoyed even in crowded cities and the courts of kings — though more comfortably apart.
Now, since we're undertaking to live alone and do without company, let's arrange it so that our contentment depends entirely on ourselves. Let's dissolve every tie that binds us to others. Let's win this much from ourselves: to be able to live alone in earnest, and to live at our ease doing it.
Stilpo escaped the burning of his city, where he lost his wife, his children, and everything he owned. Demetrius Poliorcetes, seeing him walk out of so great a ruin with an untroubled face, asked whether he hadn't suffered any loss. "No," he answered — thank God, nothing of his was lost. The philosopher Antisthenes meant the same thing when he said, neatly, that a man should equip himself with goods that float, and can swim out of a shipwreck with their owner. Certainly a wise man never loses anything, as long as he has himself. When the city of Nola was sacked by the barbarians, Paulinus, the bishop there, lost everything he had and was taken prisoner; and he prayed like this: "Lord, keep me from feeling this loss; for Thou knowest they have not yet touched anything that is mine." The riches that made him rich and the goods that made him good were still intact. That is what it means to choose treasures that can't be plundered, and to hide them in a place no one can enter — a place that can be betrayed by no one but ourselves.
A man should have a wife, children, property, and above all health, if he can get them. But we must not fasten our hearts to them so tightly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, where we keep our real liberty — our principal retreat and solitude. There our daily conversation should be with ourselves, and so private that no outside business or company gets in. There we should laugh and talk as if we had no wife, no children, no property, no staff, no servants — so that when the day comes that we lose them, it will be nothing new to do without them. We have a soul that can turn in on itself; it can keep itself company. It has the means to attack and to defend, to give and to receive. No need to fear that solitude will leave us slumped in boring emptiness — in solitude, as Tibullus says, be a crowd to yourself.
Virtue is satisfied with herself: no rules, no words, no audience. In our ordinary actions, not one in a thousand actually concerns ourselves. That man you see scrambling up the rubble of that wall, furious, beside himself, with all those gunshots aimed at him; and that other one, covered in scars, pale, faint with hunger, resolved to die rather than open the gates to him — do you think they're there for their own sake? No — most likely for the sake of someone they've never seen, who never gives a thought to their pain and danger, and is wallowing in idleness and pleasure the whole time. And this drooling, bleary-eyed, unwashed fellow you see shuffling out of his study after midnight — do you think he's been digging through books to learn how to be a better, wiser, happier man? No such thing. He'll die at that desk, but he'll teach posterity the meter of Plautus's verses and the correct spelling of a Latin word. Who doesn't willingly trade health, rest, and life itself for reputation and glory — the most useless, frivolous, counterfeit coin in circulation? As if our own death weren't frightening enough, we take on the deaths of our wives, children, and household. As if our own affairs didn't supply enough worry, we take up our neighbors' and friends' affairs too, the better to rack our brains and torment ourselves. Ah, says Terence — can any man let anything become dearer to him than himself?
Solitude seems to me to sit best on those who have already given their most active and flourishing years to the world, after the example of Thales. We have lived enough for others; let us live what little is left for ourselves. Let's bring our thoughts and intentions home, to ourselves and our own ease. Arranging a safe retreat is no small job; it will keep us busy enough without mixing in other projects. Since God gives us time to organize our departure, let's pack up, say our goodbyes early, and pry ourselves loose from those gripping obligations that drag us elsewhere and pull us away from ourselves.
We must untie the knot of our obligations, however strong. We may still love this person or that thing, but we should wed ourselves to nothing but ourselves. That is: let the rest be ours, but not glued so close that it can't be pulled away without flaying us or tearing out a piece of us. The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to yourself.
It's time to wean ourselves from society when we can no longer contribute to it. A man who's in no condition to lend should forbid himself to borrow. Our strength is failing; let's call it in and concentrate it on ourselves. Whoever can fold the duties of friendship and company back into himself, let him do it. In this decay of age, which makes a man useless, burdensome, and tiresome to others, let him take care not to become useless, burdensome, and tiresome to himself. Let him indulge and pamper himself, and above all govern himself with such respect for his own reason and conscience that he'd be ashamed to stumble in their presence — for it is rare, as Quintilian says, that a man holds himself in sufficient reverence.
Socrates says that boys should get themselves educated, grown men should practice doing good, and old men should withdraw from all civil and military employment and live at their own discretion, bound to no office. Some temperaments suit these precepts of retirement better than others. People of a soft, slow disposition, with delicate attachments and a will that doesn't readily submit to harness — and I am one, by nature and by conviction — will take to this advice more easily than active, busy souls who embrace everything, sign up for everything, run hot for everything, who offer and give themselves to every occasion. We should use these accidental, external goods as far as they please us, but never make them our main foundation. They aren't one; neither nature nor reason allows it. Why then, against their laws, should we enslave our contentment to a power outside ourselves?
But to leap ahead of fortune's accidents — to strip ourselves in advance of the comforts within our reach, as some have done out of devotion and some philosophers out of reasoning; to wait on yourself hand and foot, to sleep on boards, to put out your own eyes, to throw your wealth in the river, to go hunting for pain — some chasing bliss in the next life through misery in this one, others lying flat on the ground to be safe from falling — all that is virtue run to excess. Let the sturdiest, toughest natures make even their hiding glorious and exemplary. As Horace puts it: when money is short, I praise the safe little life, tough enough on slim rations — but the moment things get richer and easier, I declare that the only wise men, the only ones living well, are those whose money shows in handsome country villas.
A great deal less would do for me. It's enough, while fortune favors me, to prepare for the day she turns; enough, sitting comfortably, to picture trouble coming as far as my imagination will stretch — the way we stage mock combats at jousts and tournaments in the middle of perfect peace. I don't think the philosopher Arcesilaus any less temperate or virtuous for knowing he ate off gold and silver plate when his fortune allowed it; in fact I think better of him than if he had refused what he used with generosity and moderation. I see the true limits of natural necessity. Noticing the poor man begging at my door, often merrier and healthier than I am, I put myself in his place and try to fit my mind to his cut. Running through other examples the same way — imagining death, poverty, contempt, and sickness hard on my heels — I find it easy to resolve not to be terrified of what a lesser man than I accepts with such patience. I can't believe a meaner understanding can do more than a stronger one, or that the effects of reasoning can't reach as high as the effects of habit. And knowing how flimsy these accidental comforts are, I never fail, in the middle of enjoying them, to make it my chief prayer to God that He make me content with myself and with the condition I'm in. I see healthy young men who nevertheless keep a stash of pills in their trunk at home, to take when a cold strikes — which they fear the less because they think the remedy is within reach. That's the way to do it — and further, if you find yourself prone to some more violent disease, stock yourself with the medicines that numb and deaden the part.
The occupation a man picks for this retired life should be neither laborious nor boring; otherwise there's no point in having retired at all. Which occupation depends on each man's taste. Mine doesn't bend at all toward farming, and those who love it should pursue it in moderation — trying, as Horace says, to make circumstances bow to me, not me to circumstances. Farming is otherwise a very servile business, as Sallust calls it — though some branches are more forgivable than the rest, like the care of gardens, which Xenophon attributes to Cyrus. And a middle way can be found between the grubbing, anxious absorption of men who make farming their whole life and study, and the slack, total negligence of others who let everything run wild — like Democritus, whose cattle, as Horace says, ate up his crops and fields while his soaring mind ranged abroad without its body.
But let's hear the advice the younger Pliny gives his friend Caninius Rufus on the subject of solitude: "I advise you, in that full and prosperous retreat of yours, to leave the farm work to your hired hands and devote yourself to the study of letters, so as to extract from them something entirely your own." He means reputation — the same spirit as Cicero, who says he wants to use his retirement from public affairs to win immortal life through his writings. Is your knowing nothing, asks Persius, unless somebody else knows that you know it?
It seems only reasonable, when a man talks of leaving the world, that he should look entirely beyond it. These men do it by halves. True, they set their affairs up for the time when they'll no longer be in the world; but the fruit of their project they still claim to draw from the world after they've left it — a ridiculous contradiction.
The notion of those who seek solitude for devotion's sake, filling their hopes and courage with the certainty of divine promises in the next life, is far more soundly built. They set God before themselves, an object infinite in goodness and power; the soul has room there to satisfy her desires in perfect freedom. Afflictions and sufferings turn to profit, being spent to purchase eternal health and joy; death becomes a thing to wish for, the passage to so perfect a state. The harshness of their rules is quickly softened by habit, and the appetites of the flesh are baffled and beaten down simply by being refused — since nothing keeps them alive but use and exercise. This single end — another, happily immortal life — genuinely deserves that we abandon the comforts and pleasures of this one. And whoever can truly and steadily set his soul ablaze with the fire of that living faith and hope builds himself, in solitude, a life more delicious and luxurious than any other kind of existence.
So neither the goal nor the method of Pliny's advice pleases me; we often jump out of the frying pan into the fire. This business with books is as laborious as any other, and just as much an enemy of health — which ought to be our first consideration. And we shouldn't let ourselves be lulled by the pleasure of it: it's the same pleasure that destroys the frugal man, the miser, the sensualist, and the ambitious man.
The sages warn us often enough to beware the treachery of our appetites, and to tell true, whole pleasures apart from those laced with more pain than they're worth. Most of our pleasures, they say, hug and flatter us only to strangle us, like the thieves the Egyptians called Philistae. If the hangover arrived before the drunkenness, we'd take care not to drink too much; but pleasure, to deceive us, walks in front and hides what's trailing behind her. Books are pleasant — but if poring over them ends up costing us our health and our good humor, the best things we have, let's drop them. I'm one of those who think no fruit they yield can make up for that loss. Like men long worn down by illness who finally surrender to medicine and accept a regimen of living they must never again break, so the man who retires, weary and sick of the common way of life, should design his new one by the rules of reason, and set it up with forethought and reflection. He should have said goodbye to every kind of labor, whatever it promises, and shaken off all the passions that disturb the peace of body and soul — and then choose the road that suits his own temper best: let each man know his own way.
In farming, study, hunting, and every other pursuit, we should go to the outer limit of pleasure, and take care not to push past the point where trouble starts to mix in. We should keep only as much business as is needed to keep us in shape and protect us from the troubles that the other extreme — dull, slack idleness — drags along with it. There are barren, knotty sciences, mostly hammered out for the crowd; leave those to the people still in the world's service. Personally, I care for no books except the pleasant, easy kind that tickle me, or the kind that console me and teach me how to manage my life and my death — strolling silently in the healthy woods, as Horace says, pondering whatever is worthy of a wise and good man.
Wiser men, with strong and vigorous souls, can fashion themselves a rest that is purely spiritual. But I, who have a perfectly ordinary soul, need the help of the body's comforts to hold myself up; and since age has lately robbed me of the pleasures I liked best, I train and sharpen my appetite for the ones that remain and suit this season better. We must hang on with tooth and nail to the use of life's pleasures, which the years wrench out of our hands one after another. Let's pluck the sweets, says Persius — the living is ours; soon enough you'll be ashes, a ghost, a story people tell.
Now as for the goal Pliny and Cicero hold out to us — glory — it's nowhere near my reckoning. Ambition is, of all moods, the most contrary to solitude. Glory and repose cannot lodge in the same house. As far as I can see, these men have only their arms and legs out of the crowd; their soul and intention are stuck in it deeper than ever — does an old man, asks Persius, really gather tidbits for other people's ears? They've stepped back only to get a better running start and charge harder into the crowd. Want to see how short they shoot? Set against them the advice of two philosophers, from two very different schools — one writing to Idomeneus, the other to Lucilius — urging their friends to leave honors and affairs for solitude.
"Until now," they say, "you have lived swimming and floating; come now and die in the harbor. You have given the first part of your life to the light; give what remains to the shade. It's impossible to give up the work unless you also give up the fruit of it; so strip yourself of every concern for name and glory. There's a danger the shine of your past deeds will throw too much light on you and follow you right into your hiding place. Quit, along with the other pleasures, the pleasure that comes from other people's approval. As for your knowledge and talents, don't worry — they won't lose their effect if you yourself are the better for them. Remember the man who was asked why he worked so hard at an art that hardly anyone would ever appreciate. 'A few are enough for me,' he replied; 'one is enough; none at all is enough.' He spoke truly. You and one companion are theater enough for each other — or you for yourself. Let the whole people be as one person to you, and be yourself a whole people to one. It's a shabby ambition to try to wring glory out of one's idleness and seclusion. Do as the hunted animals do, and brush out your tracks at the mouth of your den. Your business is no longer what the world says of you, but what you say to yourself. Withdraw into yourself — but first prepare yourself to receive yourself. It would be madness to trust yourself to your own keeping if you can't govern yourself. There are ways to fail in solitude just as in company. Until you have made yourself into someone you wouldn't dare stumble in front of, and until you feel a certain shame and reverence before yourself — keep honest images ever before the mind, as Cicero says — hold in your imagination Cato, Phocion, and Aristides, in whose presence even fools would hide their faults, and make them auditors of all your intentions. If your intentions go crooked, reverence for those men will set them straight again. They will keep you on the road of being content with yourself, of borrowing nothing from anyone but yourself, of steadying and fixing your soul on definite, bounded thoughts where she can take her pleasure — and, having understood the true goods, which we enjoy in proportion as we understand them, of resting satisfied, with no craving for more life or more name."
That is the counsel of true and natural philosophy — not of a boastful, chattering philosophy like that of the other two.
Plutarch says somewhere that he doesn't find as much difference between one beast and another as he finds between one man and another. He means the inner qualities — the furnishings of the soul. And honestly, I find such a gulf between Epaminondas, as I judge him, and certain men I know — men of good sense, mind you — that I'd happily go Plutarch one better: there is more difference between this man and that man than between that man and a beast. As Terence says, "ah, how far one man can outstrip another!" There are as many degrees of mind as there are yards between here and heaven, and just as countless.
But when it comes to valuing men, here is a strange thing: we are the only creature appraised by what isn't ours. Every other animal is rated on its own qualities. We praise a horse for its strength and the sureness of its feet — as Juvenal says, it's the swift horse we applaud, the one that sets the whole hoarse circus roaring as it wins — not for its fancy harness. We praise a greyhound for its speed, not its collar; a hawk for its wing, not its hood and bells.
Why, then, don't we value a man for what is actually his own? He has a grand household, a beautiful palace, plenty of credit, so many thousand a year in income. All of that is around him. None of it is in him.
You don't buy a cat in a bag. If you're bargaining for a horse, you have its blankets stripped off so you can see it bare and open to your eye — or if it's draped, as horses used to be when presented to princes, only the unimportant parts are covered, so that you won't be distracted by a glossy coat or a broad rump and will look instead at the legs, the eyes, the feet: the parts that do the work. Horace says this was the custom of kings — when they bought horses, they inspected them uncovered, so a handsome head standing on a weak foot wouldn't tempt some gaping buyer.
So why, when you size up a man, do you take him wrapped and bundled in his packaging? He shows you nothing then but the parts that aren't remotely his own, and he hides exactly the parts by which his value can be judged. It's the price of the blade you want, not the scabbard. Strip him, and maybe you wouldn't bid a penny. Judge him by himself, not by his outfit. As one of the ancients put it very neatly: "Do you know why you think he's tall? You're counting the height of his shoes." (That's Seneca.) The pedestal is no part of the statue.
Measure him without his stilts. Make him set aside his income and his titles and present himself in his shirt. Is his body sound and lively, fit for its work? What kind of soul does he have? Is it a fine one, a capable one, fully equipped? Is it rich in what's its own, or only in what it has borrowed? Has luck had a hand in the matter? Can it look drawn swords in the eye without blinking? Does it care whether life leaves by the mouth or by the throat? Is it settled, even, content? That is what needs examining. That is how you measure the enormous differences between man and man.
Is he, as Horace describes, "wise and master of himself, a man whom neither poverty nor death nor chains can frighten; strong enough to tell his appetites no and to look down on honors; complete in himself, smooth and round, so that nothing outside can get a grip on him — a man against whom fortune always charges and always limps away"? A man like that stands five hundred yards above kingdoms and duchies. He is an absolute monarch — of himself, in himself. "The wise man," says Plautus, "shapes his own fortune."
What is left for such a man to want? As Lucretius asks, doesn't nature cry out for nothing more than this — a body free of pain, and a mind enjoying itself, clear of fear and worry?
Now compare him with the general run of mankind: stupid, small-souled, servile, unstable, endlessly tossed about by the storm of one passion after another, hanging on others for everything — and the distance between them is greater than the distance between heaven and earth. Yet such is the blindness of habit that we take little or no notice of it. Meanwhile, put a peasant next to a king, a nobleman next to a vassal, a magistrate next to a private citizen, a rich man next to a poor one, and everybody sees an enormous gap — though they differ, you might say, only in their trousers.
In Thrace the king was set apart from his people in a particularly entertaining way: he had a religion all to himself, a private god — Mercury — whom his subjects weren't allowed to worship, while he, in turn, wouldn't lower himself to theirs, Mars, Bacchus, and Diana. But these are only stage paintings; they make no real difference in the thing itself. Watch actors play a duke or an emperor up on the stage, then go back, a moment later, to being the valets and porters they really are. Just so with the emperor whose pomp dazzles you in public — all those great emeralds set in gold, as Lucretius says, flashing green, and the sea-blue silk robe. Peek behind the curtain and you'll find nothing but an ordinary man, possibly a more contemptible one than the least of his subjects. As Seneca says, one man is happy on the inside; the other's happiness is gold leaf.
Cowardice, indecision, ambition, spite, and envy churn in him as much as in anyone. Horace says it: neither treasure chests nor the consul's bodyguard can clear away the mind's miserable riots, or the cares that flutter around paneled ceilings. And worry and fear grab him by the throat even in the middle of his armies — for as Lucretius says, the fears and gnawing anxieties of men are not scared off by the clash of weapons or the points of spears; they move boldly among kings and the masters of the world, and the glitter of gold doesn't awe them a bit.
Do fevers, gout, and strokes spare him any more than they spare one of us? When old age settles on his shoulders, can the yeomen of his guard lift it off? When the fear of death turns him white, can the gentlemen of his bedchamber talk him out of it? When jealousy or some other obsession is swimming in his head, do our bows and compliments restore his good humor? That canopy stitched with pearls and gold over his bed has no power whatsoever against a bad attack of colic. Burning fevers, as Lucretius says, leave you no sooner when you toss on embroidered tapestry under royal purple than when you lie in a common blanket.
Alexander the Great's flatterers had him convinced he was the son of Jupiter. But one day he was wounded, and watching the blood run from the wound he said, "Well, gentlemen, what do you say now? Isn't this blood crimson, and entirely human? It's hardly the kind Homer has flowing from the wounds of gods." The poet Hermodorus wrote verses in honor of Antigonus calling him the son of the sun. Antigonus said: "The man who empties my chamber pot knows better."
A king is a man, no more — and if he's defective or ill-made from birth, the empire of the whole universe can't fix him. Let the girls fight over him, says Persius; let a rose spring up wherever he steps — what good is any of it if he's a fool? Even pleasure and good luck can't be tasted without vigor and sense. As Terence says, things are worth what the mind of their owner is worth: good to the man who knows how to use them, bad to the man who uses them badly.
Whatever fortune hands you, it takes a palate to taste it. It's enjoying things, not owning them, that makes us happy. It isn't lands, as Horace says, or heaps of bronze and gold that drive fevers from a sick owner's body or cares from his mind; the possessor has to be healthy if he plans to get any good from his pile. To a greedy man or a frightened one, house and estate are what a painting is to a blind man — what a hot compress is to gout.
A dull man's taste is flat and dead. He no more enjoys what he has than a man with a head cold enjoys fine wine — than a horse appreciates its expensive saddle. Plato has it right: health, beauty, strength, riches, and everything else we call goods are exactly as bad for the unjust man as they are good for the just one, and the evils the other way around. Where body and mind are out of order, what use are all the external conveniences? The smallest pinprick, the smallest passion of the soul, is enough to strip the pleasure out of being monarch of the whole world. At the first twinge of gout, what comfort is it to be called Sire and Your Majesty?
Made all of silver, as Tibullus says, made all of gold — doesn't he forget his palaces and his grandeur anyway? If he loses his temper, does being a prince keep him from going red, going pale, and grinding his teeth like a madman? And on the other hand, if he's a capable man of sound nature, kingship adds almost nothing to his happiness. If your belly is well, says Horace, and your sides and your feet, all the wealth of kings can add nothing more. He can see the whole apparatus for what it is: counterfeit and trickery. Maybe he'd even agree with King Seleucus, that a man who knew the real weight of a scepter wouldn't bother to pick one up if he found it lying on the ground — so heavy and painful are the duties of a good king.
It can be no small job to govern others when we find it so hard to govern ourselves. And as for ruling, which looks so attractive: considering how feeble human judgment is, and how hard it is to choose among new and doubtful things, I'm strongly of the opinion that it is far easier and far pleasanter to follow than to lead. It is a great rest for the mind to have only one road to walk and no one to answer for but yourself. As Lucretius says, far better to obey in peace than to crave the reins of power. Add to that Cyrus's saying, that no man is fit to command unless he's worth more than the people he commands.
But King Hiero, in Xenophon, goes further: even in the enjoyment of pleasure itself, he says, kings are worse off than private men, because having everything available on command takes away the sharp delight ordinary people get from it. Love that is too rich and too easy, as Ovid says, turns to boredom, and like sweets on the stomach, it sickens.
Do we imagine the choirboys take any great delight in music? Surfeit makes it tedious to them. Feasts, balls, masquerades, tournaments — these thrill people who see them rarely and long to see them; to someone who attends constantly, the flavor goes flat and stale. Women don't much excite the man who has them whenever he likes. The man who never gives himself time to be thirsty will never know the real pleasure of drinking. Farces and acrobatics delight the audience; to the performers they're a grind. The proof is that princes sometimes amuse themselves by going in disguise, stepping down from their rank for a while to live, briefly, in the poor plain style of the humblest of their people. The rich enjoy a change, as Horace says: a clean simple supper under a poor man's small roof, no tapestries, no purple, has smoothed many an anxious forehead.
Nothing clogs and sickens like abundance. What appetite wouldn't quail at three hundred women all at its mercy, as the Grand Signor has in his seraglio? And what relish for the hunt did that ancestor of his keep for himself who never went hawking without seven thousand falconers?
Beyond all this, I suspect the very glare of greatness brings real trouble into the enjoyment of even the most tempting pleasures. The great stand in too bright a light; they live exposed to every eye. And I don't know why we demand, more than of anyone else, that they hide their faults — since what counts as mere indiscretion in us, the public brands in them as tyranny and contempt for the law. People are inclined to believe that, on top of their natural appetite for vice, princes get an extra thrill out of trampling public decencies. Plato in his Gorgias actually defines a tyrant as one who has license, in a city, to do whatever he pleases. And often, because of that impunity, the open display of a prince's vices does more damage than the vice itself. Every man dreads being watched and pried into; princes are watched down to their gestures, their glances, and their thoughts, the whole populace believing it has the right and title to judge them. Besides, blemishes grow with the eminence and brightness of the place where they sit: a mole or a wart on them shows larger than a gaping wound on other men. That's why the poets imagine Jupiter conducting his love affairs in so many borrowed shapes — of all the escapades they charge him with, there is only one, as I remember, where he appears in his own majesty and grandeur.
But back to Hiero. He also complains of what his royalty cost him in this: he couldn't go abroad and travel freely, being practically a prisoner inside the borders of his own country, and in everything he did he was hemmed in by an importunate crowd. Truthfully, when I see our kings sitting all alone at table, ringed by so many people talking at them and so many strangers staring at them — as they always are — I have often felt more pity than envy.
King Alfonso used to say that in this respect donkeys were better off than kings: their masters let them feed at their ease, a favor kings can't get from their servants. It has never struck me as any great advantage to a man of sense to have twenty people chattering around him while he sits on the toilet. Nor can I see why the services of a man with ten thousand a year, a man who took Casale or held Siena, should be more comfortable or more welcome to him than those of a good valet who knows his job.
The advantages of being a sovereign are mostly imaginary. Every level of fortune contains some little image of kingship. Caesar called all the lords of France who held free rights on their own lands "kinglets" — petty kings. And in truth, apart from the title "Sire," they go a long way toward royalty. Look at the provinces far from court — Brittany, say. Consider the retinue, the vassals, the officers, the duties, the service, the ceremony, the whole state kept up by a lord living away from court in his own house among his own tenants and servants — and watch where his imagination flies. Nothing could be more royal. He hears talk of his actual master once a year, the way one hears of the king of Persia, and acknowledges him only through some distant family tie his secretary keeps filed away in a register somewhere. Our laws sit lightly enough, truth be told: a French gentleman feels the weight of the crown pinch his shoulders maybe twice in his life. Real, effective subjection falls only on those of us who volunteer for it — who stick their necks under the yoke hoping to profit by it in wealth and honors. A man who is content at his own fireside, and can run his household without lawsuits and quarrels with the neighbors, is as free as the Doge of Venice. Servitude binds few men, as Seneca says; many men bind themselves to it.
But what bothers Hiero most is finding himself stripped of all friendship, cut off from all mutual companionship — the thing in which the truest and most perfect enjoyment of human life consists. For what testimony of affection can I squeeze out of a man who owes me, like it or not, everything he's capable of giving? Can I read anything into his humble speech and his bowing and scraping, when those courtesies aren't his to withhold? The honor we receive from people who fear us is not honor. Those respects are paid to my royalty, not to me. As Seneca has it in his tragedy, the greatest advantage of kingship is that the people are forced not only to endure their master's deeds but to praise them.
Don't I see that the bad king and the good one, the hated and the beloved, get exactly the same reverence? My predecessor was served with the same ceremony, and my successor will be. If my subjects do me no harm, that's no proof of affection — why should I take it for one, when they couldn't harm me if they wanted to? No one follows me or obeys me out of any friendship between him and me; friendship can't form where there is so little in common and so little exchange. My height has lifted me clean out of human fellowship: there's too much disparity, too much distance. They follow me out of form and habit — or rather, they follow my fortune, not me, hoping to grow their own. Everything they say to me and do for me is surface paint. Their freedom is curbed on every side by the great power I hold over them, so I see nothing around me that isn't masked and disguised.
The Emperor Julian, being applauded one day by his courtiers for his exact justice, said: "I'd be proud of this praise if it came from people who dared to condemn or criticize the opposite, were I to do it."
All the real advantages princes have, they share with men of middling condition. It's for the gods to ride winged horses and dine on ambrosia. Kings have no other sleep than ours and no other appetite. The steel they arm themselves with is no better tempered than the steel we use. Their crowns keep off neither the rain nor the sun.
Diocletian, who wore as fortunate and revered a crown as any, resigned it to retire into the happiness of private life. Some time later, when public affairs demanded that he take it up again, he answered the men who came to urge him: "You would never try to persuade me to this if you had seen the fine order of the trees I've planted in my orchard, and the beautiful melons I've sown in my garden."
In Anacharsis's opinion, the happiest state would be one in which, all else being equal, rank was measured out according to men's virtues, and disgrace according to their vices.
When King Pyrrhus was preparing his expedition into Italy, his wise counselor Cyneas, wanting to make him feel the vanity of his ambition, asked him: "Well, sire — what is all this great preparation for?" "To make myself master of Italy," the king replied. "And when that's done?" said Cyneas. "Then I'll cross into Gaul and Spain." "And then?" "Then I'll go conquer Africa; and at last, when I've brought the whole world under me, I'll sit down and rest, and live content and at ease."
"Then for God's sake, sire," said Cyneas, "tell me what stops you from being in that condition right now, if you please? Why not settle yourself this instant in the state you're aiming at, and spare yourself all the labor and danger you're putting in between?"
The trouble, as Lucretius says, was that he never learned where acquiring should stop, or how far real pleasure can actually grow.
I will close with an old verse that I find very fit for the purpose — Cornelius Nepos's line: "Every man frames his own fortune."
Judgment is a tool that works on any subject, and it pokes its nose into everything. That's why, in these essays of mine, I grab whatever occasion comes along. If it's a subject I don't understand at all, so much the better — I sound the ford from a good distance, and if I find it too deep for my height, I stay on the bank. Knowing you can go no further is itself an act of judgment, and one of the acts it's proudest of.
Sometimes I take an empty, trivial subject and see whether I can find anything in it to build a body out of, something to prop up and support. Sometimes I wander into a noble subject, one that's been worked over by a thousand hands, where nothing new can be said and the road is so beaten on every side that you have no choice but to walk in someone else's footsteps. There, judgment's job is to pick the route that seems best — to decide, out of a thousand paths, that this one or that one is the right choice.
I take the first argument fortune offers me. They're all equally good to me, and I never plan to cover any of them completely — because I never see the whole of anything. Neither do the people who promise so confidently to show it to us. Of the hundred limbs and faces every subject has, I take one. Sometimes I just glance it over; sometimes I lift the skin a little; sometimes I pinch it to the bone. I jab in — not as wide as I can, but as deep as I can — and most of the time I'm tempted to take a subject up by some new light I've found glinting in it.
If I knew myself less well, I might risk handling some topic to the bottom and discover my inability the hard way. Instead I scatter a word here, a word there — samples snipped from various pieces of cloth, strewn around without any design and without committing myself too far. I'm not answerable for them, and not obliged to stick to my subject. I can vary it whenever I like, and surrender to doubt and uncertainty — and to my own ruling method, ignorance.
Every motion reveals us. The same soul of Caesar that showed itself so brilliantly in marshaling the battle of Pharsalia also showed itself in arranging his idle hours and his love affairs. You judge a horse not only by watching it show off its paces, but by its ordinary walk — even by seeing it standing in the stable.
Among the soul's functions, some are low and humble. Whoever does not see her in those small offices as well as the grand ones never sees her whole — and she may show best moving at her plain, everyday pace. The winds of passion catch her most strongly at her highest altitudes. Besides, she throws herself entirely into each subject she touches, handles only one thing at a time — and handles it not according to what it is, but according to what she is.
Things in themselves may have their own weights, measures, and qualities. But once inside us, the soul cuts them to fit her own taste. Death is terrifying to Cicero, desirable to Cato, a matter of indifference to Socrates. Health, conscience, authority, knowledge, riches, beauty, and their opposites — all of them strip off at the door when they enter us, and receive a new robe from the soul, in whatever color she chooses: brown, bright, green, dark; and whatever quality: sharp, sweet, deep, or shallow. Each soul decides for herself, since none of them have agreed on any common standard of rules or procedures — each one is queen in her own realm.
So let us stop blaming the external qualities of things. The reckoning is ours to give. Our good and our ill depend on no one but ourselves. That is where our offerings and our vows belong — not to fortune, who has no power over our character. On the contrary: our character drags fortune along in its train and casts her in its own mold.
So why shouldn't I judge Alexander at the dinner table, ranting and drinking at the prodigious rate he sometimes did? Or over a chess board? What string of his soul does that idle, childish game leave untouched? I hate it and avoid it myself, precisely because it isn't enough of a game — it's too grave and serious a pastime, and I'm ashamed to spend on it an amount of attention that would serve for better things. Alexander didn't rack his brains harder over his glorious expedition into India; another man sweats no harder untangling a problem on which the salvation of mankind depends. Look how this ridiculous game torments the soul, all her faculties summoned for such a trivial cause — and what a fine chance it gives everyone to know himself and judge himself rightly. There is no posture in which I sift myself more thoroughly. What passion doesn't it stir up? Anger, spite, hatred, impatience, and a burning ambition to win — in a contest where the more honorable ambition would be to lose. Because excelling, standing out above the common run in frivolous things, hardly suits a man of honor.
What I say of this example can be said of all the others. Every particle of a man, every occupation, reveals him just as well as any other.
Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers. The first, finding the human condition ridiculous and vain, never went out in public except with a mocking, laughing face. Heraclitus, pitying that same condition of ours, wore a perpetually sad expression and tears in his eyes. As Juvenal puts it, the one laughed every time he set foot outside his door; the other wept.
I prefer the first temper — not because laughing is more pleasant than weeping, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other does; and it seems to me we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and lamentation imply that the thing lamented has some value. What we laugh at, we declare worthless. I do not think there is so much unhappiness in us as vanity; we are not so much wicked as silly; we are not so full of evil as of emptiness; we are not so miserable as we are cheap.
That's why Diogenes — who passed his time rolling around in his tub and thumbing his nose at the great Alexander, rating us no higher than flies or bladders puffed with air — was a sharper, more penetrating judge, and therefore in my opinion a fairer one, than Timon, the one they called the Man-hater. Because whatever a man hates, he takes to heart. Timon wished us ill; he passionately desired our ruin; he shunned our company as dangerous, the company of wicked and depraved creatures. Diogenes valued us so little that contact with us could neither disturb him nor infect him. He dropped our company not from fear, but from contempt — he figured we were incapable of doing either good or harm.
In the same key was Statilius's answer when Brutus invited him into the conspiracy against Caesar. He agreed the enterprise was just; he just didn't think mankind was worth a wise man's trouble. Which matches the teaching of Hegesias, who said a wise man should do nothing except for himself, since no one else is worth doing anything for; and the saying of Theodorus, that it isn't reasonable for a wise man to risk himself for his country — to endanger wisdom for the sake of fools.
Our condition is as laughable as it is laughed at.
It's been said of certain people — Alexander the Great, for one — that their sweat gave off a sweet smell, thanks to some rare and extraordinary constitution. Plutarch and others went looking for the cause. But the ordinary human body works quite the other way, and the best it can hope for is to smell of nothing at all. Even the sweetness of the purest breath has no greater perfection than to carry no offensive smell whatsoever, like the breath of healthy children. That's what made Plautus say of a woman: she smells sweetest who smells of nothing.
And people who go around in fine exotic perfumes deserve to be suspected of some natural flaw underneath — something they're using all that scent to cover up. To smell good is to stink. As Martial teases a friend: "You laugh at us, Coracinus, for wearing no scent; I'd rather smell of nothing than smell sweet." And elsewhere he says it again: the man who always smells good doesn't smell good.
That said, I'm a great lover of good smells myself, and I detest bad ones — and I catch them at a greater distance, I think, than other men. As Horace puts it, my nose is quicker to sniff out a rank armpit or a festering sore than a keen hound is to find the hidden sow.
Among smells, the simple and natural ones please me most. The ladies should take note, since this is chiefly their department. Even in the depths of barbarism, the Scythian women used to powder and crust their faces and whole bodies after bathing with a certain fragrant drug that grew in their country; when they scrubbed it off to be intimate with their men, they came away perfumed and sleek.
You wouldn't believe how strangely smells of every kind cling to me, how readily my skin drinks them in. Whoever complains that nature gave us no vehicle for carrying smells to the nose has it wrong — smells carry themselves, especially to me. My mustache, which is full, does the job nicely. If I so much as brush it with my gloves or my handkerchief, the smell stays a whole day. It tells on me — it reports where I've been. And the close, luscious, devouring, clinging, melting kisses of youthful passion, back in my wilder days, would leave a sweetness on my lips for hours afterward.
And yet I've always been remarkably untouched by epidemic diseases — the kind caught at a sick man's bedside or bred from bad air — and I've escaped every one of my time, and there have been several, in our cities and in our armies. We read of Socrates that he never once left Athens through all the plagues that ravaged the city, and he alone was never infected.
Doctors could, I believe, get far more use out of odors than they do. I've often noticed that smells change me — they work on my spirits, each according to its nature. Which makes me approve of the old idea that incense and perfume in churches — a practice so ancient and so universal across all nations and religions — was meant to cheer us, to rouse and purify the senses, and so make us fitter for contemplation.
To judge the matter better, I'd love to have tasted the work of those cooks who had the rare art of seasoning exotic scents into the flavor of food. It was noticed especially in the household of the king of Tunis, who in our own day landed at Naples to meet the Emperor Charles. His dishes were stuffed with aromatic drugs at such expense that dressing one peacock and two pheasants in their fashion came to a hundred ducats; and when the carver cut them open, not just the dining hall but every room of his palace and the neighboring streets filled with a sweet vapor that took a long while to fade.
My chief concern in choosing where to stay is always to avoid thick and stinking air. And those beautiful cities, Venice and Paris, lose a good deal of my affection for them — the one by the foul smell of her marshes, the other by the smell of her mud.
I can't accept the way we settle, in advance, how long our lives are supposed to last. I notice the wise men cut the figure much shorter than popular opinion does. When the younger Cato's friends tried to stop him from killing himself, he asked them: "Am I now at an age where I can be accused of leaving the world too soon?" He was forty-eight. He considered that a ripe, advanced age, given how few people ever reach it.
As for those who soothe themselves with some notion of "the natural course of things" and promise themselves years beyond that — well, if they could be exempted from the endless accidents we're all naturally exposed to, maybe they'd have a case. But what an idle fantasy it is to expect to die of sheer worn-out strength, the kind of death that comes only at the furthest extreme of old age, and to set the lease of our life by that measure — when it is, of all deaths, the rarest and least often seen. We call that one alone a natural death. As if it were against nature for a man to break his neck in a fall, drown in a shipwreck, or get carried off by pleurisy or plague — as if our ordinary condition didn't expose us to exactly these hazards. Let us stop flattering ourselves with these fine words. Perhaps we ought instead to call natural whatever is general, common, and universal.
Dying of old age is a death that is rare, extraordinary, singular — and therefore less natural than the others, not more. It is the last and furthest kind of dying; the more remote it stands, the less we should count on it. It is, true enough, the boundary stone beyond which we cannot pass, the limit the law of nature has fixed. But it is also a privilege she very rarely grants — to last all the way there. It's a lease she signs only as a special favor, maybe to one person in two or three centuries, and even then she throws in a safe-conduct pass to get him past all the obstacles and ambushes she has scattered along that long road.
So here is my opinion: once we reach forty, we should regard it as an age very few attain. Since men don't usually get that far, it's a sign we are already well along. And once we've passed the ordinary bounds — which are the true measure of life — we shouldn't expect to go much further. Having slipped past so many precipices of death, the same ones we've watched so many other men tumble into, we ought to admit that a run of luck this extraordinary — the luck that has rescued us from all those dangers and kept us alive beyond the usual term — is not likely to hold much longer.
Even our laws keep this error alive. They say a man isn't capable of managing his own estate until he's twenty-five — when he'll be hard pressed to manage his life that long. Augustus shaved five years off the old Roman standard and declared that thirty was old enough to be a judge. Servius Tullius excused knights over forty-seven from the hardships of war; Augustus released them at forty-five. Though sending men to the fireside before fifty-five or sixty strikes me as a bit unreasonable. My own view is that our work and our usefulness should be stretched as far as possible, for the public good. The fault I find is on the other side: they don't put us to work early enough. This same emperor was running the whole world at nineteen — and yet he wanted a man to be thirty before he was fit to settle a dispute about a gutter.
For my part, I believe our souls are as grown up at twenty as they will ever be, as capable then as ever. A soul that hasn't given clear proof of its force by that age never will. Our natural qualities and powers show whatever vigor and beauty they have within that term, or never. As they say in Dauphiné, "if the thorn doesn't prick when it's born, it will hardly ever prick at all."
Of all the great human actions I've ever heard or read of, of whatever kind, in past ages and in our own, more were done before the age of thirty than after — and often in the lives of the very same men. May I not point with confidence to Hannibal, and to his great rival Scipio? They spent the better half of their lives living off the glory they had won in their youth. Great men afterward, yes — compared with everyone else. But not compared with themselves.
As for me personally, I'm certain that since that age both my mind and my body have shrunk rather than grown — retreated rather than advanced. It's possible that in those who use their time well, knowledge and experience keep increasing with the years. But quickness, readiness, steadiness, and the other parts of us that matter far more, and are far more essentially our own — these droop and decay. As Lucretius says, "when the body is shaken by the heavy blows of time and the limbs sag with blunted force, the judgment limps, the tongue and the mind wander."
Sometimes the body surrenders to age first, sometimes the mind. And I've seen plenty of men whose brains went weak before their legs or their stomach did. It's a disease that causes its sufferer little pain and shows obscure symptoms — which makes it all the more dangerous. This is why I complain about our laws: not that they keep us at work too long, but that they set us to work too late. Considering how fragile life is, and how many ordinary, natural rocks it can wreck on, we should not hand over so large a share of it to childhood, idleness, and apprenticeship.
Those who make it their business to study human behavior never run into anything that stumps them more than fitting our actions together into one consistent picture. Our deeds contradict one another so strangely that it seems impossible they came from the same person. The younger Marius shows up sometimes as a son of Mars, sometimes as a son of Venus. Pope Boniface VIII, they say, came into his office like a fox, ruled in it like a lion, and died like a dog. And who would believe it was Nero — the very portrait of cruelty — who, when the death warrant of a condemned man was brought to him to sign, as the custom was, cried out, "I wish I had never learned to write!" That is how much it pained him to send a man to his death.
History is full of such examples, and every man can supply so many from his own experience that I sometimes wonder at intelligent people taking the trouble to sort these pieces into a matching set — since indecision strikes me as the most common and obvious defect of our nature. Remember the famous line of the comic player Publius: "A plan that cannot be changed is a bad plan."
There is some sense in judging a man by the general run of his life. But given how naturally unstable our habits and opinions are, I've often thought that even the best authors are a little off in stubbornly trying to weave us into one solid, consistent fabric. They settle on a general image of a man and then interpret all his actions to fit it — and whatever they can't bend into uniformity, they write off as play-acting. Augustus has escaped them: there was such an obvious, sudden, and continual variety in everything he did, his whole life long, that even the boldest critics have had to let him slip away whole and unjudged. Constancy is the virtue I find hardest of all to believe in, and inconstancy the easiest. Whoever judges a man in detail, piece by piece, will hit the truth more often.
In all of antiquity it's hard to pick out a dozen men who set their lives on one fixed and certain course — which is the main point of wisdom. To sum it all up in a word, says one of the ancients, and to gather every rule of human life into one: it is to will, and not to will, always the same thing. I won't bother to add, he says, "provided the will is just" — because if it isn't just, it cannot possibly stay the same. I learned long ago that vice is nothing but disorder and lack of measure, and so constancy can never be fastened to it. Demosthenes is supposed to have said that the beginning of all virtue is reflection and deliberation — and its end and perfection, constancy. If we chose our course by reason, we would choose the best one; but nobody has thought of it. As Horace says, "what he sought, he scorns; what he just let go, he chases again. He seethes, and his whole life is out of order."
Our usual practice is to follow the pull of our appetite — left, right, up, down, wherever the breeze of occasion carries us. We never think about what we want until the instant we want it; and we change like that little creature that takes its color from whatever you set it on. What we decided a moment ago we immediately reverse, and then reverse again. It is all swaying and inconsistency. As Horace says, we are wooden puppets, moved by strings in other people's hands.
We do not go; we are carried — like floating things, drifting now gently, now violently, as the current runs calm or rough. As Lucretius asks, don't we see them all, not knowing what they want, forever seeking a change of place, as if that could set down the load? Every day a new whim, and our moods move with the weather — as Cicero has it, "men's minds are like the light that father Jupiter sends across the fruitful earth."
We float among our various leanings. We will nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly. If a man had fixed laws and a settled plan of conduct in his head, we would see an evenness shine through his whole life — an order, an unfailing fit of each action to the next. Empedocles spotted the flaw in the people of Agrigentum: they threw themselves into pleasures as if every day were their last, and built as if they were going to live forever. The younger Cato is easy to judge: strike one note and you have the whole instrument — a harmony of perfectly tuned sounds that cannot clash. But with us it's the opposite: every single action needs its own separate judgment. The surest way, in my opinion, is to judge each act by the circumstances closest around it, without digging any further and without drawing any larger conclusion from it.
During the civil disorders of our poor kingdom, I was told that a young woman, close by where I was then staying, had thrown herself out of a window to escape the advances of a soldier quartered in her house. The fall didn't kill her, so she tried again, and would have cut her own throat if she hadn't been stopped — though not before wounding herself badly enough to show she meant it. And then she freely admitted that the soldier had so far pressed her with nothing worse than courtship, persistence, and presents — she was only afraid he would come to force in the end. And all this she said with such a look, such a tone, and her own blood still on her to vouch for her virtue, that she seemed a second Lucretia. Yet I have since learned, on good authority, that both before and after, she drove no such hard bargain. As the host says in Ariosto's tale: be as handsome a man and as fine a gentleman as you please, but don't conclude too much about your lady's unshakable chastity just because you've been turned down. It may only mean the muleteer suits her better.
Antigonus had taken one of his soldiers into high favor for his courage, and ordered his physicians to cure the man of a deep, lingering disease that had tormented him for years. After the cure, Antigonus noticed him going about his fighting far more coolly than before, and asked what had so tamed him. "You did, sir," the soldier answered, "by relieving me of the pains that made my life not worth keeping." A soldier of Lucullus had been stripped of everything by the enemy, and in revenge pulled off a magnificent stroke against them that left him richer than before. Lucullus, who had formed a high opinion of him from that exploit, set about recruiting him for some extremely dangerous mission, with all the handsome speeches and promises he could think of — the kind of words, as Horace says, that might put heart into a coward. "Send some poor soldier who's been plundered," the man answered — for, as Horace has it, "the fellow who has lost his purse will go wherever you like" — and he flatly refused to go.
We read that Mehmed furiously berated Hassan, the commander of his Janissaries, for letting the Hungarians break into his squadrons and for fighting feebly himself. Hassan's only answer was to charge alone, scimitar in hand, into the first body of enemies he met, where he was promptly cut to pieces. That was perhaps not so much vindication as a swing of mood — not natural bravery so much as a flash of wounded pride. The man you saw yesterday so daring and bold — don't be surprised to find him just as great a coward the day after. Anger, necessity, company, wine, or the sound of a trumpet had set his blood up. That is not courage formed and settled by reason; it is courage thrown together by circumstances — and it's no wonder if different circumstances turn it into something else entirely.
These supple shifts and contradictions in us have led some to imagine that we have two souls, and others that two powers attend us, each pulling its own way — one toward good, the other toward ill — since such jerky variety could never, they think, flow from a single source.
As for me, every gust of every accident not only carries me along with it; I also unsettle and trouble myself by the sheer instability of my own posture. Whoever looks closely into himself will hardly ever find himself twice in the same state. I give my soul one face or another, depending on which side I turn her to. If I speak of myself in different ways, it's because I see myself in different ways. Every contradiction can be found in me, in some corner or other, in some form or other: bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; talkative, silent; hardworking, delicate; clever, dull; gloomy, cheerful; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; generous, greedy, and wasteful. I find all of it in myself, more or less, depending on which way I turn. And whoever sifts himself to the bottom will find this same flux and discord in himself — even in his own judgment. I have nothing to say about myself that is whole, simple, and solid, without mixture and confusion. Distinguo — "I draw a distinction" — is the most universal clause in my logic.
Though I always mean to speak well of what's good, and to put the better interpretation on things rather than the worse, still our condition is so strange that vice itself often pushes us into doing good — if doing good were judged by anything but intention. So one gallant deed should not prove a man brave. If he were truly brave, he would be brave always, on every occasion. If his courage were a habit and not a single outburst, it would make him equally steady in every emergency: the same alone as in company, the same in the tournament lists as on the battlefield. For say what they will, there is not one courage for the street and another for the field. He would bear an illness in his bed as bravely as a wound in battle, and fear death no more in his own house than in an assault. We would not see the same man charge into a breach with superb confidence and then torment himself over a lost lawsuit or the death of a child. When a man who is a notorious coward stands firm under poverty — when he flinches at the barber's razor and yet runs head-on at enemy swords — the action deserves praise; the man does not.
Many Greeks, says Cicero, cannot bear the sight of an enemy yet endure sickness with courage; the Cimbrians and Celtiberians are exactly the reverse — for, as he adds, nothing can be steady that does not spring from a fixed principle.
No valor was more extreme in its kind than Alexander's; but even his is of one kind only — not full enough at every point, not universal. Incomparable as it is, it has its blemishes. We see him losing his head at every faint suspicion that his captains were plotting against his life, and throwing himself into those investigations with a violence and reckless injustice, and a fear, that overturned his natural reason. The superstition that ran so deep in him carries its own trace of cowardice. And his extravagant remorse over the murder of Clytus is one more mark of how unevenly his courage ran.
Everything we do is a patchwork of separate pieces, and we want to win honor under a false flag. Virtue can only be followed for her own sake; if we sometimes borrow her mask for some other purpose, she promptly snatches it back off our face. Virtue is a vivid, fast dye: once the soul is truly steeped in it, it will not come out except with the cloth itself. So to judge a man rightly, we must follow his track a long way and watch it closely. If constancy does not stand firm there on its own foundation — "if the path of his life has been thought through and laid out in advance," as Cicero puts it — if the variety of events makes him change his pace (his path, I mean; the pace may run faster or slower), then let him go: that man runs wherever the wind blows, as the motto of our Talbot has it.
It's no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has such power over us, since we live by chance. Whoever has not aimed his life at some definite goal cannot possibly arrange the individual acts. Whoever does not carry the whole shape in his head cannot fit the pieces together. What good is a supply of paints to a man who doesn't know what he means to paint? No one draws up a definite plan for his life; we decide it only piece by piece. The archer must first know what he is aiming at, and then fit his hand, bow, string, arrow, and movement to the target. Our plans go astray because they have no address and no destination. No wind works for the sailor who has no port in mind.
I can't accept the verdict given in favor of Sophocles, when the reading of one of his tragedies was taken as proof — against his own son's accusation — that he was fit to manage his household affairs. Nor do I think the Parians, sent to straighten out the Milesians, drew a sound conclusion from what they saw. Visiting the island, they took note of the best-tended fields and the best-run country houses, wrote down the owners' names, called an assembly of the citizens, and appointed those farmers the new governors and magistrates — reasoning that men so careful of their private business would be just as careful of the public's.
We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that every piece plays its own game every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and other people. "Consider it a great thing," says Seneca, "to play one and the same man."
Since ambition can teach men valor, and temperance, and generosity — yes, and even justice; since greed can take a shop boy raised in shade and idleness and give him the nerve to leave the fireside and trust himself, in a frail boat, to the waves and the anger of Neptune, and can teach him discretion and prudence along the way; since Venus herself puts boldness and resolve into boys still under the schoolmaster's rod, and steels the hearts of tender girls in their mothers' laps — as Tibullus tells it, the girl, with love for her guide, slips past the sleeping guards and steals through the dark, alone, to her young man — given all this, it is not enough for a sound judgment to weigh us simply by our outward actions. It must probe right down to the soul, and discover there what springs set the motion going. But since that is a high and hazardous undertaking, I wish fewer people would attempt it.
If to philosophize is, as they define it, to doubt, then surely to write at random and play the fool, as I do, must count as doubting too. It is for novices and freshmen to inquire and dispute, and for the chairman to moderate and decide. My chairman is the authority of the divine will, which governs us without contradiction and sits high above these vain human quarrels.
When Philip forced his way into the Peloponnese, someone told Damidas that the Spartans would suffer badly if they did not hurry to make peace with him. "You poor fellow," Damidas replied, "what can people suffer who do not fear death?" Agis was asked how a man might live free. "By despising death," he said. These sayings, and a thousand others like them, plainly mean something more than just waiting patiently for death to arrive on its own. There are things in life far worse to endure than death itself.
Take the Spartan boy captured by Antigonus and sold as a slave. When his master ordered him to some degrading task, the boy said, "You shall see what you have bought. It would be shameful for me to serve when freedom is so close at hand" — and threw himself from the top of the house. When Antipater threatened the Spartans harshly to force them to accept one of his demands, they answered, "If you threaten us with worse than death, we shall die all the more willingly." And when Philip wrote that he would block all their undertakings: "What — will you also keep us from dying?"
This is the meaning of the old saying: the wise man lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can. The kindest gift nature has given us — the one that strips away every excuse for complaining about our condition — is that she has left the keys of life in our own keeping. She has arranged only one door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out. We may run short of land to live on, but land enough to die on can never be lacking, as Boiocalus answered the Romans. Why do you complain of this world? It does not hold you. If you live in pain, your own cowardice is the cause. To die, nothing is needed but the will to die. As Seneca says, "Death is everywhere — heaven has provided well for that. Anyone can take a man's life; no one can take his death. A thousand roads lead to it."
Nor is death a remedy for one disease only; it is the infallible cure of them all. It is a sure harbor, never to be feared and often to be sought. It comes to the same thing whether a man gives himself his end or waits to receive it, whether he pays before his day or waits until payment falls due. Wherever it comes from, it is still his own. Wherever the thread breaks, there is the end of the spool. The most voluntary death is the finest. Life depends on the will of others; death depends on our own. In nothing should we suit our own inclination so much as in this. Reputation has no stake in such a venture, and it is folly to be swayed by any worry about it. Living is slavery if the liberty of dying is missing.
The ordinary course of medicine is carried out at the expense of life. They torment us with burnings, incisions, and amputations of limbs; they forbid us food and drain our blood. One step further and we are cured indeed, and for good. Why is the jugular vein not as much at our disposal as the median vein? For a desperate disease, a desperate cure. Servius the grammarian, tortured by gout, could think of no better remedy than to apply poison to his legs and kill their feeling. Let them be as gouty as they pleased, so long as they could feel no pain.
God gives us leave enough to go when He reduces us to a state where living is far worse than dying. It is weakness to buckle under infirmities, but it is madness to nurse them. The Stoics say it is living according to nature for a wise man to take his leave of life even at the height of prosperity, if he does it at the right moment; and for a fool to cling to life even in misery, provided he still has most of the things they count as natural goods. Just as I do not break the law against thieves when I pocket my own money and cut my own purse, nor the law against arsonists when I burn my own wood, so I am not subject to the laws against murderers for having taken my own life.
Hegesias said that as the conditions of life depend on our choice, so should the conditions of death. And when Diogenes met the philosopher Speusippus, so swollen with chronic dropsy that he had to be carried in a litter, and Speusippus called out, "I wish you good health" — "No health to you," Diogenes answered, "who are content to live in such a condition." And in fact, not long after, Speusippus, weary of so lingering a state, found a means to die.
But this does not pass without dispute. Many hold that we cannot quit this garrison of the world without the express command of Him who posted us in it; that it belongs to God — who placed us here not for ourselves alone, but for His glory and the service of others — to dismiss us when it pleases Him, and not for us to leave without His permission. We are born not for ourselves only but for our country too, and the laws have a claim on us in their own interest, with a charge of manslaughter ready against us. And if those courts fail to take up the case, we are punished in the next world as deserters of our duty. As Virgil writes, the next sad region of the underworld holds those who, though guiltless, made their own deaths with their own hands, and hating the light, threw their lives away.
There is more constancy in wearing the chain we are bound to than in breaking it, and stronger proof of firmness in Regulus than in Cato. It is rashness and impatience that drive us over these cliffs. No misfortune can make true virtue turn her back; she seeks out hardship, pain, and grief as the very food that nourishes her. The threats of tyrants, the racks and the tortures, only stir her up and give her life — like the oak on Mount Algidus in Horace's lines, which draws fresh vigor from the very axe that lops it. And as Seneca says, "Father, it is no virtue to fear life; virtue is to stand against great misfortunes and neither flinch nor retreat." Or as Martial puts it, "In adversity it is easy to despise death; the braver man is the one who can endure to live wretched."
It is cowardice, not virtue, to crouch in a furrow under a tombstone to dodge the blows of fortune. Virtue never halts or leaves her road, however hard the storm blows. As Horace says, "If the world cracked and fell, the ruins would strike a fearless head." Most of the time, fleeing other troubles drives us straight into this one; indeed, in trying to escape death we often run right into its mouth. "Tell me," asks Martial, "is it not madness to die for fear of dying?" — like those who, terrified of a precipice, throw themselves over it. As Lucan says, the very fear of coming evil has pushed many into extreme danger; the bravest man is the one who can face what he dreads when it confronts him, and can also wait. And Lucretius observes that the dread of death so seizes some men that it makes them hate both life and daylight, and they kill themselves in their misery — forgetting that this very fear is the fountain of all their cares.
Plato, in his Laws, assigns a disgraceful burial to the man who has robbed his nearest and dearest friend — himself — of life and of his appointed course, when not compelled by public judgment, by some grievous and inescapable stroke of fortune, or by unbearable disgrace, but driven merely by cowardice and the weakness of a timid soul. And the opinion that holds life so cheap is absurd, for life is our being; it is all we have. Beings of a nobler and higher nature may look down on ours, but it is against nature for us to despise ourselves and hold ourselves of no account. It is a disease peculiar to man, found in no other creature, to hate and scorn his own existence. And it is a vanity of the same stamp to wish to be something other than what we are. Such a desire can never touch us, since it contradicts and cancels itself. The man who wishes to be turned from a man into an angel does nothing for himself; he would gain nothing by it — for once he no longer exists, who is left to feel the improvement and rejoice in it for him? As Lucretius says, he for whom misery and pain lie in the future must himself exist at the time the ills befall him.
The security, the rest, the freedom from feeling, the escape from the evils of this life that we think we are buying at the price of death — none of it profits us at all. The man who cannot enjoy peace gains nothing by escaping war, and the man who cannot taste rest gains just as little by avoiding trouble.
Among those who hold the first of these two opinions, there has been a great debate about what occasions are sufficient to justify the contemplation of self-slaughter — what they call "a reasonable exit." For though they say men must often die for slight causes, since the things that keep us in life are themselves of no great weight, still there has to be some limit. There are wild and senseless moods that have driven not only single men but whole nations to destroy themselves; I have given examples elsewhere. We read of the virgins of Miletus, who by a frantic compact hanged themselves one after another until the magistrate put a stop to it, decreeing that any woman found hanged should be dragged by the same rope, stark naked, through the city.
When Therykion urged Cleomenes to kill himself because of the wretched state of his affairs — having missed the more honorable death in the battle he had just lost, he should accept this one, second in honor, and not give the conquerors the chance to inflict on him either a shameful death or a shameful life — Cleomenes, with a courage truly Spartan and Stoic, rejected the advice as weak and unmanly. "That remedy," he said, "can never run out, but a man must never use it while an inch of hope remains." It was sometimes constancy and valor to live, he said; he wanted even his death to be of service to his country, and meant to make it an act of honor and virtue. Therykion still thought himself right, and did his own business; Cleomenes did the same afterward, but not until he had first tried fortune's utmost malice.
All the troubles in the world are not weighty enough that a man should die to escape them. Besides, there are so many sudden and unexpected turns in human affairs that it is hard to judge rightly when we have truly reached the end of our hope. As the poet says, even the gladiator beaten in the cruel arena keeps hoping, though the menacing crowd turns its thumb. All things, says the old adage, may be hoped for by a man while he lives. Yes, replies Seneca — but why should that thought always run in a man's head, that fortune can do anything for the living, rather than this one: that fortune has no power over the man who knows how to die?
Josephus found himself in danger so close and so plain — a whole people violently set against him, with no visible means of escape — that even when a friend counseled him in that extremity to kill himself, it served him well to hold on to hope; for fortune turned the event beyond all human expectation, and he came out of it without harm. Whereas Brutus and Cassius, by the haste and rashness with which they killed themselves before the proper time and a just occasion, threw away the last remains of Roman liberty, of which they were the sole protectors. Monsieur d'Enghien, at the battle of Cerisoles, twice tried to run himself through, despairing of the day's fortune — which was going very badly on his side of the field — and by that haste came very near cheating himself of a magnificent victory. I have seen a hundred hares escape from the very teeth of the greyhounds. As Seneca says, some men have outlived their executioners. And as Virgil writes, length of days and the shifting labor of changeful time bring things to a better state; fortune, turning, shows another face, and sets men back on solid ground.
Pliny says there are only three kinds of disease that give a man good title to destroy himself, and the worst of them is a stone in the bladder when the urine is blocked. Seneca says only those diseases that unsettle the workings of the soul over a long time.
And some, to avoid a worse death, have chosen one to their own liking. Democritus, general of the Aetolians, was brought a prisoner to Rome and found means to escape by night; but with his keepers close behind him, rather than be retaken he fell on his own sword and died. Antinous and Theodotus, when the Romans had reduced their city in Epirus to the last extremity, counseled the people to kill themselves together; but the people preferred to surrender, so the two leaders went to find the death they wanted, charging furiously into the enemy, intent on striking and not on parrying.
When the island of Gozo was taken by the Turks some years ago, a Sicilian there, who had two beautiful daughters of marriageable age, killed them both with his own hand, and their mother too, who came running in to save them. That done, he went out into the street with a crossbow and a harquebus, killed with two shots the two Turks nearest his door, then drew his sword and charged in among the rest, where he was instantly surrounded and cut to pieces — delivering his family and himself from slavery and dishonor.
The Jewish women, after circumcising their children, threw them and themselves off a precipice to escape the cruelty of Antigonus. I have been told of a man of rank in one of our prisons whose friends, learning that he would surely be condemned, bribed a priest to tell him — to spare him the disgrace of such a death — that his only means of deliverance was to commend himself to a certain saint, under certain vows, and to fast eight days together without taking any nourishment, whatever weakness or faintness he might feel. He followed the advice, and so destroyed himself without knowing it, never dreaming of death or of any danger in the experiment. Scribonia, advising her nephew Libo to kill himself rather than wait for the stroke of justice, told him that preserving his life only to hand it over within three or four days to the men who would come fetch him to execution was doing other people's business, and that keeping his blood for his enemies to spill was simply serving their malice.
We read in the Bible that when Nicanor, the persecutor of God's law, sent his soldiers to seize the good old man Razis — surnamed, in honor of his virtue, the father of the Jews — the old man, seeing no other remedy, his gates burned down and the enemy ready to lay hands on him, chose to die nobly rather than fall into the power of his wicked adversaries and be butchered by them against the honor of his rank. He stabbed himself with his own sword; but the blow, struck in haste, did not go home, so he ran and threw himself headlong from the top of a wall into the crowd below, which parted and made room, so that he landed squarely on his head. Feeling some life still in him even then, he summoned his courage again, got to his feet all bloody and broken, forced his way through the crowd to a steep rock, and there, through one of his wounds, drew out his own bowels and, tearing them apart with both hands, flung them among his pursuers — calling down divine vengeance on them all the while for their cruelty and injustice.
Of all violences done to the conscience, the one done against a woman's chastity is, in my opinion, the most to be avoided, since a certain pleasure is naturally mixed in it, and for that reason the refusal can never be entirely perfect and whole; the violence seems mingled with some small consent of the party forced. Church history holds several examples of devout women who embraced death to protect themselves from the outrages tyrants prepared against their religion and their honor. Pelagia and Sophronia were both canonized: the first threw herself into a river with her mother and sisters to escape being forced by soldiers, and the second killed herself to avoid being violated by the emperor Maxentius.
It may perhaps stand to our honor in future ages that a learned author of our own day — a Parisian — takes great pains to persuade the ladies of our time to take any course at all rather than enter into the horrible contemplation of such a despair. I am sorry he never heard, to add to his other stories, the saying of a woman at Toulouse who had passed through the hands of some soldiers: "God be praised," she said, "that for once in my life I have had my fill without sin." In truth, these cruelties are quite unworthy of the good French temper, and, God be thanked, our air has been well purged of them since that good advice. It is enough that they say "no" while doing it, following the rule of good Marot — "a sweet no, with a sweet smile, is so very gracious."
History is full everywhere of those who, by a thousand different roads, have traded a painful and weary life for death. Lucius Aruntius killed himself, he said, to flee both the future and the past. Granius Silvanus and Statius Proximus killed themselves after being pardoned by Nero — either scorning to live by the favor of so wicked a man, or unwilling to be put to the trouble of obtaining a second pardon someday, knowing how prone he was to suspect worthy men and believe accusations against them. Spargapises, son of Queen Tomyris and a prisoner of war to Cyrus, used the first kindness Cyrus showed him — ordering him unbound — to kill himself, having wanted no other benefit from liberty than to take revenge on himself for the disgrace of his capture.
Boges, governor of Eion for King Xerxes, besieged by the Athenian army under Cimon, refused the terms offered him — safe return to Asia with all his wealth — unable to bear outliving the loss of a place his master had given him to keep. He defended the city to the last extremity; then, when nothing was left to eat, he threw all the gold and everything else the enemy might take as plunder into the river Strymon, ordered a great pyre lit and the throats of all the women, children, concubines, and servants cut, threw their bodies into the fire, and at last leaped into it himself.
Ninachetuen, a lord of the Indies, on hearing the first whisper of the Portuguese viceroy's plan to strip him, for no stated cause, of his command at Malacca and transfer it to the king of Campar, made this resolution by himself. He had a platform built, longer than it was wide, raised on columns, royally hung with tapestries and strewn with flowers and quantities of perfume. Then, in a robe of cloth of gold thick with jewels of great value, he came out into the street and mounted the steps; at one corner burned a pyre of aromatic wood. Everyone ran to see what these strange preparations meant. Ninachetuen, with a bold but indignant face, declared how much the Portuguese nation owed him, and with what spotless fidelity he had carried out his charge; that having so often shown, sword in hand, on behalf of others, that honor was dearer to him than life, he was not going to abandon that concern in his own case; that since fortune denied him every means of opposing the injury planned against him, his courage at least commanded him to free himself from the feeling of it, and not to serve as a fable for the people or a triumph for men less deserving than himself. Having said this, he leaped into the fire.
Sextilia, wife of Scaurus, and Paxaea, wife of Labeo, to hearten their husbands to escape the dangers closing in on them — dangers in which they had no share but their married love — voluntarily gave up their own lives, to serve them in that final necessity as companion and example. What they did for their husbands, Cocceius Nerva did for his country, with less use though equal devotion: this great jurist, flourishing in health, wealth, reputation, and the emperor's favor, had no other reason to kill himself than pure grief at the miserable state of the Roman republic.
Nothing can be added to the beauty of the death of the wife of Fulvius, a close favorite of Augustus. Augustus, having discovered that Fulvius had leaked an important secret entrusted to him, received him coldly one morning when he came to pay his respects, and frowned on him. Fulvius went home in despair and sorrowfully told his wife that, having fallen into this misfortune, he was resolved to kill himself. "It is only right that you should," she answered flatly, "since you have had so much experience of my loose tongue and never took warning from it. But let me kill myself first." And without another word she ran herself through with a sword.
Vibius Virrius, despairing of the safety of his besieged city and of Roman mercy, told the senate of Capua in its last deliberation, after many arguments to that end, that the noblest way to escape fortune was by their own hands. The enemy would hold them in honor, he said, and Hannibal would feel how many faithful friends he had abandoned. He invited those who approved his advice to a good supper waiting at his house, where after they had eaten well they would drink together of what he had prepared — "a drink," he said, "that will deliver our bodies from torture, our souls from insult, and our eyes and ears from the sight and sound of all the hateful evils the conquered suffer at the hands of cruel and implacable conquerors." He had arranged, he said, for fit persons to throw their bodies onto a funeral pyre before his door as soon as they were dead. Many approved this high resolution; few imitated it. Twenty-seven senators followed him, and after trying to drown the thought of that fatal decision in wine, they ended the feast with the deadly dish. Embracing one another, after they had jointly mourned the misfortune of their country, some went home to their own houses, others stayed to be burned with Vibius on his pyre. And they were all so long in dying — the wine filling their veins and delaying the poison's work — that some of them came within an hour of seeing the enemy inside the walls of Capua, which was taken the next morning, and of suffering the very miseries they had paid so dearly to avoid.
Jubellius Taurea, another citizen of the same country, when the consul Fulvius was returning from the shameful slaughter he had made of two hundred and twenty-five senators, called him back fiercely by name, and when he had made him stop, said, "Give the order for someone to dispatch me too, after the massacre of so many others, so you can boast of having killed a far braver man than yourself." Fulvius dismissed him as a madman — and besides, letters had just arrived from Rome condemning the inhumanity of his executions, which tied his hands. So Jubellius went on: "Since my country is taken, my friends are dead, and I have slain my wife and children with my own hands to save them from the desolation of this ruin — since I am denied the death of my fellow citizens — let me borrow from virtue a vengeance on this hateful life." And drawing a short sword he had hidden on him, he ran it through his own breast and fell backward, dying at the consul's feet.
When Alexander was besieging a city in the Indies, the people inside, finding themselves hard pressed, resolved stoutly to deprive him of the pleasure of his victory, and burned themselves all together along with their city, in spite of his humanity. A new kind of war: the enemy fighting to save them, they fighting to destroy themselves, doing everything to make sure of death that men ordinarily do to make sure of life.
Astapa, a city in Spain, finding its walls and defenses too weak to withstand the Romans, the inhabitants piled all their riches and furniture in the public square, placed all the women and children on top of the heap, stacked wood and kindling around it to catch fire quickly, and left fifty of their young men to carry out what they had resolved. Then they made a desperate sally, and lacking the power to win, got themselves killed to the last man. The fifty, after slaughtering every living soul left in the city and setting fire to the pile, threw themselves into it last of all — ending their noble liberty in a manner without feeling rather than in sorrow and disgrace, and showing the enemy that if fortune had allowed it, they would have had the same courage to snatch victory away as they had to make it dreadful, even fatal: for many of the enemy, lured by the gold melting in those flames, pressed close and were suffocated and burned, unable to retreat through the crowd pushing behind them.
The people of Abydos, pressed by King Philip, took the same resolution; but lacking time, they could not carry it out. The king, horrified by their reckless haste — the treasure and goods they had condemned to the flames having first been seized — drew off his soldiers and granted them three days to kill themselves in, so that they might do it with more order and at greater ease. They filled those three days with blood and slaughter beyond the worst excess of any enemy's cruelty, so that not a single soul was left alive that had the power to destroy itself. There are countless examples of such mass resolutions; they seem the more fierce and cruel as their effect is more universal, yet they are really less so than when carried out singly. What argument and persuasion cannot do with men one by one, they can do with all together — the fever of the group sweeping away individual judgment.
In the reign of Tiberius, the condemned who waited to be executed forfeited their goods and were denied burial rites; those who anticipated the sentence by killing themselves were buried and had liberty to dispose of their estates by will.
But men sometimes covet death in hope of a greater good. "I desire to be with Christ," says St. Paul; and, "who shall deliver me from these bonds?" Cleombrotus of Ambracia, having read Plato's Phaedo, conceived so great a longing for the life to come that, with no other occasion at all, he threw himself into the sea. Which shows how wrongly we call this voluntary dissolution "despair," when it is often the eagerness of hope that inclines us to it — and often a calm and temperate desire, proceeding from a mature and deliberate judgment. Jacques du Chastel, bishop of Soissons, on St. Louis's expedition overseas, seeing the king and the whole army about to return to France leaving the affairs of religion unfinished, resolved to go to paradise instead. Having taken solemn leave of his friends, he charged alone, in full view of everyone, into the enemy's army, where he was promptly cut to pieces.
In a certain kingdom of the newly discovered world, on a day of solemn procession when the idol they worship is drawn through public streets on a chariot of marvelous size, many are seen cutting off pieces of their own flesh to offer it; and a number of others prostrate themselves in its path, letting themselves be crushed and broken under the heavy wheels, to earn a veneration for sanctity after death — which is duly paid them. The bishop's death, sword in hand, has more magnanimity in it and less feeling, the heat of combat absorbing part of the pain.
Some governments have taken it on themselves to regulate the justice and the proper occasions of voluntary death. In former times our city of Marseilles kept a poison prepared from hemlock, at public expense, for anyone who wished to hasten his end — provided he first gave the Six Hundred, their senate, an account of the reasons and motives for his design. It was not lawful to do violence to oneself otherwise than by leave of the magistrates and upon just occasion. The same law was in use elsewhere.
Sextus Pompeius, on his expedition into Asia, stopped at the island of Cea, near Negropont. While he was there — we have it from someone who was with him — a woman of great rank, having explained to her fellow citizens why she was resolved to end her life, invited Pompeius to her death, to make it the more honorable. He accepted; and having long tried in vain, with all the power of his eloquence, which was very great, to turn her from her design, he yielded at last to her will.
She had passed her ninetieth year in a very happy state of both body and mind. Lying now on her bed, better dressed than usual and propped on her elbow, she said: "May the gods, O Sextus Pompeius — and rather those I leave than those I go to seek — reward you for not disdaining to be both the counselor of my life and the witness of my death. For my part, having always felt the kindly face of fortune, I am going, for fear that the desire to live too long may show me the other one, to dismiss by a happy end the remains of my soul, leaving behind two daughters of my body and a legion of grandchildren." Then, after urging her family to live in peace, she divided her property among them, commended her household gods to her eldest daughter, took up the bowl containing the poison with a steady hand, and having made her vows and prayers to Mercury to conduct her to some happy seat in the other world, briskly swallowed the fatal draught. After that, she kept the company informed of its progress — how the cold took hold of the parts of her body one after another — until at last, telling them it had reached her heart and bowels, she called her daughters to do the final office and close her eyes.
Pliny tells of a certain Hyperborean nation where, thanks to the sweet mildness of the air, lives rarely ended except by the voluntary surrender of the inhabitants: weary of living and sated with it, they had the custom, at a very great age, of making good cheer and then throwing themselves into the sea from the top of a certain rock set aside for that service.
Pain, and the fear of a worse death, seem to me the most excusable incitements.
I have no doubt that I often end up talking about things that are handled better, and more truly, by the people who actually master them. What you have here is purely a test of my natural abilities, not my acquired ones. Catch me in some ignorance and you've won nothing off me — I'd hardly answer to someone else for writings I don't answer for to myself, or even feel satisfied with. Anyone hunting for knowledge should go fish for it where it lives; there is nothing I claim less. These are fancies of my own, and I'm not trying to explain the world with them — I'm trying to lay myself open. The things themselves may be known to me someday, or may have been once, back when fortune happened to set me down wherever they were being explained. But I've completely forgotten. I may be a man of some reading, but I am a man of no retention.
So I can promise nothing certain, beyond showing you exactly how far the knowledge I currently have happens to reach. Don't pay attention to the matter I write about — pay attention to the shape I give it as I write. Watch, in what I borrow, whether I knew how to choose the right thing to lift or support the idea, which is always my own. Because I make others say for me — not before me, but after me — what I can't say so well myself, whether for want of language or want of sense. I don't count my borrowings; I weigh them. If I'd wanted to make them impressive by quantity, I'd have packed in twice as many. They are almost all from names so famous and so ancient that they seem to introduce themselves, without my help.
In the reasonings, comparisons, and arguments that I transplant into my own soil and mix in with my own, I deliberately hide the author. I do it to put a check on those rash critics who pounce on every kind of writing — especially recent writing, by men still living, and in the common tongue, which lets every man fancy himself qualified to judge, and makes the whole conception and design seem common too. I want them to flick Plutarch's nose thinking it's mine, and burn themselves insulting Seneca in me. I have to hide my weakness under these great reputations. And I will love anyone who can pluck my feathers off me — by sheer clearness of understanding and judgment, by nothing but the force and beauty of the writing itself. Because I, whose memory fails me at every turn when I try to sort the borrowed plumes out by their nation, am still wise enough to know, by the measure of my own abilities, that my soil could never produce the rich flowers I find growing there, and that all the fruit of my own raising isn't worth a single one of them.
For this much, though, I do hold myself accountable: if I trip over myself; if there's vanity or weakness in my writing that I don't sense myself, or can't see even when someone points it out. Plenty of faults escape our eye — but the real infirmity of judgment is failing to see them when somebody else lays them open to us. Knowledge and truth can lodge in us without judgment, and judgment can live in us without them; in fact, confessing your ignorance is one of the finest and surest proofs of judgment that I know.
I have no drill sergeant to put my writings in rank and file except chance. As things come into my head, I pile them up; sometimes they crowd in whole battalions, sometimes single file. I want people to see my natural, ordinary pace, lopsided as it is. I let myself jog along however I happen to go. And anyway, these are not subjects a man is forbidden to be ignorant about, or to discuss casually, at a venture. I'd love to understand things more perfectly, but I won't pay what perfect understanding costs. My plan is to pass what's left of my life gently, not laboriously. There is nothing I am willing to break my head over — not even knowledge, whatever it's worth.
In books, all I look for is the pleasure of an honest pastime; or if I study, the only learning I'm after is the kind that teaches me to know myself, and to die well and live well. As Propertius says, "this is the post my horse must sweat toward."
When I hit difficulties in my reading, I don't sit there chewing my nails over them; after a charge or two, I let them go. If I dug in, I'd only lose myself, and my time with it. My mind is impatient — it has to be satisfied on the first pass. What I don't see at once, staring makes more obscure, not less. I do nothing without gladness; grinding away too stubbornly darkens, dulls, and tires my judgment. My sight blurs and scatters with poring; I have to pull it away and send it back in fresh attempts — exactly the way they teach us to judge the sheen of scarlet cloth: pass the eye lightly across it, then sweep over it again in several quick, repeated glances.
If one book bores me, I take up another — and I only touch them at all in the hours when doing nothing has started to weary me. I don't bother much with new books, because the old ones seem fuller and stronger; nor much with the Greeks, because my judgment can't do its work on a half-understood text.
Among the books that are simply pleasant, of the moderns I find Boccaccio's Decameron, Rabelais, and the Kisses of Johannes Secundus — if that one may be filed under the heading at all — worth the time, for amusement. As for Amadis and that sort of stuff, it couldn't hold even my childhood. And I'll say further — boldly or rashly, take your pick — that this old, heavy soul of mine is no longer tickled by Ariosto, nor even by the worthy Ovid. His easy flow and his inventions, which used to ravish me, hardly interest me now; I can barely sit still for them.
I say my opinion freely of all things — even of things that may well exceed my capacity, and that I don't pretend for a moment fall under my jurisdiction. What my judgment delivers is the measure of my own eyesight, not the measure of the things I'm bold enough to judge. When I find myself put off by Plato's Axiochus — finding it a feeble work, with all due respect to such an author — my judgment doesn't trust itself. It isn't arrogant enough to set itself against the authority of so many famous judgments of antiquity, which it regards as its tutors and masters, and with whom it would rather be wrong. In a case like that, it convicts itself: either it stopped at the outer bark, unable to reach the heart, or it was looking at the thing in some false light. It settles for keeping itself clear of confusion and disorder; as for its own weakness, it owns up to it freely. It believes it's giving a fair reading of what its perceptions show it — but those perceptions are weak and imperfect. Most of Aesop's fables carry several layers of meaning. The interpreters pick out one that happens to fit the story, but for the most part that's only the first face it shows, the surface; there are other layers underneath — more living, more essential, more profound — that they never managed to reach. And that's just how it is with me.
But to get on with the business of this essay: I have always thought that in poetry, Virgil, Lucretius, Catullus, and Horace stand many degrees above the rest — and Virgil above all in his Georgics, which I consider the most accomplished work in all of poetry. Set the Georgics beside the Aeneid, and you can easily see passages in the Aeneid the author would have given one more polish if he'd had the time. The fifth book of the Aeneid strikes me as its most perfect. I also love Lucan, and read him gladly — not so much for his style as for his own worth, and the truth and solidity of his opinions and judgments. As for good Terence, the very refinement and grace of the Latin tongue, I find him wonderful at catching, alive, our manners and the movements of the soul. What we do keeps throwing me back on him at every turn; and I can't read him often enough to stop discovering some new grace and beauty.
People who lived near Virgil's own time complained when anyone compared Lucretius to him. I think the comparison is, in truth, badly unequal — though it's a belief I have a hard time holding steady when I'm caught up in one of Lucretius's superb passages. But if that comparison made them angry, what would they say to the brutish, barbarous stupidity of the people who nowadays compare Virgil to Ariosto? What would Ariosto himself say? "O what a stupid and tasteless age," as Catullus put it.
I think the ancients had even more reason to complain about those who set Plautus beside Terence — a much closer match — than about Lucretius beside Virgil. It counts heavily in Terence's favor that the father of Roman eloquence has him, and him alone of his class, so constantly on his lips, and that the best judge of Roman poets passed the verdict he did on Terence's rival.
It has often struck me that our modern comedy writers — imitating the Italians, who are happy enough at this game — take three or four plots from Plautus or Terence to make one of their own, and cram five or six of Boccaccio's tales into a single comedy. What makes them load up on material like this is distrust of their ability to stand on their own merits. They need something to lean on; lacking stuff of their own to hold our attention, they bring in story to cover the weakness of the writing. With my author it's the opposite: the elegance and perfection of his way of speaking makes us lose our appetite for his plot. His grace and refinement of language hold us everywhere; he runs so clear throughout — "liquid, like the purest stream," as Horace says of him — and so fills the soul with his own beauties that we forget the beauties of his story.
The same observation takes me a step further. I notice that the best of the ancient poets avoided straining for effect — avoided not only the fantastic flights of the Spanish and Petrarchan styles, but even those softer, gentler touches that have decorated all the poetry written since. Yet no sound judgment will hold that against the ancients, or fail to admire, beyond all comparison, the smooth polish, the perpetual sweetness, the flowering beauty of Catullus's epigrams over all the stingers Martial fastens to the tails of his. The reason is the one I just gave — the one Martial gave about himself: "my subject did the work, and spared my wit the labor." The first sort make themselves felt without working themselves up, without getting angry; they have material enough to laugh with everywhere — they don't need to tickle themselves. The second sort need outside help: the less wit, the more body. They get on horseback because they can't stand on their own legs.
It's the same at our balls. The hired men who teach dancing, unable to carry off the bearing and dignity of our nobility, try to recommend themselves with dangerous leaps and other strange tumblers' tricks. And the ladies have an easier time of it in dances full of fancy steps, changes, and quick flurries of motion than in certain stately dances where they have only to walk at a natural pace and carry their ordinary grace and presence. I've likewise seen first-rate clowns, in their everyday clothes and wearing their everyday faces, give us every pleasure their art can give — while their apprentices, not yet up to that pitch of perfection, have to flour their faces, climb into ridiculous costumes, and pull a hundred grotesque expressions to scrape up a laugh.
This idea of mine is nowhere easier to see than in setting the Aeneid against Orlando Furioso. The first you see up on a strong wing, in a high, brave line of flight, always tracking its point. The second flutters and hops from tale to tale as from branch to branch, never trusting its wings except for the shortest hauls, perching at every turn for fear its breath and strength will give out — making, as Virgil says, "only short excursions."
Those, then, in that line, are the authors that please me best.
As for my other reading — the kind that mixes a little more profit with the pleasure, and teaches me how to order my opinions and my conduct — the books that serve me here are Plutarch (now that he's been translated into French) and Seneca. Both have this notable convenience, perfectly suited to my temperament: the knowledge I'm after comes in loose pieces that don't demand long stretches of reading, of which I am incapable. That's how it is with Plutarch's minor works and Seneca's letters, which are the best and most profitable parts of everything they wrote. It costs no great effort to pick one up, and I quit whenever I please, because they have no sequence, no dependence on one another.
These two authors agree in most of their useful and true opinions, and their parallel runs further: fortune sent them into the world in roughly the same century; both were tutors to Roman emperors; both came from foreign lands; both were rich, and both were great men. Their teaching is the cream of philosophy, served plainly and to the point. Plutarch is more uniform and steady; Seneca more various, more in motion. Seneca toils and strains every muscle to arm virtue against weakness, fear, and vicious appetite; Plutarch seems to rate their power lower — he won't alter his pace or even bother to put up his guard. Plutarch's opinions are Platonic, gentle, fitted to civil society; Seneca's are Stoic and Epicurean, further from common use but, to my mind, more useful to a single man and more solid. Seneca seems to bend a little toward the tyranny of the emperors of his day — and only seems, I'm sure, for I take it as certain he is speaking against his own judgment when he condemns the noble killers of Caesar. Plutarch is frank from end to end. Seneca sparkles with sharp touches and sallies; Plutarch with things that warm you and move you more. Plutarch contents you and pays you better. He leads us; the other drives us.
As for Cicero, the works of his most useful to my purpose are the ones that treat of character and the rules of living. But to confess the truth boldly — since once you've jumped the fence of impudence there's no reining in — his way of writing strikes me as tedious, and so does every writing of the same kind. His prefaces, definitions, subdivisions, and etymologies eat up the greater part of his work; whatever life and marrow there is gets smothered under the long windup. If I spend an hour reading him — which is a lot for me — and then try to recall what juice and substance I've extracted, most of the time I find nothing but wind, because he hasn't yet gotten to the arguments that serve his purpose, or the reasons that actually tie the knot I'm looking for.
For me, who only want to become wiser — not more learned, or more eloquent — these Aristotelian arrangements of parts are beside the point. I want a writer to begin with the main proposition. I know perfectly well what death and pleasure are; let no man waste his time dissecting them for me. What I want, from the first stroke, are good solid reasons that teach me how to stand up to their shock — and for that, neither grammatical subtleties nor ingenious weavings of words and syllogisms are the slightest use. I'm for arguments that charge straight into the heart of the strongpoint. Cicero's loiter around the edges of the subject. They're fine for the schools, the bar, and the pulpit, where we have leisure to doze and can wake up a quarter of an hour later in plenty of time to pick up the thread.
That manner of speaking is necessary with judges you mean to win over, right or wrong; with children; with ordinary people, to whom you have to say everything and see what sticks. I don't want an author laboring to get my attention, shouting "Hear ye!" fifty times like a herald. The Romans opened their religious rites with Hoc age — "attend to this" — the way we open ours with Sursum corda, "lift up your hearts." For me those are so many words wasted: I arrive already fully prepared from my own room. I need no appetizer, no invitation, no sauce; I eat the meat raw. All those preparatives, instead of whetting my appetite, tire it out and spoil it.
Will the license of the times excuse a sacrilege? — because I find Plato's dialogues themselves draggy, smothering the matter; and I mourn all the time a man with so many better things to say spent on those long, useless warm-up conversations. My ignorance excuses me here in better style, since I don't know Greek well enough to see the beauty of his language.
In general I choose books that use learning, not books that merely lead up to it. The first two, and Pliny, and others of their kind, have no Hoc age about them: they want readers who come already instructed — or if they do say "attend to this," it's a substantial attending, with a body of its own.
I also delight in reading the Letters to Atticus — not only because they hold so much of the history and affairs of Cicero's times, but far more because in them I discover his own private moods. For I have a singular curiosity, as I've said elsewhere, to pry into the souls of my authors, their natural and genuine opinions. From the works they put on the world's stage you may judge their talent — but not their character, and not the men themselves. I have lamented a thousand times the loss of the treatise Brutus wrote on virtue: it is a fine thing to learn the theory from those who best know the practice. But since the sermon is one thing and the preacher another, I'd as gladly see Brutus in Plutarch as in a book of his own. I would rather know for certain what he said in his tent to a few particular friends the night before a battle than the speech he made to his army the next morning; rather know what he did in his study and his chamber than what he did in the public square and the senate.
As for Cicero the man, I share the common opinion: learning aside, there was no great excellence in him. He was a good citizen, of an affable nature — as fat, easy men like him usually are — but soft-living, in truth, and with a mighty share of vanity and ambition. And I don't know how to excuse him for thinking his poetry fit to publish. Writing bad verses is no great flaw; failing to see how unworthy they were of the glory of his name — that is a flaw. As for his eloquence, it stands beyond all comparison; I believe no one will ever equal it.
The younger Cicero, who resembled his father in nothing but his name, was commanding in Asia when one day he found several strangers at his table — among them Cestius, seated at the lower end, the way men slip into the open tables of the great. Cicero asked one of his servants who the man was, and was told his name. But like a man with his mind elsewhere, who keeps forgetting the answer, he asked again — three or four times. The servant, tired of repeating himself, and wanting to fix the man in his memory by some particular detail, said: "It's that Cestius — the one you were told makes no great account of your father's eloquence next to his own." Cicero, suddenly stung, ordered poor Cestius seized on the spot and had him soundly whipped, in his own presence. A most discourteous host.
Even among those who, all things weighed, judged Cicero's eloquence incomparable, there were some who didn't hesitate to note its faults: his great friend Brutus, for one, who called it a broken and feeble eloquence. The orators nearest his own age also faulted his obsessive care for a certain long cadence at the close of his sentences, and singled out the words esse videatur — "it would seem to be" — which he leans on so often there. For my own part, I prefer a style that comes off shorter and rounder. He does sometimes snap his clauses together briskly enough, but very seldom. One passage I marked myself: "I had rather be old for a shorter time than be old before I am old," as he says in his book on old age.
The historians are the ball that comes to my strong side — pleasant and easy, and at the same time the place where man in general, the creature I hunt the knowledge of, appears more vividly and more entire than anywhere else: the variety and truth of his inward qualities, in bulk and in detail, the diversity of materials he's assembled from, and the accidents that threaten him. Now the writers of lives — since they dwell more on counsels than on events, more on what issues from within than on what happens without — are the historians fittest for me; and that is why, in every way, Plutarch is my man. I am very sorry we don't have a dozen Diogenes Laertiuses, or that his lives of the philosophers aren't longer and better known, for I am every bit as curious about the lives and fortunes of these great teachers of the world as about the variety of their doctrines and opinions.
In this branch of study you have to tumble through all sorts of authors without distinction, old and new, French and foreign, to learn the things they variously treat of. But Caesar, in my opinion, deserves study in a class by himself — not for the history alone, but for the man, he has so much excellence and perfection above all the rest, Sallust included. Truly, I read this author with rather more reverence and respect than we usually grant human writings: now considering the man himself, through his actions and his miraculous greatness; now the purity and inimitable polish of his language, in which he surpassed not only every historian, as Cicero admits, but perhaps Cicero himself. He speaks of his enemies with such fairness that — apart from the false colors he uses to dress up his bad cause, and the filth of his pestilent ambition — I think the only fault you can charge him with is speaking too sparingly of himself. So many great things could not have been done under his command unless his own personal share in them was far larger than he lets on.
I love historians either very simple or excellent. The simple ones, who have nothing of their own to mix in, and whose only business is to gather everything that comes to their notice and record it all faithfully, without choosing or sorting, leave our judgment whole for discerning the truth. Such, among others, is honest Froissart, who marches through his enterprise with so frank a plainness that when he's made a mistake, he isn't ashamed to confess it and correct it on the spot where it's pointed out — and who gives us even the variety of rumors then in circulation, and the different reports that were made to him. His is the naked, unshaped stuff of history, and every reader can profit from it according to his own understanding.
The truly excellent ones have the judgment to pick out what is worth knowing; of two reports, to weigh which is the likelier true; from the condition and temperament of princes, to infer their counsels and put fitting words in their mouths. They have the right to assume the authority of bending our belief to theirs — but certainly that privilege belongs to very few.
The middle sort — and most of them are the middle sort — spoil everything. They insist on chewing our meat for us. They take it on themselves to judge, and so, inevitably, to bend history to their own fancy; for once the judgment tilts to one side, the narrative can't help twisting and writhing to that bias. They undertake to select what's worth knowing, and meanwhile hide from us exactly the word, the private act, that would have taught us most; they leave out as unbelievable the things they don't understand — and some things, perhaps, because they can't render them in good French or Latin. Let them flaunt their eloquence and their cleverness all they like; let them judge to their hearts' content; but let them also leave us something to judge after them. Let them not alter or dilute, by their trimmings and their selections, anything of the substance of the matter, but hand it to us pure and entire, in all its dimensions.
For the most part — and especially in these latter ages — the people picked for this work are picked out of the crowd for the single qualification of speaking well, as if we came to history to learn grammar. And having been hired for that alone, and bringing nothing to market but chatter, they're right not to trouble themselves over anything else. So with a fine jingle of words they cook us up a tidy stew of the reports they gather on street corners. The only good histories are those written by the men who themselves held command in the affairs they describe, or who had a share in conducting them, or who at least have conducted others of the same kind. That's nearly all the Greek and Roman histories: with several eyewitnesses writing on the same subject — in an age when greatness and learning commonly met in the same person — any error that slips in must be a slight one, on a deeply doubtful point. What can you expect from a physician writing about war, or a schoolman writing about the designs of princes?
If you want to see how scrupulous the Romans were on this point, one example will do. Asinius Pollio found, even in Caesar's own histories, things misreported — because Caesar couldn't have his eye on every part of his army at once and had trusted individuals who brought him less than accurate accounts, or because his lieutenants hadn't fully informed him of what they'd done in his absence. Which shows how delicate a thing the hunt for truth is, when you can't trust the report of a battle to the knowledge of the man who commanded it, nor to the soldiers who fought in it, unless — as in a judicial inquiry — the witnesses are confronted and the objections heard on the proof of every smallest incident. Honestly, the knowledge we have of our own affairs is far murkier still. But that has been handled well enough by Bodin, and in line with my own opinion.
To prop up the weakness of my memory a little — so extreme that more than once I've picked up a book as new and unread that I'd carefully gone through a few years before, scribbling it full of my notes — I've adopted a custom of late: at the end of every book I don't intend to read again, I write down the date I finished it and the verdict I'd reached, so it can at least show me again the general air and idea I'd formed of the author while reading him. And I'll copy out some of those annotations here.
Here's what I wrote, some ten years ago, in my Guicciardini (whatever language my books speak to me in, I speak to them in my own): "He is a diligent historiographer, from whom, in my opinion, a man may learn the truth of the affairs of his time as exactly as from any other — and in most of them he was himself an actor, in honorable rank. There's no sign that he ever disguised anything out of hatred, favor, or vanity; the free judgments he passes on the great — particularly on those who advanced him and employed him in posts of trust, like Pope Clement VII — are ample testimony to that. As for the part he thinks himself best at, his digressions and reflections, some are genuinely good, enriched with fine touches; but he loves them too much. Determined to leave nothing unsaid, with a subject so full, so vast, so nearly infinite, he turns flabby, and smacks a little of scholastic prattle. I've also noticed this about him: of all the souls and deeds he judges, all the motives and counsels, he never credits a single one to virtue, religion, or conscience — as if those things had died out of the world entirely. Of every action, however fine it looks on the outside, he refers the cause to some vicious motive or some hope of profit. It is impossible to imagine that among the countless actions he passes judgment on, not one was produced by way of honest reason. No corruption could have infected men so universally that nobody escaped the contagion. Which makes me suspect the bad taste was his own, and that he judged other men by himself."
In my Philippe de Commines there is this: "You will find the language here sweet and agreeable, of a natural simplicity; the narration pure, with the author's good faith showing plainly through it — free of vanity when he speaks of himself, of partiality and envy when he speaks of others; his reflections and exhortations carried more by zeal and truth than by any exquisite skill; and throughout, an authority and gravity that mark him as a man of good stock, brought up in great affairs."
And on the Memoirs of Monsieur du Bellay, this: "It is always a pleasure to read things written by men who have experienced how such things ought to be done; but it can't be denied that in these two lords there is a plain falling-off from the freedom and liberty of writing that shines in the older men of their kind — the Sire de Joinville, companion of Saint Louis; Eginhard, chancellor to Charlemagne; and, nearer our own day, Philippe de Commines. What we have here is less a history than an apology for King Francis against the Emperor Charles V. I won't believe they falsified anything as to the bare facts; but they make a regular practice of twisting the judgment of events, often against all reason, to our advantage, and of leaving out whatever is awkward in their master's life. Witness the affairs of Messieurs de Montmorency and de Biron, which are simply missing — and the very name of Madame d'Estampes is nowhere to be found. Secret doings a historian may conceal; but to pass over in silence what the whole world knows, and things that dragged such great public consequences after them, is an inexcusable defect. In short: whoever wants a complete knowledge of King Francis and the events of his reign should look for it elsewhere, if my advice carries any weight. The only profit to be had from these Memoirs is in the particular accounts of the battles and campaigns these gentlemen took part in personally; in certain words and private acts of the princes of their time; and in the treaties and negotiations handled by the Seigneur de Langey, where there are things worth knowing on every page, and reflections above the common run."
I think virtue is something other — something nobler — than the good nature we're born with, the simple inclination toward decency. Souls that are well-made and well-bred follow the same path virtue does, and wear the same face in their actions. But the word virtue implies something greater and more active than letting yourself be led, gently and quietly, by a happy disposition down the road of reason.
A man who shrugs off insults out of natural sweetness does a fine and praiseworthy thing. But a man who is stung to the quick by an offense, who arms himself with reason against the raging appetite for revenge, and who after a hard fight finally masters his own passion — that man does far more. The first acts well; the second acts virtuously. Call one action goodness and the other virtue. The very name of virtue presupposes difficulty and struggle; it cannot exist without an opponent. That may be why we call God good, mighty, generous, and just — but we do not call Him virtuous. His works are natural and cost Him nothing.
Many philosophers have held this view — not only Stoics but Epicureans too. And before anyone objects to my lumping them together: I'm borrowing the common opinion of the Epicureans, which is false, whatever the clever quip of Arcesilaus may suggest. When someone needled him that plenty of students left his school for Epicurus's, but never one came the other way, he answered, "Naturally — you can make capons out of roosters, but never roosters out of capons." In truth the Epicurean sect yields nothing to the Stoic in firmness or in the rigor of its opinions and rules. One Stoic — showing more honesty than those debaters who, to score points against Epicurus, put words in his mouth he never thought, twisting his sentences by grammatical hairsplitting into meanings they knew were foreign to his mind and his morals — declared that he had quit the Epicurean school for this reason among others: he found their road too lofty and too steep. For those who are called lovers of pleasure are in fact lovers of honor and justice, and cultivate and practice every virtue — so says Cicero.
These philosophers say it is not enough to have the soul well-placed, well-tempered, and well-disposed to virtue. It is not enough to have our resolutions and our reasoning fixed beyond fortune's reach. We must go looking for occasions to put them to the test. They would seek out pain, hardship, and contempt on purpose, to wrestle with them and keep the soul in training — for, as Seneca says, virtue grows stronger by being attacked.
This is one reason Epaminondas — who belonged to yet a third school — refused riches that fortune offered him by perfectly lawful means. I have poverty to wrestle with, he said; and he held that extreme to the end of his life. Socrates, it seems to me, set himself an even harder drill: he kept a thoroughly bad-tempered, scolding wife for daily practice, which is fencing with sharpened blades.
Metellus, alone of all the Roman senators, undertook by sheer force of virtue to withstand Saturninus, the tribune of the people, who was determined to ram through an unjust law in favor of the commons. Having thereby incurred the death penalty that Saturninus had decreed for dissenters, Metellus told the men leading him to execution something like this: that doing evil was too easy and too base; that doing good where there was no danger was commonplace; but that doing good where there was danger was the proper work of a man of virtue.
These words of Metellus show exactly what I'm getting at: virtue refuses to keep company with ease. The smooth, gentle, downhill path that a sweet natural disposition travels is not the path of true virtue. Virtue demands a rough and stormy passage. She wants either external difficulties to wrestle with, like Metellus had — fortune delighting to break her stride — or internal ones, supplied by the unruly appetites and imperfections of our condition.
I've come this far at my ease. But here it occurs to me that the soul of Socrates, the most perfect that has ever come to my knowledge, would by this rule deserve very little credit. I cannot detect in that man the slightest stirring of a vicious inclination. I cannot imagine any difficulty or constraint in the course of his virtue. I know his reason was so powerful and so sovereign in him that it would never have allowed a vicious appetite even to sprout. To a virtue as elevated as his, I have nothing to oppose. I seem to see him marching at a victorious, triumphant pace, in state and at his ease, with nothing in his way.
If virtue can only shine by fighting contrary appetites, shall we say she cannot exist without the help of vice — that she owes vice her reputation and her honor? And what would become of that brave and generous Epicurean pleasure, which prides itself on nursing virtue tenderly in its lap, giving her shame, fevers, poverty, death, and tortures for toys to play with? If I assume that perfect virtue shows itself in struggling, in patiently enduring pain, in bearing the worst extremities of gout without being shaken from her seat; if I make trouble and difficulty her necessary diet — then what becomes of a virtue raised so high that she not only despises pain but rejoices in it, that finds the stabbing of a sharp colic positively delightful? For that is the virtue the Epicureans established, and many of them proved it by their actions. So have others, who I find outdid the very rules of their own school.
Witness the younger Cato. When I see him dying, tearing out his own bowels, I am not content to believe merely that his soul was free of trouble and horror. I cannot think he simply held the steadiness the Stoic rules prescribed — calm, unmoved, imperturbable. There was something in that man's virtue, it seems to me, too lively and too fresh to stop there. I believe — I have no doubt — that he felt pleasure and delight in so noble an action, and enjoyed it more than anything else he ever did. He quit life rejoicing that he had found a reason to die, as Cicero says. I believe it so thoroughly that I wonder whether he would have wanted to be deprived of the occasion for so brave a deed. And if the goodness that made him care more for the public's interest than his own didn't hold me back, I could easily slip into the opinion that he was grateful to fortune for putting his virtue to so splendid a trial — grateful to that brigand Caesar for trampling underfoot the ancient liberty of his country. I seem to read in that act a kind of exaltation of soul, an extraordinary and manly thrill of pleasure, as he looked on the nobility and height of his enterprise: fiercer for having resolved on death, as Horace puts it.
Not spurred by any hope of glory, as some have shallowly and feebly concluded — that consideration was too small to touch a heart so generous, so proud, so determined — but for the beauty of the thing in itself, which he, who handled the springs of it, saw far more clearly and in its perfection than we can. Philosophy has obliged me by ruling that so brave an action would have been indecently placed in any life but Cato's: that only his life was entitled to end that way. And yet, following reason, he ordered his son and the senators who were with him to manage their affairs differently. Cato, says Cicero, to whom nature had given incredible dignity, and who had strengthened it by lifelong constancy, never wavering in his resolve, was bound to die rather than look upon the face of a tyrant.
Every death ought to be in proportion to the life that went before it. We do not become someone else just because we are dying. I always interpret a death by the life that preceded it. If anyone tells me of a death that looked strong and steadfast, attached to a feeble life, I conclude it came from some feeble cause, in keeping with the life. The ease of Cato's death, the facility in dying that he had acquired by the vigor of his soul — should that dim the luster of his virtue?
And who, with even a drop of true philosophy in his head, can be content to imagine Socrates merely free of fear and passion under arrest, in chains, condemned? Who does not recognize in him not just firmness and constancy — that was his everyday condition — but some new satisfaction, a playful cheerfulness, in his final words and acts? In that little start of pleasure he felt scratching his leg when his irons were taken off, doesn't he show the same serenity and joy of a soul released from past discomforts and on the point of entering into knowledge of things to come?
Cato will pardon me, if he pleases. His death is more tragic, more drawn-out; but this one is — I don't quite know how — finer. Aristippus, hearing people lament that death, said, "May the gods send me one like it."
In the souls of these two men, and of their imitators (for I very much doubt they ever had equals), one sees so perfect a habit of virtue that it became their very constitution. It is no longer a laborious virtue, no longer reason's precepts, held up by a soul straining at the load — it is the very essence of their soul, its natural and ordinary bearing. They made it so by long practice of philosophy's precepts working on a rich, fine nature. The vicious passions that spring up in us find no entrance into them; the force and vigor of their souls stifle and snuff out unruly desires the moment they begin to stir.
Now I don't think it can be doubted that it is nobler, by a high and godlike resolution, to prevent temptations from being born at all — to be so formed to virtue that the very seeds of vice are rooted out — than to stop their progress by main force; and that this second way, catching ourselves surprised by the first stirrings of passion and arming ourselves to stand firm and beat them back, is itself far more generous than simply being equipped with an easy, affable nature that happens to dislike debauchery and vice. For this third and lowest sort of virtue seems to make a man innocent, but not virtuous; free from doing evil, but not strong enough to do good. Besides, this condition sits so close to imperfection and weakness that I hardly know where to draw the line between them. The very names of goodness and innocence have, for this reason, become almost terms of contempt.
I know very well that several virtues — chastity, sobriety, temperance — can come to a man through personal defects. Steadiness in danger (if it deserves the name), contempt of death, patience in misfortune, can often be found in men simply because they fail to judge such events properly and don't grasp them for what they are. Dullness and stupidity sometimes counterfeit virtuous deeds. I have often seen men praised for what deserved blame.
An Italian lord once said this in my presence, at the expense of his own nation: that the Italians' subtlety and quickness of mind were so great, and they foresaw dangers from so far off, that no one should wonder if in war they often provided for their safety before they had even sighted the peril. We French and the Spaniards, not so cunning, went a step further: we had to see and feel the danger before taking alarm — and even then we couldn't hold steady. But the Germans and the Swiss, heavier and slower, hadn't the wit to look around them even when the blows were landing on their heads. Perhaps he was only joking. Yet it is quite true that raw soldiers rush into danger more recklessly than men who have taken their beatings — knowing well, as Virgil says, how much fresh glory in arms and the sweetness of honor can do in a first battle.
This is why, when we judge a particular action, we must consider the circumstances, and the whole man who performed it, before we give it a name.
Now a word about myself. I have sometimes heard my friends call prudence in me what was merely luck, and credit me with courage and patience where it was only judgment and opinion — giving me one title when another was due, sometimes to my advantage, sometimes not. As for the rest, I am so far from having reached that first and most perfect degree of excellence, where virtue becomes habit, that I've barely given proof of the second. I have not worked very hard at curbing the desires that have pressed me. My virtue is a virtue — or rather an innocence — that is casual and accidental. If I'd been born with a more disorderly temperament, I'm afraid the result would have been shabby, for I have never noticed much steadiness in my soul for resisting passions, even mildly vehement ones. I don't know how to nurse quarrels and conflicts inside my own chest. So I owe myself no great thanks for being free of several vices. If my nature is flawed by only a few minor vices and otherwise sound, as Horace says, it is like faulting moles on a handsome body.
I owe it to my fortune rather than my reason. She had me born of a family famous for integrity, and of a very good father. Whether he passed some of his temperament into me, or whether the examples at home and the good upbringing of my childhood worked on me without my noticing, or whether I was simply born this way — whether the Scales or dread Scorpio presided over my birth hour, as Horace has it, or Capricorn, tyrant of the western sea — I cannot say. But this much is so: I have a natural horror of most vices. The answer of Antisthenes, asked what was the best thing to learn — "to unlearn evil" — seems to point at this. I hold them in horror, I say, with a detestation so natural and so much my own that the same instinct and impression I brought away from my nurse I keep still; no temptation has ever had the power to alter it. Not even my own reasonings, which, straying off the common road in some things, might easily seem to license me for actions that my natural inclination makes me hate.
I will say a monstrous thing, but I will say it anyway: I find my conduct, in many matters, more under control than my opinions, and my appetite less debauched than my reason. Aristippus laid down opinions so bold in favor of pleasure and riches that he set all the philosophers against him. But as for his conduct: when the tyrant Dionysius presented three beautiful women to him and told him to choose, he answered that he would choose all three — Paris got into trouble for preferring one over the other two. But having brought them home, he sent them back untouched. And when his servant, carrying his money behind him on the road, found the load too heavy, Aristippus told him to pour out and throw away whatever was troubling him. Epicurus, whose doctrines were supposedly so irreligious and soft, lived a life laborious and devout. He wrote to a friend that he lived on nothing but biscuit and water, and asked him to send a little cheese to keep on hand for when he wanted to throw a feast.
Must it be true, then, that to be perfectly good we must be so by some hidden, natural, universal property — without law, reason, or example? The excesses I've been mixed up in are not, thank God, of the worst sort. I have condemned them in myself fairly — my judgment was never infected by them; on the contrary, I accuse them more severely in myself than in anyone else. But that is all. Beyond that, I put up too little resistance and let myself lean too easily to the other side of the scale — except that I keep my vices in bounds and stop them from mixing with other vices, which mostly cling together in a cluster if a man isn't careful. I have trimmed mine back and kept them as single and as simple as I could, and I do not carry the wrong any further, as Juvenal says.
As for the Stoics' opinion that the wise man, when he acts, acts by all the virtues at once, though one shows most, according to the nature of the action — the human body might lend them some analogy there, since anger cannot work unless all the humors assist it, even if choler predominates. But if they want to draw the parallel conclusion, that when the wicked man does wickedly, he does it by all the vices at once, I don't believe it, or else I don't understand them, for I find the opposite in practice. These are sharp, airless subtleties that philosophy sometimes amuses itself with. I indulge some vices, but I flee others as thoroughly as any saint could. The Peripatetics likewise reject this all-or-nothing bundling, and Aristotle holds that a prudent and just man can still be intemperate and unrestrained. Socrates admitted to people who spotted a certain inclination to vice in his face that it was indeed his natural bent — but that he had corrected it by discipline. And friends of the philosopher Stilpo said that, born with a weakness for wine and women, he had made himself by study thoroughly abstinent from both.
What good there is in me, I have, on the contrary, by the chance of my birth. I do not hold it from law, precept, or any other schooling. The innocence in me is a simple innocence: little vigor, and no art.
Among all the vices, I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and by judgment, as the extreme of all vices. And with such softness that I cannot watch a chicken's neck wrung without distress, and cannot bear to hear a hare crying in my dogs' teeth — even though the chase is a violent pleasure.
Those who have sensuality to fight against like to use this argument, to show that it is altogether vicious and unreasonable: that at its height it masters us so completely that reason has no access. And they cite our own experience in the act of love — that moment, as Lucretius describes it, when the body already has its foretaste of joy and Venus is on the point of finishing her work. They conceive that the pleasure so transports us that our reason cannot do its job while we are in that ecstasy. But I know very well it can be otherwise; a man may sometimes, if he chooses, win this point over himself and turn his soul, even at the critical moment, to other thoughts — though he must bend it to that purpose deliberately. I know the utmost force of this pleasure can be mastered. I have experienced it in myself, and have not found Venus so imperious a goddess as many men, far more virtuous than I am, declare her to be. I do not count it a miracle, as the Queen of Navarre does in one of the tales of her Heptameron (a very pretty book of its kind), nor even a thing of extreme difficulty, to spend whole nights with a long-desired mistress, with every freedom and opportunity a man could want, and still keep one's pledged word to be content with kisses and simple caresses, pressing no further.
I think the pleasure of the hunt would make a better example. There the pleasure is smaller, but the surprise is sharper, leaving reason no time to brace itself for the encounter — when, after a long search, the animal bursts up suddenly where we least expected it. That jolt, and the heat of the shouting, strike us so hard that those who love this lesser chase would find it impossible to wrench their thoughts elsewhere at that instant. And the poets make Diana triumph over Cupid's torch and arrows: in such delights, asks Horace, who does not forget the anxious cares of love?
But back to my point. I am tenderly compassionate of other people's afflictions, and would readily cry for company, if I could cry at all, for any occasion whatever. Nothing tempts my tears but tears — and not only real ones, but tears of every kind, feigned or painted. The dead I scarcely pity; I would sooner envy them. But I deeply pity the dying. Savages who roast and eat the bodies of the dead offend me less than men who torment and persecute the living. I cannot even watch the ordinary executions of justice, however reasonable, with a steady eye.
Someone wanting to give evidence of Julius Caesar's clemency wrote: "He was mild in his revenges. Having forced the surrender of the pirates who had earlier captured and ransomed him, and having sworn to crucify them, he did condemn them to the cross — but only after they had first been strangled. His secretary Philemon, who had tried to poison him, he punished with nothing harsher than plain death." Without naming the Latin author who dares offer it as proof of mercy that a man merely killed those who had wronged him — it's easy to guess he was haunted by the horrid, inhuman examples of cruelty the Roman tyrants had set.
For my part, even in justice itself, anything beyond a simple death looks to me like pure cruelty. Let them kill, but not torture. This holds especially for us, who ought to have some care for souls, and dismiss them in a good and tranquil state — which cannot be done when we have shaken them with unbearable torments.
Not long ago, a soldier being held prisoner noticed from his tower that crowds were gathering at the place of execution and carpenters were busy putting up a scaffold. Concluding the preparations were for him, he resolved to kill himself, but could find nothing to do it with except an old rusty cart-nail that fortune put in his way. With it he gave himself two great wounds in the throat; finding these were not enough, he gave himself a third in the belly, and left the nail buried up to the head. The first of his keepers to come in found him like this — still alive, but sunk down and drained by his wounds. To use what time remained before he died, they hurried to read him his sentence. When he heard he was only to be beheaded, he seemed to take new courage, accepted the wine he had refused before, and thanked his judges for the unhoped-for mildness of their sentence. He had resolved to dispatch himself, he said, for fear of some more terrible and unbearable death — the preparations he'd seen had convinced him they meant to torture him with some horrible execution — and he counted himself delivered from death, now that it was changed from the one he had dreaded.
I would advise that these displays of severity, meant to keep the people in line, be practiced on the dead bodies of criminals. To see them denied burial, to see them boiled and cut in quarters, would work on the crowd nearly as much as the pain inflicted on the living — which in effect amounts to little or nothing, as God himself says: they kill the body, and after that there is no more they can do. And the poets dwell with special force on the horror of that picture as something worse than death — alas, cries Cicero's verse, that the half-burnt remains of the king, his bones laid bare, should be dragged foully through the dirt and gore.
I happened to be in Rome one day just as they were executing Catena, a notorious robber. He was strangled without any stir among the spectators; but when they began to cut him in quarters, the hangman could not strike a blow without the people following it with a wailing cry, as if every one of them had lent his own sense of feeling to that miserable carcass. Such inhuman excesses should be spent on the bark, not on the quick. Artaxerxes, in a somewhat similar spirit, softened the old laws of Persia by ordaining that noblemen who had committed a fault, instead of being whipped as they used to be, should be stripped and their clothes whipped in their place; and instead of having their hair torn out, should only have their tall headdress taken off. The Egyptians, devout as they were, thought they satisfied divine justice well enough by sacrificing pigs in image and effigy — a bold invention, to pay God in picture and show for so essential a substance.
I live in a season when unbelievable examples of this vice flourish, through the license of our civil wars. You will find nothing in the ancient histories more extreme than what we witness every day. But it has not in the least reconciled me to it. I could hardly persuade myself, before I saw it with my own eyes, that there existed souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the sole pleasure of it; that they would hack and chop off other men's limbs; that they would sharpen their wits to invent unheard-of tortures and new kinds of death — without hatred, without profit, with no other end than to enjoy the pleasant spectacle of the gestures and writhings, the pitiful groans and cries, of a man dying in anguish. For this is the farthest point cruelty can reach: that a man should kill a man, not in anger, not in fear, but only to watch, as Seneca says.
For my own part, I cannot without grief see even an innocent animal pursued and killed — a creature with no defense, that has done us no harm. And it often happens that a stag we are hunting, finding himself spent and out of breath, with no escape left, surrenders himself to us, his pursuers, imploring mercy with his tears — bleeding, as Virgil says, and like a creature begging for grace. That has always been a deeply unpleasant sight to me. I hardly ever take an animal alive that I don't turn loose again. Pythagoras used to buy them from fishermen and fowlers to do the same. It was the slaughter of wild beasts, says Ovid, that first warmed man's steel with blood.
Natures that are bloodthirsty toward animals show a native bent toward cruelty. At Rome, once they had accustomed themselves to spectacles of slaughtered animals, they proceeded to slaughtered men — to gladiators. Nature herself, I fear, has stamped in man some instinct toward inhumanity. Nobody takes pleasure in watching animals play with and caress one another; everybody enjoys watching them tear each other to pieces.
And so that no one laughs at this sympathy of mine for animals: theology itself commands us some kindness on their behalf. Considering that one and the same master has lodged us together in this palace for his service, and that they, like us, belong to his household, it has reason to enjoin us some affection and regard for them. Pythagoras borrowed the transmigration of souls from the Egyptians, but it was afterward received by many nations, our Druids among them — souls never die, says Ovid, but leave their old seat and live on, received into new homes. The religion of our ancient Gauls held that souls, being eternal, never stop moving and shifting from one body to another. And they mixed into this notion a thought about divine justice: according to how the soul had behaved while it was in Alexander, they said, God assigned it another body to live in, more or less painful, suited to its condition. He makes them wear the mute chains of brutes, says Claudian — the bloodthirsty he shuts up in bears, robbers in wolves, deceivers in foxes — until, after years and a thousand shapes, purged in Lethe's stream, he restores them at last to human form. If the soul had been valiant, they lodged it in a lion's body; if voluptuous, in a hog's; if cowardly, in a deer's or a hare's; if treacherous, in a fox's — and so on, until, purified by this punishment, it entered the body of some other man. For I myself remember, says Ovid's Pythagoras, that in the days of the Trojan war I was Euphorbus, son of Panthous.
As for that kinship between us and the beasts, I don't put much stock in it — nor in the practice of several nations, among the oldest and noblest, who not only welcomed animals into their society and company but ranked them far above themselves, treating them sometimes as familiars and favorites of their gods, holding them in more than human reverence; others recognized no god and no divinity except them. Beasts were made sacred by the barbarians, says Cicero, for the benefits they conferred. And Juvenal: one region adores the crocodile; another trembles before the ibis, glutted on serpents; here gleams the golden image of the sacred ape; here men venerate a river fish; there whole towns worship a dog.
Even the interpretation Plutarch gives this error — and it is a well-conceived one — does the animals credit. He says it was not the cat or the ox, for instance, that the Egyptians worshipped; rather they worshipped, in those beasts, some image of the divine faculties — in this one, patience and usefulness; in that one, liveliness; or, as with our neighbors the Burgundians and all the Germans, impatience at being shut up — by which they represented liberty, which they loved and adored above every other divine attribute. And so on through the rest. But when, among the more moderate opinions, I meet arguments that try to demonstrate the close resemblance between us and the animals — how large a share they have in our greatest privileges, how plausibly we can be compared — truly, I knock a good deal off our presumption, and I willingly resign that imaginary sovereignty we are supposed to hold over the other creatures.
But suppose all of that were false. There remains, even so, a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that binds us not only to animals, which have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and kindness and gentleness to the other creatures capable of receiving it. There is a certain exchange between them and us, a mutual obligation.
I am not ashamed to confess how childishly tender my nature is on this point: I can hardly refuse my dog when he pesters me to play at the most inconvenient moments. The Turks have alms and hospitals for animals. The Romans made the feeding of geese a public charge, in honor of the vigilance that had saved their Capitol. The Athenians decreed that the mules which had worked on the building of the temple called Hecatompedon should be set free, to graze wherever they pleased, unhindered. The people of Agrigentum made a solemn custom of burying the animals they had loved — horses of rare quality, dogs, useful birds, even those kept only to amuse their children — and the magnificence they showed in everything else appeared particularly in the splendor and number of the monuments raised for this purpose, which stood in their beauty for centuries afterward. The Egyptians buried wolves, bears, crocodiles, dogs, and cats in sacred ground, embalmed their bodies, and wore mourning at their deaths. Cimon gave honorable burial to the mares that had three times won him the prize at the Olympic Games. The elder Xanthippus had his dog buried on a headland by the sea, which has kept its name ever since. And Plutarch says he himself could never quite bring himself, for a small profit, to sell off to the butcher an ox that had served him a long time.
People who compare Cato the Censor with the younger Cato — the one who killed himself — are comparing two beautiful natures that resemble each other closely. The elder built his reputation in several arenas, and he stands out for his military exploits and his useful public service. But the younger's virtue — and it would be blasphemy to compare anyone to him for sheer vigor — was far more pure and unblemished. For who could clear the Censor of envy and ambition, when he dared to attack the honor of Scipio, a man infinitely beyond him, or anyone else of his time, in goodness and every other excellent quality?
One of the stories they tell about the Censor is that in his extreme old age he threw himself into learning Greek with a greedy appetite, as if quenching a long thirst. To me, that does not say much for his honor. It is, properly speaking, what we call falling into second childhood. All things have their season — even good ones. I can say my Lord's Prayer at the wrong moment: they accused Titus Quintius Flaminius of exactly that, because as general of an army he was seen off praying by himself in the middle of a battle. A battle, mind you, that he won.
The wise man, as Juvenal says, sets a limit even on honest things.
Eudemonidas, watching Xenocrates still bent over his school lectures in old age, asked, "When will this man be wise, if he is still learning?" And when people praised King Ptolemy for drilling himself in arms every day, Philopoemen said, "It is nothing to admire in a king of his age to still be practicing these things. By now he ought to be using them." The young should make their preparations, say the sages, and the old should enjoy them. The greatest vice they find in us is that our desires keep growing young again. We are always beginning to live over.
Our studies and our desires ought to feel their age at some point. Yet here we are, one foot in the grave, and our appetites and projects keep springing up fresh every day. As Horace puts it, you contract for marble to be cut when you are at the edge of the funeral, and build houses forgetful of the tomb.
The longest of my plans does not stretch beyond a year. I think of nothing now but finishing. I am ridding myself of all new hopes and undertakings, taking my last leave of every place I depart from, and letting go, every day, of something I own. As Seneca says, henceforth I will neither lose anything nor gain it — I have more left to pay for the journey than I have journey left. And with Virgil's Dido I can say: I have lived, and finished the course Fortune set before me.
It is, in fact, the only comfort I find in my old age: it kills off in me a number of the cares and desires that have disturbed my life — care about how the world is going, care about riches, grandeur, knowledge, health, myself. There are men learning to speak just when they ought to be learning to be silent forever. A man may always study, but he must not always go to school. What a contemptible thing, an old man at his ABCs!
Different things suit different men, as the poet says; all things are not for all ages.
If we must study, let us study something suited to our present condition, so we can answer like the man who, asked what use study was at his decrepit age, said: "That I may leave better, and more at ease." Such a study was the younger Cato's, when he felt his end approaching and found it in Plato's discourse on the eternity of the soul. Not — let us be clear — that he was not long since furnished with everything needed for such a departure. Of assurance, settled will, and instruction he had more than Plato had in all his writings; his knowledge and his courage were, in this respect, above philosophy. He took up that reading not as a service to his death, but as a man whose sleep was never troubled by a matter of such weight: without choosing it or changing anything, he simply continued his studies along with the other accustomed actions of his life. The night he was denied the praetorship, he spent at play. The night he was to die, he spent reading. Losing his life or losing an office — to him it was all one.
Other writers set out to shape mankind. I only describe a man — and a particular one at that, badly enough made, whom I would certainly build quite differently if I had it to do over. But it's done; there's no recalling it.
Now, though the lines of my portrait keep shifting and changing, the likeness holds. The world is one perpetual see-saw. Everything in it moves without rest — the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt — both with the general motion and with a motion of their own. Even steadiness is nothing but a slower, more languid swaying. I cannot pin my subject down. He goes staggering and reeling along with a natural drunkenness. I take him as he is at the moment I turn my attention to him. I do not portray being; I portray passing. Not the passage from one age of life to another — or, as people say, from one seven-year stretch to the next — but from day to day, from minute to minute. My history has to be fitted to the hour. I may change presently, not only by accident but by intention. This book is a register of varied and changing events, of ideas that are unsettled and, when it happens so, contradictory — whether because I am then a different self, or because I catch my subjects under different circumstances and from different angles. So yes, I may well contradict myself now and then; but the truth, as Demades said, I never contradict. If my soul could ever get a solid footing, I would stop making attempts and start making decisions. But it is forever in its apprenticeship, forever on trial.
The life I am setting out is an ordinary one, without luster. No matter. You can tie the whole of moral philosophy to a common private life just as well as to one of richer stuff: every man bears the whole form of the human condition.
Authors present themselves to the public by some special, external badge. I am the first ever to do it by my whole being — as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian or a poet or a lawyer. If the world complains that I talk too much about myself, I complain that the world does not so much as think about itself.
But is it reasonable that someone so private in his way of living should presume to make himself publicly known? Is it reasonable to bring before the world — where polish and craftsmanship carry so much credit and authority — the raw, simple products of nature, and a fairly weak nature at that? Isn't writing books without learning and without art like building a wall without stone or brick? The fancies of music are guided by art; mine, by chance.
Still, I have this much going for me, by the rules: no man ever handled a subject he understood better than I understand the one I have taken up — in this field I am the most learned man alive. And second: no man ever went deeper into his material, sifted its parts and connections more finely, or arrived more exactly at the goal he set himself. To finish the job, all I need to bring is fidelity — and it is here, the purest and most sincere fidelity to be found anywhere. I tell the truth, not as much as I would like to, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more as I grow older, since custom seems to allow old age more freedom to chatter, and more indiscretion in talking about oneself.
What I often see elsewhere cannot happen here — the craftsman and his work contradicting each other. "Can a man whose conversation is so sensible have written such a foolish book?" Or, "How do such learned writings come from a man whose talk is so feeble?" When a man's conversation is ordinary and his writing remarkable, it means his capacity is borrowed, not his own. A learned man is not learned in everything; but a whole man is whole everywhere — even in his ignorance. Here, my book and I walk hand in hand, keeping one pace. In other cases you can praise or blame the work apart from the workman; not here. Whoever touches the one touches the other. Whoever judges the book without knowing the man wrongs himself more than me; whoever does know him gives me all the satisfaction I want. I will be lucky beyond what I deserve if I win just this much public agreement: that intelligent people see I was capable of profiting from learning, if I had had any — and that I deserved a better memory.
Allow me here to repeat what I have said often: that I rarely repent, and that my conscience is content with itself — not the conscience of an angel, not the conscience of a horse, but the conscience of a man. And I always add this clause — not as a formality but as real and honest submission — that I speak as one inquiring and doubting, and refer myself, purely and simply, to the common and accepted beliefs for the final answer. I do not teach; I relate.
There is no vice that is truly a vice which doesn't offend, and which a sound judgment doesn't condemn. Its ugliness and wrongness are so obvious that perhaps the people are right who say vice is mainly bred from stupidity and ignorance — it is that hard to imagine a man knowing it without hating it. Malice sucks up most of its own venom and poisons itself with it. Vice leaves repentance in the soul the way an ulcer sits in the flesh, forever scratching and tearing at itself. Reason wipes out other griefs and sorrows, but it breeds the grief of repentance — which is all the harder to bear because it springs from within, just as the chills and fevers that rise inside us bite sharper than the ones that strike only the skin. I count as vices (each in its own measure) not only the ones that reason and nature condemn, but also the ones that human opinion has made vices — even false and mistaken opinion — once law and custom have given it authority.
Likewise there is no virtue that doesn't gladden a well-born nature. There is a kind of — I don't know what — congratulation in doing well, an inward satisfaction, and a generous boldness that keeps company with a good conscience. A boldly vicious soul may perhaps armor itself with confidence, but it cannot supply itself with this contentment. It is no small satisfaction to feel yourself preserved from the contagion of so rotten an age, and to say to yourself: "Anyone who could see straight into my soul would not find me guilty of anyone's affliction or ruin, or of revenge or envy, or of any public offense against the laws, or of stirring up trouble, or of breaking my word. And though the license of these times permits and even teaches everyone to do it, I have not laid hands on any Frenchman's goods or money; I have lived on my own purse, in war as in peace; and I have never used a man's labor without paying him his wage." These testimonies of conscience are a pleasure; and this natural rejoicing is a great benefit to us — the only payment that can never fail us.
To rest the reward of virtuous deeds on other people's approval is to build on far too uncertain a foundation — especially in an age as corrupt and ignorant as this one, when the good opinion of the crowd is an insult. Whom would you trust to show you what deserves praise? God keep me from being a good man by the descriptions I see people giving every day of themselves in their own honor. As Seneca says, what used to be vices are now customs.
Some friends of mine have at times taken it on themselves to school me and scold me with great frankness — sometimes of their own accord, sometimes at my invitation, as a service which, to a well-made soul, surpasses all the other offices of friendship, not just in usefulness but in kindness. I have always welcomed it with the wide-open arms of courtesy and gratitude. But to speak honestly between us, I have often found so much false measure in their blame and in their praise alike that I would hardly have gone wrong to do wrong, rather than do right by their notions.
Those of us who live private lives, on display to no one but ourselves, need above all to have a standard set up within, by which to test our actions — and, by that standard, sometimes to pat ourselves on the back and sometimes to correct ourselves. I have my own laws and my own court to judge myself, and I appeal to them more than anywhere else. I do restrain my actions out of regard for others; but I extend them only by my own rule. You alone know whether you are cowardly and cruel, or loyal and devout. Others never see you; they only guess at you by uncertain conjectures. They see your art, not your nature. So do not cling to their verdict; cling to your own. As Cicero says, it is your own judgment you must use on yourself; the weight of your own conscience in the discovery of your virtues and vices is immense — take that away, and everything collapses.
But the saying that repentance follows hard on the heels of sin doesn't seem to apply to sin in its full dress, the kind that lodges in us as in its own house. We can disown and retract the vices that take us by surprise, the ones passion sweeps us into. But the vices that long habit has rooted in a strong and deliberate will are not open to being contradicted. Repentance is nothing but a recanting of our will, a turning against our own fancies — and our fancies drive us whichever way they please. Look at this man, whom repentance makes disown his former virtue and self-control; as Horace has it, why didn't I have the mind I have today when I was a boy — or why, now that I have it, can't I have my smooth cheeks back?
It is a rare life that keeps its order even in private. Anyone can play his part in the puppet show and act the honest man on the boards. The real point is to be ruled inside, in your own chest, where everything is permitted to you and everything is hidden. The next step down is to be orderly at home — in your own house, in your own chimney corner, in your everyday doings, for which you answer to no one, and where there is no rehearsal and no act. That is why Bias, describing the excellent state of a household, said: the master must be the same man within it, of his own free virtue and temper, that he is outside it for fear of the law and what people will say. And it was a fine answer Julius Drusus gave the builders who offered, for three thousand crowns, to remodel his house so that his neighbors could no longer see into it as they did: "I will give you six thousand," he said, "to make it so everyone can see into every room." It is recorded to the honor of Agesilaus that on his journeys he always took lodging in temples, so that the people — and the gods themselves — could look in on his most private doings. Many a man has been a miracle to the world in whom his wife and his valet never saw anything even remarkable. Few men have been admired by their own households. No one was ever a prophet, not merely in his own house but in his own country — so says the experience of history. It is the same with trifles; and in the following small example you can see the image of the great ones. In my home country of Gascony they think it's comic to see me in print. The farther from my own doorstep my readers are, the higher my stock. In Guienne I pay the printers; elsewhere they pay me. That is the hope men bank on who hide themselves while alive and present, to get themselves a name when they are dead and gone. I would rather have less of a name and take none but what is owed me while I'm here to collect it. When I leave the world, I waive the rest.
Watch this official, whom the people escort in pomp, with wonder and applause, right to his door: he sheds the pageant with his robe, and falls as low as he was hoisted high. Inside himself, all is tumult and squalor. And even if there were order in there, it would take a quick and finely chosen judgment to detect it in those low, private motions. Add to that the fact that order is a dull and somber virtue. Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, governing a nation — these are glittering deeds. Scolding, laughing, selling, paying, loving, hating; dealing gently and justly with your own household and with yourself; not slacking off, not giving yourself the lie — that is rarer, harder, and less noticed. So whatever people say, retired lives carry duties as stiff and strenuous as other lives do, or stiffer. Private men, Aristotle says, serve virtue at a harder and higher rate than men in office, because we gear ourselves up for the grand occasions more out of glory than out of conscience. The shortest road to glory would be to do for conscience what we now do for glory. Alexander's virtue, on his enormous stage, looks to me a good deal less vigorous than the virtue of Socrates in his lowly, obscure routine. I can easily picture Socrates in Alexander's place; Alexander in Socrates' place, I cannot. Ask the one what he can do, and he answers, "Subdue the world." Ask the other, and he answers, "Live a human life in keeping with its natural condition" — a far more general, weighty, and legitimate science.
The worth of a soul lies not in soaring high but in walking in order. Its greatness is exercised not in greatness but in ordinary things. Just as those who judge us from inside set little store by the shine of our public actions — seeing that these are only threads and jets of clear water spurting from a thick and muddy bottom — so those who judge us by the brave outward show conclude that the inside matches, and cannot believe that faculties as common as their own could live in the same skin as these other faculties that astonish them, so far out of their range. That is why we give demons such monstrous shapes. Who doesn't picture Tamerlane with huge eyebrows, flaring nostrils, a terrible face, and a giant's frame — the size of the image his name has stamped on our imagination? If someone had brought me, back in the day, to meet Erasmus, I could hardly have believed that anything he said to his servant or his landlady was not all adages and maxims. We find it much easier to imagine a craftsman on the toilet, or on his wife, than a great chief justice — so venerable in his bearing and his learning. It seems to us that men like that never stoop from their lofty benches so far as to actually live. And just as vicious souls are sometimes spurred to do good by some outside push, so virtuous souls are spurred to do wrong. They must be judged, then, by their settled state, when they are at home with themselves — if they ever are — or at least when they are nearest to rest and to their native position.
Natural inclinations get help and reinforcement from education, but they are hardly ever changed or overpowered by it. A thousand natures in my own day have slipped off toward virtue or toward vice straight through schooling that pushed the opposite way. As Lucan says, wild beasts caged and grown unused to the woods turn tame, put off their fierce looks, and submit to the rule of man; but let one small taste of blood reach their mouths, and their rage and fury come back — their throats swell at the remembered savor, and their anger barely spares the trembling keeper. You do not root out these original qualities; you cover them up, you hide them. Latin is like a native tongue to me; I understand it better than French. But I haven't spoken it, and have hardly written it, for forty years. Yet in the sudden, extreme emotions I have fallen into two or three times in my life — once when I saw my father, in perfect health, collapse on top of me in a faint — the first words that burst up from the bottom of me have always been Latin: nature surging out and forcing her own expression, against forty years of disuse. And the same thing is told of plenty of others.
Those who in my time have tried to correct the world's morals with new opinions reform the surface vices; the essential ones they leave where they were — when they don't actually swell them. And swelling is the danger: we put off all other good conduct on the strength of these external, cut-rate, showy reforms, and through them we pay off cheaply for the natural vices, the ones bred in the bone, the ones inside. Look a little at your own experience. There is no man who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a form all his own, a ruling form, which fights against his education and against the storm of passions that oppose it. For my part, I rarely feel myself jolted by shocks; I am nearly always found in my place, like a heavy, lumbering body. If I am not at home, I am always close by. My excesses do not carry me very far. There is nothing extreme or strange about the case. And still I have my sound and vigorous moments of turning back.
The true condemnation, the one that hits the common practice of mankind, is this: that their very retirement is full of filth and corruption; that their idea of reform is smudged; that their repentance is nearly as sick and lame as their sin. Some are so glued to vice by natural bent or long habit that they no longer see its ugliness. Others — and I am of this tribe — do feel the weight of vice, but they balance it against the pleasure or some other consideration, and they put up with it and rent themselves out to it at a certain price — viciously, though, and basely. Still, you might imagine a disproportion so extreme that the pleasure could justly excuse the sin, as we say usefulness sometimes does — not only when the pleasure is incidental, outside the sin itself, as in theft, but when it lies in the very exercise of the sin, as with women, where the urge is violent and, they say, sometimes beyond overcoming.
The other day, at Armagnac, on the estate of a kinsman of mine, I met a peasant whom everyone calls the Thief. He gave this account of his life: born a beggar, and concluding that earning his bread by the sweat of his hands would never get him clear of want, he decided to turn thief, and being a strong young man, he plied the trade through his whole youth in perfect safety — for he harvested and gleaned in other men's fields, but far from home, and in such quantities that nobody could imagine one man carrying off so much on his shoulders in a night. And he took care, besides, to spread the damage around evenly, so the loss fell lighter on each individual. He is now old, and rich for a man of his station — thanks to his trade, which he admits to anyone openly. To square his accounts with God, he says he is making daily restitution, through good turns, to the heirs of the people he robbed; and if he doesn't finish (for he can't do it all at once), he will leave the duty to his own heirs, in proportion to the wrong that only he knows he did to each. By this account, true or false, the man regards theft as a dishonest act and hates it — but he hates it less than poverty. He repents of it in itself, simply enough; but insofar as it was counterbalanced and compensated this way, he does not repent. This is not the habit that fuses us into vice and bends our very understanding to its shape; nor is it that whirlwind of passion that swamps and blinds the soul in gusts and hurls us for the moment, judgment and all, into the power of sin.
What I do, I customarily do completely, in one piece and one stride. I rarely have an impulse that hides itself and sneaks past my reason; nearly every move I make is made with the consent of all my faculties, without split or inward mutiny. My judgment gets all the blame or all the praise for it — and the blame it gets once, it keeps forever, for almost since infancy it has been one and the same judgment: the same bent, the same track, the same force. And in the matter of general convictions, I settled in childhood into the spot where I meant to stand.
Some sins are violent, quick, sudden; set those aside. But these other sins, repeated so many times, deliberated, planned — sins of temperament, or sins of profession and trade — I cannot conceive how they could sit so long in one and the same resolve unless the reason and conscience of the man who keeps them is constant in willing them. And the repentance he claims comes over him at some appointed instant — that I find very hard to imagine or believe. I do not follow the Pythagorean idea that men take on a new soul when they approach the images of the gods to receive their oracles — unless the sect meant that the soul must indeed be a foreign one, new, loaned for the occasion, since our own shows so little sign of the purity and cleanliness the office calls for.
These men do exactly the opposite of the Stoic teaching, which tells us, yes, to correct the imperfections and vices we find in ourselves, but never to let them disturb the peace of our souls. These men would have us believe they carry great grief and remorse inside; but of amendment, of correction, of stopping, they show us nothing. Yet there is no cure if the disease is not thrown off. If repentance sat in one pan of the scales, it would outweigh the sin. I know no quality so easy to counterfeit as piety, when a man's life and morals are not made to match it: its essence is hidden and secret; its appearances are easy and showy.
For my own part, I may wish in a general way to be different than I am; I may condemn my whole form and be displeased with it, and beg God to remake me entirely and to pardon my natural weakness. But this I ought not to call repentance, it seems to me — no more than my displeasure at not being an angel or Cato. My actions are in order; they match what I am and match my condition. I can do no better. And repentance does not properly reach the things that are not in our power — regret reaches those. I can imagine numberless natures loftier and better ordered than mine; for all that, I do not improve my own faculties, any more than my arm or my mind grows stronger because I conceive of someone else's being stronger. If imagining and wishing for a nobler way of acting than ours bred repentance for our own, we would have to repent of our most innocent works — since we may rightly suppose that in a more excellent nature they would have been done with greater dignity and perfection, and we would wish ours had been. When I compare the conduct of my youth with the conduct of my old age, I find I have generally kept order in both, by my own lights; that is all my powers of resistance can do. I do not flatter myself: in the same circumstances, I would do the same things again. It is not a spot on me; it is a dye that stains me through and through. I know no repentance that is superficial, halfway, and ceremonial. It must sting me on every side before I will call it by that name; it must grip and wring my bowels as deeply and as universally as God sees into me.
As for business — many fine opportunities have slipped through my fingers for lack of good management. And yet my deliberations were sound enough, given what was in front of me at the time; their method is always to take the easiest and safest course. I find that in my old resolutions I proceeded sensibly, by my own rule, according to the state of the matter proposed; and in the same situation I would do the same a thousand years from now. I don't ask what it looks like now, but what it looked like then, when I was weighing it. The force of any counsel lies in its timing; occasions and circumstances roll and change without end. I have made some heavy mistakes in my life — important ones — not for lack of good judgment but for lack of good luck. There are secret parts in the matters we handle, parts no one can guess — especially in human nature: mute conditions that never show themselves, unknown sometimes even to their owner, which are sprung and startled into life by occasions. If my prudence could not see into them or predict them, I hold no grudge against it; its commission only runs so far. If the outcome beats me — if it favors the side I rejected — there's no help for that. I don't blame myself; I accuse my fortune, not my work. And that is not to be called repentance.
Phocion once gave the Athenians a piece of advice that was not followed; and when the affair went off successfully against his prediction, someone said to him, "Well, Phocion, are you glad things are going so well?" "Very glad," he said, "that this has happened — but I do not repent of advising the other." When friends come to me for advice, I give it freely and clearly, without stalling — the way almost everyone else does — over the chance that the thing may turn out against my opinion and leave me blamed for the counsel. That worries me not at all. They will be in the wrong for having consulted me; I could not decently refuse them the service.
I, for my part, can rarely blame anyone but myself for my blunders and misfortunes, because in practice I rarely ask anyone else's advice — only as a courtesy of form, or where I need information, technical knowledge, or the facts of the matter. In things where I have nothing to supply but judgment, other people's reasons may back mine up, but they seldom turn me around. I listen to them all graciously and patiently; but as far as I can remember, I have never trusted any but my own. To my mind they are only flies and motes that flit about my will. I set little store by my own opinions — but I set just as little by other people's, and fortune pays me out accordingly: I take little advice, and I am asked for little. I am rarely consulted, and even more rarely believed; I know of no undertaking, public or private, that my advice ever restored or improved. Even the people fortune had tied, more or less, to my management have let themselves be run by anyone's counsel sooner than mine. And being a man every bit as jealous of his peace as of his authority, I prefer it that way. By leaving me alone they treat me according to my professed creed, which is to be settled and contained entirely within myself. To me it is a pleasure to be uninvolved in other men's affairs and clear of standing surety for what they do.
About all things past, however they fell out, I have little regret. This thought spares me the pain of it: that's how they were bound to fall out; they sit now in the great revolution of the universe, in the chain of Stoical causes. Your fancy cannot, by wish or imagination, shift one jot of it without overturning the whole order of things, and the past, and the future.
For the rest, I hate that accidental repentance that old age brings in its baggage. The ancient who said he was obliged to his years for weaning him off pleasure held a different opinion from mine. I can never think myself beholden to impotence for any good it may do me. Nor, as Quintilian says, will Providence ever be so hostile to her own work that feebleness should be ranked among the best things. Our appetites are scarce in old age; a deep satiety settles on us after the act. In that I see nothing of conscience. Sourness and weakness stamp us with a drowsy, crabbed, rheumatic virtue. We must not let natural decay carry us so far that it corrupts our judgment along the way. Youth and pleasure never so mastered me, back then, that I failed to see the face of vice in the pleasure; and the distaste the years have brought me does not so master me now that I cannot see the pleasure in the vice. Now that I am no longer in my prime, I judge these things as if I were. As the old poet says, old as I am, unfit now for ladies' love, I still remember what beauty can do.
I, who examine my reason narrowly and strictly, find it the very same it was in my most licentious years — except perhaps weaker and dimmer for having grown old. And I find that whatever pleasure it now refuses me out of regard for my bodily health, it would refuse me no more than it ever did out of regard for the health of my soul. I do not rate it the more valiant for being out of combat. My temptations are so broken and crippled that they are not worth its opposing: I push them off with outstretched hands, nothing more. But set the old concupiscence in front of my reason, and I fear it would have less strength to resist than it once had. I cannot see that, of itself, it judges anything differently now than it did then, or that it has come into any new light. So if there is a convalescence here, it is a bewitched one. A wretched sort of cure, to owe your health to your disease!
It is not for our misfortune to perform that office; it is for the good fortune of our judgment. Blows and afflictions get nothing out of me but curses. They are for people who can't be wakened without a whip. My reason runs far more freely in prosperity. It is much more distracted and put upon digesting pains than digesting pleasures. I see best in clear weather. Health counsels me more cheerfully, and to better effect, than sickness does. I did all that lay in me to reform and regulate myself in the matter of pleasures while I still had the health and vigor to enjoy them. I would be ashamed and resentful if the misery and bad luck of my decrepitude were to be rated above my good, healthy, lively, vigorous years — if men were to take my measure not by what I have been, but by what I have ceased to be.
In my opinion it is living happily, and not — as Antisthenes said — dying happily, that makes human felicity. I have made no effort to fix a philosopher's tail onto the head and body of a dissolute man; I will not have this wretched remainder of me give the lie to the pleasant, sound, and long part of my life. I want to present myself uniform throughout. Were I to live my life over again, I would live it just as I have lived it. I neither complain of the past nor fear the future; and unless I am badly fooled, things have gone inside me about as they have gone outside. One of my chief debts to my fortune is that my bodily life has run its course with each thing in its natural season. I have seen the grass, the flower, and the fruit; now I see the withering — happily, because naturally. I bear my present infirmities the more gently because they came on schedule, and because they make me remember all the more kindly the long happiness of my past life. My wisdom may have been the same size in both seasons; but it performed better, and with better grace, when it was green and gay than now that it is broken down, peevish, and labored.
So I renounce these accidental, painful reformations. God must touch our hearts. Our consciences must amend of themselves, by the strengthening of our reason — not by the failing of our appetites. Pleasure is not, in itself, something pale and colorless, fit to be made out only by dim, bleary eyes.
We ought to love temperance for its own sake, and out of reverence for God, who has commanded it, and chastity too. But what catarrhs reduce us to — what I owe to the favor of my kidney stones — is neither chastity nor temperance. A man cannot brag of despising and resisting pleasure if he cannot see it, if he doesn't know what it is — its graces, its powers, its most winning beauties. I know both sides; I have the right to say it. But it seems to me that in old age our souls suffer more troublesome ailments and defects than in youth. I said so when I was young and got laughed at for my beardless chin; and I say so now that my grey hair gives me some standing. We call our peevish tempers, and our distaste for whatever is in front of us, wisdom. But the truth is we don't so much abandon our vices as trade them — and, in my opinion, for worse ones. Besides a silly, threadbare pride, a tedious itch to talk, prickly and unsociable moods, superstition, and a ridiculous appetite for riches just when we have lost the use of them, I find in old age more envy, more injustice, more malice. It plants more wrinkles in our minds than on our faces; and you will seldom or never see a soul that doesn't, in aging, come to smell sour and musty. The whole man moves together, toward his ripening and toward his rot.
Looking at the wisdom of Socrates, and several details of his condemnation, I would venture to believe he lent himself to it on purpose, in a way, by playing along — at seventy, with the prospect just ahead of feeling the high motions of his mind cramped and his accustomed brightness dimmed.
What strange transformations I watch old age work, every day, in so many of my acquaintances! It is a powerful disease, and it creeps in naturally and invisibly. It takes a vast stock of study, and great precaution, to dodge the defects it loads onto us — or at least to slow their advance. I can feel that, for all my fortifications, it gains on me foot by foot. I hold out as well as I can. But where it will finally bring me, I do not know. Come what may, I am content that the world should know, when I have fallen, from what height I fell.
We should not bolt ourselves so tightly to our own moods and temperaments. The best skill we have is knowing how to apply ourselves to many different things. To keep yourself tied and chained to one single course is to exist, not to live. The finest souls are the ones with the most variety and flexibility in them. There is an admiring report of the elder Cato along these lines — as Livy says, his mind was so adaptable to everything that whatever he happened to be doing, you would swear he had been born to do exactly that.
If I were free to shape myself by my own design, there is no way of being — however graceful — that I would want to be fixed in so firmly that I could not break loose from it. Life is an uneven, irregular, many-shaped motion. To be led around by the nose by yourself, endlessly, so stuck in your own grooves that you cannot turn aside or twist your neck out of the collar — that is not being a friend to yourself, much less a master. It is being a slave.
I say this now, at this point in my life, because I find I cannot easily shake off the nagging of my own soul. It usually cannot entertain itself except with narrow things, and it cannot work except entirely and with all its strength. Give it the lightest subject and it will swell and stretch the thing to the point where its full power is engaged. For that reason, idleness is hard labor for me, and bad for my health. Most minds need outside material to wake them up and get them moving; mine needs it rather to settle down and rest — because, as Seneca says, the vices of leisure have to be shaken off by being busy. The chief and hardest study of my mind is studying itself. Books, for it, are the kind of work that distracts it from that study. The first thoughts that strike it set it bustling, testing its strength in every direction — sometimes flexing its force, sometimes steadying, moderating, and putting itself in order out of a feeling for grace and proportion. It has plenty of its own to work on. Nature has given it, as she gives everyone, enough material of its own to use, and subjects enough for inventing and judging.
Meditation is a powerful and rich study for anyone who can really taste it and apply himself to it. I would rather shape my soul than furnish it. There is no occupation either weaker or stronger — depending on the soul in question — than entertaining your own thoughts. The greatest men make it their whole business: those, as Cicero says, for whom to live is to think. Nature has favored this activity with a special privilege: there is nothing we can do for so long, and no activity we give ourselves to more often or more easily. It is the business of the gods, says Aristotle, and the source of their happiness and of ours.
The main use of reading, for me, is that the variety of its subjects wakes up my reason and exercises my judgment — not my memory. Few conversations can hold me without force and effort. It is true that beauty and elegance of speech win me over as much as the weight and depth of the subject, or more. And since I tend to drift off in every other kind of talk, lending only the rind of my attention, it often happens that in flat, pitiful exchanges — mere chatter — I either give drowsy, meaningless answers, unworthy of a child and ridiculous, or, more foolishly and rudely still, hold an obstinate silence. I have a brooding streak that pulls me into myself, and alongside it a heavy, childish ignorance of many perfectly ordinary things. Between those two qualities, I have earned this much: a man could truthfully tell five or six stories about me as ridiculous as any told about anyone.
But back to my point. This difficult temperament of mine makes me picky about the company I keep — I have to cull and select men for my purpose — and it makes me unfit for ordinary society. We live and do business with people. If their conversation annoys us, if we refuse to lower ourselves to plain and common souls — and the plain and common are often as sound as the finest-spun, and all wisdom is folly that does not adapt itself to the common ignorance — then we must stop meddling in other people's affairs and in our own, because business, public and private alike, gets done with exactly these people. The least forced and most natural motions of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least strained. My God, what a good turn wisdom does for those whose desires it cuts to fit their power! There is no more useful knowledge. "According to what a man can" was the favorite saying and motto of Socrates — a motto of great solidity.
We must steer our desires toward the things nearest and easiest to get. Isn't it a foolish humor of mine to cut myself off from a thousand people my fortune has joined me to, people I cannot live without, in order to cling to one or two who are out of my reach — or rather, to a fantastical longing for something I cannot have? My gentle, easy manners, the enemies of all sourness and harshness, have probably kept me clear of envy and hostility; no man ever gave less occasion for being hated — I do not say for being loved. But the coldness of my conversation has, reasonably enough, cost me the goodwill of many people, who can be excused for reading it another and worse way.
I am very capable of forming and keeping rare and exquisite friendships. Since I seize so hungrily on the acquaintances that suit my taste, I throw myself at them with such force that I rarely fail to stick, and to make an impression where I hit — as I have happily proved more than once. In ordinary friendships I am somewhat cold and shy, for I do not move naturally except under full sail. Besides, having been given a taste, in my youth, of one single and perfect friendship, fortune has honestly left me with a kind of distaste for the others, and stamped too deep in my imagination the old saying that man is a companionable animal, but not a herd animal. And I have a natural difficulty about sharing myself by halves, with the hedging and the servile, wary caution required for keeping up many imperfect friendships — and that caution is demanded of us especially in this age, when you cannot talk about the world except dangerously or falsely.
Yet I see perfectly well that a man whose aim is the comforts of life — the essential comforts, I mean — as mine is, should run from these refinements and delicacies of temperament like the plague. What I would praise is a soul with several floors to it: one that knows how to stretch and to slacken; that is at ease wherever fortune carries it; that can talk with a neighbor about his building, his hunting, his lawsuits; that can chat with a carpenter or a gardener with pleasure. I envy those who can get familiar with the humblest of their own staff and make conversation in their manner. And I dislike Plato's advice that we should always speak to our servants, men or women, in the tone of a master, never playful, never familiar. For besides the reasons I have given, it is inhuman and unjust to set such a price on this pitiful accident of fortune; the societies that allow the least distance between masters and servants seem to me the fairest.
Other men study how to raise and elevate their minds; I study how to lower mine and bring it down. It is only faulty when it stretches. As Horace says, you tell us long tales of the line of Aeacus and the battles fought under sacred Troy — but what a cask of good wine costs, who will heat the bath, whose house will shelter me from the cold and when, about that you say nothing.
The Spartans' courage needed moderating — needed the sweet, harmonious sound of flutes to soften it in battle, so they would not throw themselves into recklessness and fury — while every other nation uses harsh, shrill sounds and loud fierce cries to whip its soldiers' courage to the limit. In the same way, it seems to me, and against the usual view, our minds mostly need lead rather than wings — coolness and calm rather than heat and agitation. Above all, in my opinion, it is playing the fool magnificently to put on the grave airs of a lofty intellect among people who are nothing of the kind, and to speak forever by the book — "talking with the point of a fork," as the Italians say of affected speech. You must come down to the level of the people you are with, and sometimes even affect ignorance. Set aside force and subtlety in everyday conversation; keeping things decent and orderly is enough. Crawl along the ground, if that is what they want.
The learned trip over this stone constantly. They are forever parading their pedantic learning and strewing their books over everything. These days they have so stuffed the boudoirs and the ears of the ladies with it that even if the ladies have missed the substance, they have at least kept the words — so that in every discussion, on any subject however plain and ordinary, they speak and write in a new and learned style. As Juvenal says, in this language they pour out their fears, their anger, their joys, their cares, and every secret of their souls — what more? they even make love learnedly. They quote Plato and Aquinas on matters the first passerby could settle just as well. The learning that cannot reach their souls stays sitting on the tongue.
If women of quality will take my advice, they will content themselves with displaying their own natural treasures. They hide and bury their beauties under beauties that are not theirs. It is great folly to snuff out your own light so as to shine by a borrowed one — to be buried, as Seneca says, under art, painted and packaged from head to foot. The reason is that they do not know themselves well enough, or do themselves justice. The world has nothing fairer than they are; it is for them to do honor to the arts, and to put paint itself to shame. What do they need beyond living loved and honored? They have, and know, more than enough for that. All they need do is rouse and warm a little the faculties that are already their own.
When I see them dabbling in rhetoric, law, logic, and similar drugs — so useless and unnecessary for their purposes — I begin to suspect that the men who push these fancies on them do it in order to govern them by that route. What other excuse can I find? It is enough that without any instruction from us they can tune the grace of their eyes to gaiety, severity, or sweetness; season a refusal with sharpness, suspense, or favor; and need no interpreter for the speeches we make in courting them. With that knowledge they hold the whip hand and rule the schoolmasters and the schools.
But if it nevertheless galls them to yield to us in anything at all, and they want their share of books out of curiosity, then poetry is the entertainment suited to them: a wanton, subtle, sly, chattering art, all pleasure and all show, like themselves. They can also draw various profits from history. And in philosophy — the moral part of it — they can pick out the lessons that will teach them to judge our humors and our characters, to defend themselves against our treacheries, to manage the heat of their own desires, to husband their freedom, to stretch out the pleasures of life, and to bear with grace the inconstancy of a lover, the rudeness of a husband, and the nagging of years and wrinkles. That is the most I would allow them in the sciences.
Some particular natures are private and withdrawn. My own native manner is made for communication and apt to put me on display; I am all outside and in plain view, born for company and friendship. The solitude I love and recommend is mainly nothing more than drawing my thoughts and affections back into myself — restraining and reining in not my steps but my cares and desires, shedding all outside worry, and avoiding like death all servitude and obligation: fleeing not so much the crowd of men as the crowd of business. Solitude of place, to tell the truth, rather gives me more room and sets me at large. I throw myself into affairs of state and into the world more readily when I am alone. At the Louvre, in the bustle of the court, I fold up inside my own skin; the crowd presses me back into myself. I am never so wanton, so free, so much my own man in my musings as in places of dignity and ceremonious caution. Our follies do not make me laugh — our wisdom does.
I am no natural enemy of court life; I have spent part of my own life there, and my temperament takes cheerfully to great company — provided it is in doses, and at times of my choosing. But this softness of judgment I have been describing chains me, like it or not, to solitude. Even at home, in a numerous household, in a house that sees plenty of visitors, I see people enough, but rarely the people I delight in talking with. And I reserve there, for myself and for everyone else, an unusual liberty. My house has no ceremony — no ushering, no escorting guests out to their coach, none of the other tiresome rituals our code of courtesy commands (oh, that servile, nagging custom!). Everyone there runs himself by his own method. Whoever wants to may speak his thoughts; I sit silent, musing, shut up in my study, and no guest takes offense.
The men whose society and familiarity I seek out are those we call sincere and able men. The image of these men puts me off all the rest. Theirs is, rightly considered, the rarest of our forms — and a form owed chiefly to nature. The end of this kind of company is simply intimacy, frequenting one another, and conversation: the exercise of souls, with no other profit. In our talk any subject will do for me; I do not care if it has neither weight nor depth — charm and aptness are always there. Everything in it is colored by ripe, steady judgment, and mixed with goodness, openness, gaiety, and friendship. It is not only on questions of kings and state that our minds show their force and beauty; they show it every bit as much in private talk. I know my men even by their silences and their smiles, and discover them better, perhaps, at the table than in the council chamber. Hippomachus said very well that he could spot the good wrestlers just by watching them walk down the street. If learning cares to join our conversation, it will not be turned away — provided it is not magisterial, imperious, and tiresome, as it usually is, but a junior partner, and teachable itself. We are only after passing the time; when we want to be instructed and preached at, we will go find learning on its throne. Let it lower itself to us for the occasion, please; for useful and profitable as it is, I imagine that at a pinch we could manage perfectly well without it and do our business unassisted. A well-born soul, practiced in the company of men, makes herself agreeable on her own. Art is nothing but the catalogue and record of what such souls produce.
The company of beautiful and honorable women is, for me, another sweet kind of association — for, as Cicero says, we too have educated eyes. If the soul has less to enjoy here than in the first kind, the bodily senses, which have a larger share in this one, bring it up to a level close to the other — though not, in my opinion, equal to it. But it is a commerce in which a man must keep a little on his guard, especially a man in whom the body has great power, as in me. I scalded myself there in my youth, and suffered all the torments the poets say fall on men who throw themselves into love without order or judgment. It is true that the whipping has made me wiser since — like Ovid's sailor, whoever escaped the wreck on the Capharean rocks steers wide of those waters forever after.
It is folly to fix all your thoughts on it and to plunge in with furious, reckless passion. But on the other hand, to go into it without love and without desire, like actors, playing a stock part, putting in nothing of your own but the lines — that is to look after your safety, true, but in as cowardly a way as a man who would abandon his honor, his profit, or his pleasure out of fear of danger. For it is certain that the men who set up such an arrangement can expect no fruit from it that could please or satisfy a noble soul. A man must have honestly desired what he honestly expects to enjoy. I say this even when fortune unjustly favors the play-acting — which happens often, because there is not one woman in the world, be she as ugly as the devil, who does not think herself well worth loving, and who does not prefer herself to other women on the strength of her youth, the color of her hair, or her graceful walk. There are no more universally ugly women than universally beautiful ones; the Brahmin girls who have nothing else to recommend them, when the town crier has called the people together for the purpose, go down to the marketplace and display their matrimonial parts to the public, to see whether those, at least, are temptation enough to fetch them a husband. So there is not one woman who will not readily let herself be won by the first vow of devotion a man makes her.
Now from this common, everyday treachery of the men of our time, the result we already see in practice was bound to follow: either the women band together and withdraw among themselves to escape us, or else they take their schooling from the example we set, play their side of the farce as we play ours, and enter the game without passion, care, or love — answerable, as Tacitus says, neither to their own affections nor to anyone else's — believing, with Lysias in Plato, that they can give themselves to us all the more usefully and conveniently the less we love them. And so it goes as in the theater: the audience gets as much pleasure as the actors, or more.
For my part, I no more recognize a Venus without a Cupid than a mother without children: they are things that lend and owe their being to each other. So the cheat bounces back on the cheater. The game costs him next to nothing, but he gets next to nothing out of it. The people who made Venus a goddess noticed that her principal beauty was bodiless and spiritual; but the Venus these men chase is not even human — not even animal. The beasts themselves would not take it so gross and earthbound. We see that imagination and desire heat them before the body does; we see that in both sexes there is choosing and preferring within the herd, and long affectionate attachments among them. Even those whom old age has cut off from the act still tremble, whinny, and twitter with love. We see them before the act full of hope and ardor, and after the body has played its game, still savoring the sweet memory of the pleasure — some strutting with pride afterward, others, tired and satisfied, trumpeting their triumph aloud. An animal that merely needs to relieve the body of a natural necessity does not trouble others with such elaborate preparations. This is no food for a gross, coarse appetite.
Not wanting to be thought better than I am, I will say this here about the sins of my youth. Partly for the danger to health (though I was not careful enough to escape two light mishaps), and even more out of contempt, I rarely went in for paid and mercenary embraces. I wanted the pleasure sharpened by difficulty, by desire, and by a certain kind of glory. I was of the emperor Tiberius's mind, who in his loves was taken as much by modesty and good birth as by any other quality, and of the courtesan Flora's humor, who never lent herself to anyone below a dictator, a consul, or a censor, and relished the rank of her lovers. No doubt pearls and brocade, titles and retinue, add something to it.
Beyond that, I set a high price on intelligence — provided the body passed muster. For to confess the truth, if one or the other of these two attractions had to be missing, I would sooner have given up the intelligence: it has its uses in better things. But in the matter of love — a matter that mainly concerns the senses of sight and touch — something can be done without the graces of the mind; without the graces of the body, nothing. Beauty is the true prerogative of women, so peculiarly their own that ours, though it calls for somewhat different features, is only at its peak when youthful and beardless — a blurred copy of theirs. They say that those who serve the Grand Turk on the strength of their beauty, and they are an infinite number, are dismissed at twenty-two at the latest. Reason, prudence, and the offices of friendship are better found among men; that is why men run the affairs of the world.
These two kinds of company are matters of luck, and depend on other people. The first is troublesome because it is rare; the second withers with age. So they could never have been enough for the business of my life. The company of books, which is the third, is far more certain and far more our own. It concedes every other advantage to the first two, but it has for its own share the constancy and the ease of its service. It walks beside me along my whole road and helps me everywhere. It comforts me in old age and in solitude. It relieves me of the weight of a tedious idleness, and frees me, at any hour, from company I dislike. It blunts the edge of grief, as long as the grief is not extreme and has not taken full possession of my soul. To shake off a troublesome thought, I have only to run to my books: they fix me at once and steal the other thing out of my mind. And they do not mutiny at seeing that I only come to them for lack of other amusements, more real, natural, and alive; they always receive me with the same welcome.
A man may well go on foot, they say, who leads his horse by the bridle. Our James, King of Naples and Sicily — handsome, young, and healthy, yet having himself carried about the country on a stretcher, lying on a shabby mattress, in a worn robe of grey cloth with a cap to match, all the while attended by a royal retinue of litters and led horses of every kind, gentlemen and officers — was practicing an authority still tender and wobbly: the sick man has nothing to complain of who carries his cure in his sleeve. All the benefit I draw from books lies in the experience and practice of that maxim, which is a very true one. In fact, I make scarcely more actual use of them than people who have never opened one. I enjoy them the way misers enjoy their money — in knowing I can enjoy them whenever I please; my mind is satisfied with the right of possession. I never travel without books, in peace or in war, and yet I will pass days, sometimes months, without looking at them. I will read by and by, I tell myself, or tomorrow, or whenever I feel like it — and meanwhile the time slips past and does me no harm. For I cannot tell you how much I rest and settle in the thought that they are there beside me, to give me pleasure whenever I choose; they are always at my call, and I have only to remember what a refreshment they are to my life. It is the best provision I have found for this human journey, and I deeply pity any man of understanding who travels without it. I will accept any other sort of amusement, however slight, precisely because this one can never fail me.
At home I retreat a little more often to my library, from which I oversee all the workings of my household at a glance. It stands over the entrance to my house: from there I look down on my garden, my courtyard, my farmyard, and into almost every part of the building. There I leaf through one book, then another, on all sorts of subjects, without method or plan. One hour I muse; another I jot down or pace back and forth dictating these whimsies of mine that you are reading now. It is on the third floor of a tower. The ground floor is my chapel; the second floor a bedroom with a dressing room and a closet, where I often sleep when I want to be more alone; and above is a great wardrobe. In the old days it was the most useless spot in the house. I pass most of the days of my life there, and most of the hours of each day. I am never there at night. Beside it is a rather handsome study with a fireplace very conveniently placed, and plenty of light; and if I were not more afraid of the trouble than the expense — the trouble that scares me off every project — I could easily add on each side, at the same level, a gallery a hundred paces long and twelve wide, since walls built for some other purpose already stand at the right height. Every place of retreat needs a walk. My thoughts fall asleep if I sit still; my mind will not go unless my legs move it — and everyone who studies without a book is in the same condition.
The shape of my library is round, with no flat wall except what my table and chair require, so the whole curve of the circle offers me all my books at once, ranged on five tiers of shelves all around me. It has three fine, open views, and is sixteen paces across. In winter I am there less constantly, for my house sits on a hill — that is what its name says — and no part of it is more exposed to wind and weather than this. That suits me well enough: the awkward climb gives me exercise and keeps the crowd away. There is my throne. There I try to make my rule absolute, and to withdraw this one corner from all society — conjugal, filial, and civil. Everywhere else my authority is merely verbal, and muddled in substance. The man who has nowhere at home to be by himself, to pay court to himself in private, to hide — that man, in my opinion, is miserable. Ambition pays its servants the fitting wage of keeping them always on display, like a statue in the public square. As Seneca says, a great fortune is a great slavery. They cannot even be private in the privy. I have found nothing in the austere life our monks profess harder than the rule I have seen in some of their orders: perpetual company, with many persons present at everything they do whatsoever. It seems to me far more bearable to be always alone than never to be able to be.
If anyone tells me that using the Muses only as a toy and a pastime is to cheapen them, he does not know, as I do, the worth of the toy, the pleasure, and the pastime. I can hardly keep from adding that every other aim is ridiculous. I live from day to day and — with all due reverence — I live only for myself; my plans go no further. In my youth I studied to show off; later, to make myself a little wiser; now, for my amusement — never for gain. The vain, spendthrift taste I once had for this kind of furniture — books acquired not just to supply my needs but to dress the walls and make a show — I have long since cured myself of entirely.
Books have many charming qualities for those who know how to choose them. But every good has its evil. This pleasure is no purer or cleaner than the others; it has its drawbacks, and weighty ones. The soul gets its exercise there, but the body — whose care I must never neglect either — sits motionless all the while, and grows heavy and dull. I know no excess that does me more harm, or that I should avoid more carefully in these my declining years.
These, then, have been my three favorite and personal occupations. I say nothing of the ones I owe to the world by civil obligation.
It's easy to show that when the great authors write about causes, they don't use only the ones they believe to be true. They also use the ones they don't believe, as long as those have some beauty and invention in them. They speak truly enough, and usefully enough, if they speak ingeniously. We can never be certain of the master cause, so we pile up a whole heap of them, hoping the real one might happen to be somewhere in the pile. As Lucretius says, "it is not enough to give one cause; we must give many, though only one of them is true."
You ask me where the custom comes from of blessing people who sneeze? Well: we break wind three ways. The wind that escapes from below is too filthy to mention. The wind that comes out of the mouth carries a whiff of gluttony with it. The third is the sneeze, and because it comes from the head and gives no offense, we grant it this polite reception. Don't laugh at the distinction — they say it's Aristotle's.
I think I read in Plutarch — who, of all the authors I know, best mixed art with nature and judgment with learning — that seasickness is caused by fear; he had first worked out some argument proving that fear could produce such an effect. Now, I am very prone to seasickness, and I know perfectly well that this cause has nothing to do with me. I know it not by argument but by hard experience. I'll set aside what I've been told — that animals get seasick too, especially hogs, who have no notion whatsoever that they're in danger. And I'll set aside what an acquaintance told me about himself: that though he's very subject to it, the urge to vomit left him three or four times when he was badly frightened in a violent storm. He was like that ancient who said, "I was too frightened to be sick," as Seneca tells it.
I was never afraid on the water — nor in any other danger, and I've had enough of them in front of my eyes to qualify, if death qualifies — never so afraid, I mean, as to be stunned out of my judgment. Fear springs sometimes from a lack of judgment as much as from a lack of courage. Every danger I've ever been in, I looked at without blinking, with an open, sound, and whole sight. Besides, it takes courage to be afraid. That courage once served me better than anything else: it let me order and manage my retreat so that it was, if not without fear, at least without panic and without astonishment. I was shaken, yes, but not dazed or stupefied.
Great souls go much further than this, and show us retreats that are not just steady and composed but downright lofty. Let me give you the account Alcibiades left of Socrates, his comrade in arms. "I found him," he says, "after the rout of our army, him and Laches, among the last of those retreating. I could study him at my leisure and in safety, because I was on a good horse and he was on foot, as he had fought. First I noticed how much judgment and resolve he showed compared with Laches. Then I noticed the boldness of his walk — no different from his everyday stride — and his gaze, firm and level, weighing and judging everything that passed around him, looking now at one group, now at another, friends and enemies alike. To his friends, that look gave heart; to his enemies, it announced that he would sell his life dearly to anyone who tried to take it. And so they came off safe — because people don't like to attack a man like that. They chase the ones who look frightened."
That is the testimony of a great captain, and it teaches what we see confirmed every day: nothing throws us into danger like a frantic eagerness to get clear of it. As Livy puts it, "where there is least fear, there is usually least danger."
Our people are wrong to say that a man "is afraid of death" when what they mean is that he thinks about it and sees it coming. Foresight is equally useful for whatever concerns us, good or bad. To consider a danger and weigh it is, in a way, the very opposite of being stunned by it.
I do not find myself strong enough to stand against the force of this passion of fear, or of any other violent passion. If it once conquered me and knocked me flat, I would never get up again entirely sound. Whoever made my soul lose her footing would never set her upright after. She probes and re-probes herself too deeply, too much to the quick; she would never let the wound she'd received close and scar over. It's been lucky for me that no illness has yet unhinged her. Every time I'm charged, I meet it with all the resistance and defense I have — which means the first assault that routed me would leave me no way to rally. I have no second line. Wherever the flood breaks through my banks, I lie open, and I drown without remedy. Epicurus says a wise man can never become a fool. I hold the reverse opinion: that whoever has once been a thorough fool will never afterward be thoroughly wise. God sends me cold according to my coat, and passions in proportion to my means of withstanding them. Nature, having left me exposed on one side, has covered me on the other: having disarmed me of strength, she has armed me with insensibility — with a composure that is steady, or, if you prefer, dull.
Now, I cannot long endure — and when I was young I could endure even less — a coach, a litter, or a boat, and I hate every kind of travel but horseback, in town and country alike. But I can bear a litter even less than a coach, and by the same logic I can bear rough water, which frightens people, better than the motion of a calm. At those little jolts the oars give, stealing the vessel out from under us, I feel — I don't know how — my head and my stomach both go wrong; just as I can't sit on a wobbly chair. When the sail or the current carries us evenly along, or we're being towed, that smooth motion doesn't bother me at all. It's interrupted movement that offends me, and worst of all when it's slow. I can't describe it any better than that. The doctors prescribed squeezing and binding my lower belly with a towel to fix this trouble — which I haven't tried, being accustomed to wrestling with my own defects and beating them myself.
If my memory could serve me, I wouldn't think my time wasted in setting down here the endless variety that history offers on the use of chariots in war — varied by nation and by age, and in my opinion of great necessity and effect, so that it's a wonder we've lost all knowledge of them. I'll say only this: quite recently, in our fathers' time, the Hungarians used them to great advantage against the Turks. Each one carried a man with a shield and a musketeer, plus a stack of harquebuses ready loaded, the whole thing screened with canvas like a war-galley. They formed the front of their battle line with three thousand such coaches, and after the cannon had spoken, sent the whole volley pouring into the enemy — who had to swallow that taste of things to come, which was no small head start. Then the chariots charged into the enemy squadrons to break them open and clear a way for the rest. Besides that, they could shield the troops on a dangerous flank while marching, or cover a position and fortify it in a hurry. In my own time, a gentleman on one of our frontiers — too bulky a man for any horse to carry — having a quarrel on his hands, rode about the country in a chariot of this sort, and got on very comfortably. But let's leave these chariots of war.
As if the worthlessness of coaches weren't already proven well enough, the last kings of our first dynasty traveled in a chariot drawn by four oxen. Mark Antony was the first man in Rome to have himself drawn in a coach by lions — with a singing girl beside him. Heliogabalus later did the same, calling himself Cybele, the mother of the gods; he was also drawn by tigers, playing the god Bacchus; sometimes he harnessed two stags to his coach, another time four dogs, and another time four naked girls, having himself drawn by them in full pomp, stark naked himself. The Emperor Firmus had his chariot drawn by ostriches of such prodigious size that it seemed to fly rather than roll.
The strangeness of these inventions puts another notion in my head: that it is a kind of small-mindedness in monarchs, and proof that they don't quite understand what they are, when they labor to make themselves honored and to look great through excessive spending. It would be excusable in a foreign country; but among their own subjects, where they hold sovereign power and can do whatever they please, it actually cheapens their dignity — the highest degree of honor they can reach. Just as, it seems to me, it's superfluous for a private gentleman to dress up finely at home: his house, his servants, and his kitchen answer for him well enough.
The advice Isocrates gives his king seems grounded in good sense: be splendid in plate and furniture, since that's a durable expense that passes down to your successors; and avoid all magnificence that will be forgotten in short order.
I loved dressing finely when I was a younger son, having no other ornament, and it suited me. There are some men on whom their rich clothes sit and weep. We have remarkable stories of the frugality of our kings about their own persons and in their gifts — kings who were great in reputation, in valor, and in fortune. Demosthenes fought hard against his city's law assigning public money to the pomp of its plays and festivals; he wanted its greatness shown in numbers of well-equipped ships and well-provided armies. And there's good reason to condemn Theophrastus, who in his book on riches takes the contrary position and maintains that this sort of expense is the true fruit of abundance. Such delights, says Aristotle, please only the basest sort of people; they vanish from memory as soon as the crowd has had its fill, and no serious, judicious man can hold them in any esteem.
The money would, in my opinion, be spent far more royally — being more profitably, justly, and durably spent — on ports, harbors, walls, and fortifications; on handsome buildings, churches, hospitals, colleges, and the improvement of streets and highways. In that line Pope Gregory XIII will leave an honorable memory to future ages, and in that line our Queen Catherine would prove her natural generosity to long posterity, if her means matched her inclination. Fortune did me a real spite when she interrupted the noble structure of the Pont-Neuf of our great city and robbed me of the hope of seeing it finished before I die.
Besides, it seems to subjects watching these triumphs that it's their own wealth being paraded before them — that they're being entertained at their own expense. For the people tend to assume about kings what we assume about our servants: that their job is to provide everything we need in abundance, and to touch none of it themselves. That's why the Emperor Galba, pleased with a musician who played for him at supper, sent for his money-box and gave him a handful of crowns out of it with these words: "This is not the public money, but my own." Still, it usually turns out that the people have reason on their side, and that princes feed the people's eyes with what their bellies need.
Even generosity doesn't show its true luster in a sovereign's hand; private men have the better right to it. For, taking it strictly, a king has nothing that is properly his own; he owes his very self to others. Authority is not given for the benefit of the magistrate but for the benefit of the people. A superior is never made superior for his own profit but for the profit of those beneath him — a doctor exists for the sick, not for himself. Every office, like every art, has its purpose outside itself.
So the tutors of young princes who make it their business to stamp this virtue of open-handedness into them — preaching that they should refuse nothing, and count nothing so well spent as what they give away (a doctrine I have seen in high credit in my time) — either care more for their own profit than their master's, or don't understand whom they're talking to. It's far too easy to preach generosity to someone with unlimited means of practicing it at other people's expense. And since a gift is measured not by its size but by the means of the giver, in such mighty hands it comes to nothing: they find themselves wastrels before they can be counted generous. Besides, it's a minor virtue compared with the other royal ones — and the only one, as the tyrant Dionysius said, that sits comfortably with tyranny itself. I would rather teach a prince the old farmer's verse: that whoever wants a good crop must sow with the hand, not pour from the sack. He must scatter the seed, not dump it in one heap. And since he has to give — or, to put it more accurately, to pay and to restore to so many people according to what they've earned — he ought to be a loyal and discerning steward of it. If a prince's generosity has neither measure nor discrimination, I would rather have him a miser.
Royal virtue seems to consist most of all in justice; and of all the branches of justice, the one that best marks a king is the justice that goes with giving — because that's the part kings have reserved to perform in person, while every other kind they hand off to be administered by others. Bounty without measure is a weak way to win goodwill; it puts off more people than it attracts. As Cicero says, "the more men you spend it on, the fewer you can spend it on later; and what greater folly than to make sure you can no longer do the very thing you love to do?" And if it's handed out without regard to merit, it embarrasses the man who receives it, and is received without grace. Tyrants have been sacrificed to the people's hatred by the hands of the very men they unjustly raised up — buffoons, panders, fiddlers, and ragamuffins of that stamp — who reckon they can secure their ill-gotten gains by showing hatred and contempt for the man they got them from, signing on to the common verdict.
The subjects of a prince who is excessive in gifts grow excessive in asking; they peg their demands not to reason but to precedent. Honestly, we often have cause to blush at our own shamelessness. By any standard of justice we are overpaid the moment the reward equals the service — do we owe our princes no natural obligation at all? If a prince carries our costs entirely, he does too much; it's enough that he contributes to them. The surplus is called a benefit, and a benefit cannot be demanded — the very word "liberality" has liberty in it.
The way we do it, it never ends. What we've already received doesn't count; only future generosity counts. So the more a prince exhausts himself in giving, the poorer he grows in friends. How could he satisfy appetites that grow with every feeding? Whoever has his mind on getting no longer thinks about what he's gotten. Nothing belongs to greed so properly as ingratitude.
The example of Cyrus fits well here, as a touchstone for the kings of our day to test whether their gifts are well or badly placed — and to see how much better that emperor placed his than they do, who are reduced to borrowing from subjects they don't know, and sooner from the people they've wronged than from the people they've showered with benefits, receiving "aid" in which nothing is voluntary but the name. Croesus once needled Cyrus about his open hand, and calculated what his treasury would be worth if he'd been a little tighter-fisted. Cyrus wanted to vindicate his generosity, so he sent letters in every direction to the great men of his realm whom he had particularly advanced, asking each of them to send him as much money as he could for a pressing need, and to send an account of what he could provide. When the answers came in, every one of his friends — judging it not enough to offer merely what they'd received from his bounty, and adding plenty of their own — it turned out the total came to far more than Croesus's reckoning. Whereupon Cyrus said: "I am no less in love with riches than other princes; I am merely a better manager of them. You see at how small a cost I have acquired the priceless treasure of so many friends, and how much more faithful treasurers they are to me than hired men with no obligation and no affection would be — and my money better stored than in chests, which would bring down on me the hatred, envy, and contempt of other princes."
The emperors excused the extravagance of their games and public spectacles on the grounds that their authority depended in some sort — at least in outward show — on the will of the Roman people, who from time immemorial had been used to being courted with such shows and excesses. But it was private citizens who had fed that custom, gratifying their fellow citizens chiefly out of their own purses with that sort of profusion and magnificence. It had quite another taste when the masters came to imitate it. As Cicero says, "the handing of money from its rightful owners to strangers should not be counted generosity."
Philip, seeing that his son was trying to win the affection of the Macedonians with presents, reprimanded him in a letter along these lines: "What! Do you want your subjects to look on you as their cashier and not their king? Do you want to buy their affections? Then buy them with the benefits of your virtue, not the benefits of your money-box."
And yet, no doubt about it, it was a fine thing to bring into the amphitheater and plant there a great number of huge trees, fully branched and fully green, a great shady forest arranged in beautiful order — and on the first day to turn loose into it a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand boars, and a thousand fallow deer, to be killed and carried off by the people; on the second day, to have a hundred huge lions, a hundred leopards, and three hundred bears slaughtered before the crowd; and on the third day, three hundred pairs of gladiators fighting to the finish — as the Emperor Probus did. It was a fine thing, too, to see those vast amphitheaters faced all over with marble on the outside, worked with figures and statues, and glittering inside with rare ornament — "a balustrade studded with gems, a portico overlaid with gold," as Calpurnius says — every side of that enormous space filled and ringed, bottom to top, with sixty or eighty rows of seats, marble too, and laid with cushions. "Let him go out," says Juvenal, "if he has any shame, and get up off the equestrian cushion, since his fortune doesn't meet the legal mark." A hundred thousand men could sit there at their ease.
And the floor below, where the games were played: they made it open and split apart by machinery into chasms, like caves vomiting out the beasts for the spectacle. Then they flooded it into a deep sea, full of sea monsters and loaded with warships, to stage a naval battle. Then they drained it dry and level again for the gladiators. And for the fourth act they strewed it with vermilion and fragrant resin instead of sand, and laid out a solemn feast there for that whole infinite crowd of people — the final act of a single day. As Calpurnius describes it: how often have we seen the arena floor sink and split, and wild beasts climb out of the chasm, and from those same depths a grove of gilded trees rise up in enameled blossom; nor were the marvels only of the forest — I have watched sea-calves fighting with bears, and an unlovely sort of cattle that might be called sea-horses.
Sometimes they raised up a high mountain, covered with fruit trees and other green growth, sending streams of water down from its summit as if from a spring's mouth. Sometimes a great ship came rolling in, opened and split apart by itself, disgorged four or five hundred fighting beasts from its hold, closed up again, and vanished without anyone's help. At other times they made jets of perfumed water shoot upward from the floor, high enough to sprinkle that whole vast multitude. To shelter the crowd from the weather, they had that immense space covered now with embroidered purple curtains, now with silk of one color or another, drawn off or on in a moment, just as they pleased — though, as Martial jokes about a notorious thief, "however fiercely the sun scorches the spectators, the awnings are drawn in when Hermogenes arrives."
Even the netting stretched in front of the spectators to protect them from the beasts turned loose in the arena was woven of gold — "the woven nets glitter with gold," as Calpurnius says.
If anything can excuse such excesses, it is when the novelty and invention produce more wonder than the expense. Even in these vanities we can see how fertile those ages were in minds of a kind quite different from ours. This sort of fertility works like everything else nature produces. It is not that she spent her whole force then and there. We do not advance; we scurry up and down, wheel this way and that, double back the way we came. I am afraid our knowledge is feeble in every direction. We see neither far forward nor far backward. Our understanding takes in little and lives only a little while — short in reach of time and short in reach of matter. As Horace says, many brave men lived before Agamemnon, but all of them lie pressed under the long night, unwept and unknown. And Lucretius asks why the poets sang nothing earlier than the Theban war and the fall of Troy.
And Solon's account of what he learned from the Egyptian priests — the long life of their state, and their way of learning and preserving the histories of other nations — is not, I think, a testimony to be brushed aside here. Cicero puts it this way: if we could see the unlimited stretch of regions and of times on every side, a vastness the mind can wander through so far and wide that it never finds an edge to rest its eye on, we would discover in that infinite immensity an infinite multitude of forms.
Even if everything that has come down to us by report about past ages were true, and known by somebody, it would be less than nothing next to what is unknown. And of this very image of the world that glides away while we live on it, how wretched and limited is the knowledge of even the most curious! Not just of particular events, which fortune often makes weighty and exemplary, but of the condition of great governments and nations — a hundred escape us for every one that reaches us. We make a mighty fuss over the invention of artillery and printing, which other men at the other end of the world, in China, had a thousand years ago. If we could see as much of the world as we do not see, we would perceive, we may well believe, a perpetual multiplication and turnover of forms. Nothing is single and rare in nature's eyes — only in the eyes of our knowledge, which is a wretched foundation for our rules, and gives us a thoroughly false picture of things. Just as we nowadays foolishly conclude that the world is declining into decrepitude from the arguments we draw out of our own weakness and decay — "our age is broken, and the earth worn out," says Lucretius — so he just as foolishly concluded that the world was newborn and young, from the vigor he saw in the minds of his own time, teeming with novelties and new arts: the world is fresh and recent, he says, which is why some arts are still being polished and still growing, and why shipping gains new improvements every day.
Our world has just discovered another one — and who can promise us it is the last of its brothers, since the spirits, the Sibyls, and we ourselves were ignorant of this one until now? — a world as large, as populous, as fruitful as the one we live on, and yet so raw and so childish that we are still teaching it its ABCs. Fifty years ago it knew nothing of letters, weights, measures, clothing, wheat, or vines. It was still naked in its mother's lap, living only on what she gave it. If we are right about our own old age, and that poet was right about the youth of his era, then this other world will only be coming into the light as ours makes its exit. The universe will fall into paralysis — one limb withered, the other in full vigor.
I am very much afraid we have hurried along its decline and ruin by our contagion, and sold it our opinions and our arts at a very steep price. It was an infant world, and yet we have not whipped it into our discipline by any superiority of natural worth and strength, nor won it by our justice and goodness, nor subdued it by our greatness of soul. Most of their answers, and most of the dealings we have had with them, show that they were not one inch behind us in clarity and natural good sense. The astonishing magnificence of the cities of Cusco and Mexico; the king's garden, among many other things, where every tree, fruit, and plant stood excellently formed in gold, in the same order and size they would have in a real garden; his cabinet, stocked with golden likenesses of every animal bred in his lands and in his seas; and the beauty of their work in jewels, feathers, cotton, and painting — all of it proves they were no whit beneath us in industry. But as for devotion, obedience to law, goodness, liberality, loyalty, and plain dealing, it served us well that we had less of these than they did. That advantage is what lost them, sold them, and betrayed them.
As for boldness and courage — for firmness, constancy, and resolution against pain, hunger, and death — I would not hesitate to set the examples I find among them against the most famous examples of the ancient world recorded on our side of it. As for the men who subdued them: take away the tricks and swindles they used to gull them. Take away the perfectly natural astonishment of those nations at the sudden, unannounced arrival of bearded men — different in language, religion, shape, and face, from a part of the world so remote they had never heard it was inhabited at all — mounted on great unknown monsters, against people who had never seen a horse, never seen any beast trained to carry a man or a load of any kind. Men shelled in hard, shining skin, with sharp, glittering weapons in their hands, against people so dazzled by the gleam of a mirror or a knife that they would trade great treasures of gold and pearl for them, and who had neither the knowledge nor the material to pierce our steel even at their leisure. Add the lightning and thunder of our cannons and muskets — enough to rattle Caesar himself, caught off guard with as little experience of them — turned on people who were naked except for some quilted cotton where the art had reached, with no weapons beyond bows, stones, sticks, and wooden shields. People taken by surprise under cover of friendship and good faith, drawn in by their own curiosity to see strange and unknown things. Take away that disparity, I say, from the conquerors, and you take away the whole occasion of so many victories.
When I consider that unconquerable ardor with which so many thousands of men, women, and children threw themselves, over and over, into certain danger for the defense of their gods and their liberty; that noble stubbornness in bearing every extremity and hardship, and death itself, rather than submit to the dominion of the men who had so shamefully cheated them — some of them, once captured, choosing to starve themselves to death rather than accept food from the hands of enemies who had won so basely — I am convinced that anyone who had attacked them on equal terms of weapons, experience, and numbers would have had as hard a war on his hands, and maybe harder, than any we have ever seen.
Why didn't so noble a conquest fall to Alexander, or to the ancient Greeks and Romans? Why didn't so vast a revolution, the transformation of so many empires and nations, fall into hands that would have gently polished and cleared away whatever was rough and wild in them, and cherished and encouraged the good seeds nature had planted there — not only blending the arts of our world into their farming and the adornment of their cities, where these were needed, but blending the Greek and Roman virtues with the virtues native to the country? What a repair of their condition that would have been, and what a benefit to the whole world, if our first examples and conduct over there had drawn those peoples into the admiration and imitation of virtue, and built between them and us a brotherly fellowship and understanding! How easy it would have been to make something of souls so innocent, so hungry to learn, and for the most part starting with such fine natural inclinations!
Instead we did the opposite. We used their ignorance and inexperience to bend them all the more easily toward treachery, luxury, greed, and every sort of inhumanity and cruelty, by the model and pattern of our own manners. Whoever drove up the price of trade goods to such a rate? So many cities razed, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people put to the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down — for the traffic of pearls and pepper! Mechanic victories! Never did ambition, never did public hatreds, drive men against one another into such miserable hostilities and such miserable calamities.
Certain Spaniards, coasting along in search of their mines, landed in a fruitful, pleasant, well-peopled country and made the inhabitants their usual declarations: that they were peaceable men, come from a very distant country, sent on behalf of the King of Castile, the greatest prince of the habitable world, to whom the Pope, God's representative on earth, had given the principality of all the Indies; that if the inhabitants would pay him tribute, they would be very gently and courteously treated. Meanwhile they demanded food for themselves, and gold — for some medicine they pretended to need — and preached the belief in one God and the truth of our religion, which they advised them to embrace, throwing in a few threats for good measure.
This was the answer they got. As for being peaceable, they didn't look it, if they were. As for their king, since he was reduced to begging, he must be poor and needy; and the man who had made him this gift must love quarrels, to give away what wasn't his and bring it into dispute against its ancient owners. As for food, they would supply it. Gold they had little of, since it was a thing they held in low esteem, useless for the actual business of living, which they cared only to pass happily and pleasantly; but whatever they could find, except what was used in the service of their gods, the strangers might freely take. As for one single God, the idea pleased them well — but they would not change their religion, having lived in it so long and so happily, and being in the habit of taking advice only from friends and people they knew. As for the threats, it showed poor judgment to threaten men whose nature and strength you knew nothing about. So the strangers had better hurry up and clear off their coast, since they were not accustomed to take the courtesies and professions of armed foreigners in good part — otherwise they would be dealt with like these others. And they pointed to the heads of executed men around the walls of their city.
There's a fair sample of the babbling of these children. And note this: neither in that place nor in several others where the Spaniards did not find the merchandise they were after did they make any stay or any attempt, whatever other attractions the country offered — witness my essay Of Cannibals.
Of the two most powerful monarchs of that world — and perhaps of this one, kings over so many kings — the last two they deposed: the king of Peru was taken in battle and put to a ransom so enormous it passes belief. He paid it faithfully, and showed in his conversation every sign of a frank, generous, steady spirit and a clear, settled understanding. The conquerors, having already squeezed out of him one million, three hundred and twenty-five thousand, five hundred weight of gold, plus silver and other goods worth no less — so much that their horses went shod in solid gold — still wanted to find out, at whatever cost in disloyalty and injustice, what the rest of this king's treasure might amount to, and to get their hands on that too. So they trumped up a false accusation, with false witnesses, charging that he was plotting to raise his provinces in rebellion and free himself. And by the virtuous verdict of the very men who had conspired his ruin by this treachery, he was sentenced to be publicly hanged and strangled — having first been made to buy his way out of being burned alive by accepting the baptism they gave him at the moment of execution. A horrid, unheard-of barbarity, which he nevertheless endured without flinching in word or look, with a bearing truly grave and royal. And afterwards, to soothe a people stunned and shaken by so strange a thing, the conquerors counterfeited great grief at his death and staged a sumptuous funeral.
The other, the king of Mexico, had long defended his besieged city, and showed in that siege everything that endurance and perseverance can do, if ever a prince and people did. When his misfortune delivered him alive into his enemies' hands, on terms that he would be treated like a king, he did nothing in his captivity unworthy of the title. After their victory, the conquerors did not find as much gold as they had promised themselves; so when they had searched and ransacked everything, they set about extracting information by the cruelest tortures they could devise on the prisoners they held. Gaining nothing — the prisoners' courage proving stronger than the torments — they arrived at last at such a pitch of fury that, against their pledged word and against the law of nations, they condemned the king himself, and one of the chief noblemen of his court, to the rack, each in the other's sight. The lord, overcome with pain, ringed around with burning coals, turned his dying eyes pitifully toward his master, as if to beg his pardon for being able to bear no more. The king fixed him with a fierce, stern look, rebuking his cowardice and faintness of heart, and said only this, in a harsh, steady voice: "And what do you think I am suffering? Am I in a bath? Am I more comfortable than you?" The lord, at that, sank under his torment and died on the spot. The king, half roasted, was carried away — not out of pity (what pity ever touched souls so barbarous that, on a doubtful rumor of some golden vessel to be looted, they would broil a man, and not just a man but a king so great in fortune and in merit, before their eyes?), but because his constancy made their cruelty more and more shameful. They hanged him later, for having nobly attempted to free himself by arms from so long a captivity and subjection; and he died with a courage worthy of so great-souled a prince.
Another time they burned alive, in one fire, four hundred and sixty living men — the four hundred common people, the sixty among the chief lords of a province — simply prisoners of war. We have these accounts from the conquerors themselves: they not only admit it, they boast of it and publish it. Could it be as a testimony to their justice? To their zeal for religion? Surely these ways run too contrary to so holy an end. If their aim had been to spread our faith, they would have remembered that faith grows not by the possession of territory but by the winning of souls, and they would have been more than content with the killing that war makes necessary, without adding a massacre as indiscriminate as if it were of wild beasts, as universal as fire and sword could make it — sparing, by deliberate choice, only as many as they meant to keep for miserable slavery in the work and service of their mines. So it was that many of the captains were put to death on the very ground of their conquests, by order of the kings of Castile, justly outraged by the horror of their conduct; and almost all of them died hated and despised. God, in fitting justice, allowed all that great plunder to be swallowed up by the sea in transport, or in the civil wars in which they devoured one another; and most of the men themselves were buried in foreign soil with no fruit of their victory.
As for the revenue from those countries — the fact that even in the hands of so thrifty and careful a prince as the present King of Spain, it falls so far short of what his predecessors were led to expect, and of that first abundance of riches found at the original landing in those newly discovered lands (for though a great deal is brought home, we can see it is nothing next to what should have been expected) — the explanation is that the use of money was wholly unknown there, so that all their gold sat gathered in one place, serving no purpose but ornament and display, a treasure handed down from father to son by many powerful kings who kept draining their mines to build that vast heap of vessels and statues for the decoration of their palaces and temples. Our gold, by contrast, is all in motion and in trade. We cut it into a thousand little pieces, cast it into a thousand forms, scatter and disperse it a thousand ways. Imagine our kings hoarding up all the gold they could lay hands on for several centuries and letting it lie idle.
The people of the kingdom of Mexico were somewhat more civilized and more advanced in the arts than the other nations around them. So they judged, as we do, that the world was nearing its end, and took the desolation we brought among them as a sure sign of it. They believed the world's existence was divided into five ages, the lives of five successive suns, of which four had already run their course; and the sun that gave them light was the fifth. The first perished, with every other creature, in a universal flood. The second perished when the sky fell upon the earth and smothered every living thing — that was the age they assigned to the giants, and they showed the Spaniards bones by whose proportions men would have stood twenty feet tall. The third perished by fire, which burned and consumed everything. The fourth by a churning of air and wind that flattened whole mountains; in that one men did not die but were turned into baboons. (What impressions will the weakness of human belief not accept!) After the death of this fourth sun, the world spent twenty-five years in perpetual darkness. In the fifteenth of those years a man and a woman were created who restored the human race. Ten years later, on a certain day, the sun appeared, newly created; and they count their years from that day. On the third day after its creation the old gods died, and new ones have been born since, day by day. How they think this last sun will perish, my author could not learn. But their count for that fourth change matches the great conjunction of stars which, eight hundred-odd years ago, by the astrologers' reckoning, produced great upheavals and novelties in the world.
As for pomp and magnificence — which is how I got into this discussion in the first place — neither Greece nor Rome nor Egypt can compare any of its works, for usefulness, difficulty, or grandeur, with the highway to be seen in Peru, built by the kings of that country from the city of Quito to the city of Cusco: three hundred leagues, straight, even, twenty-five paces wide, paved, and lined on both sides with fine high walls, and along the inside of the walls two streams that never fail, bordered with the beautiful plants they call moly. Where they met rocks and mountains, they cut through and leveled them, and filled in pits and valleys with lime and stone. At the end of each day's journey stand beautiful palaces stocked with provisions, clothing, and weapons, for travelers and for armies that have to pass that way. In rating this work I have counted the difficulty, which weighs especially heavily in that place. They built with no stones smaller than ten feet square. They had no means of carriage but hauling their loads by the strength of their own arms. They did not even know the art of scaffolding, and knew no other trick for standing to their work than to pile earth against the building as it rose, and take it away again when they were done.
Let us come back to our coaches. In place of coaches, and of every other kind of carriage, they had themselves carried on men's shoulders. That last king of Peru, on the day he was taken, was carried like this — seated on a chair of gold, borne on staves of gold, in the middle of his army. As many of his bearers as were killed to bring him down (for the Spaniards wanted him alive), just as many others — and they competed for it — stepped into the places of the dead, so that no matter what slaughter was made of those people, he could never be toppled, until a horseman seized hold of him and wrestled him to the ground.
It is now two or three years since they shortened the year by ten days in France. How many changes were supposed to follow that reform! It was moving heaven and earth at once. And yet nothing has budged from its place. My neighbors find their seasons for sowing and reaping, the right moments for their business, the harmful days and the lucky ones, exactly where they had always set them, time out of mind. There was no more error felt in our old usage than there is improvement felt in the new. That is how deep the uncertainty runs everywhere — how coarse, dim, and dull our perception is.
They say the correction could have been managed with less fuss by following the example of Augustus: skip the leap day for a few years — it is a day of nuisance and trouble anyway — until the debt was exactly paid off. (Which this reform did not even accomplish; we are still running a few days in arrears.) And by the same means we could provide for the future, ordering that after every so many years the extra day would be thrown out again, so that from then on our reckoning could never wander more than twenty-four hours off.
Years are the only accounting of time we have. The world has used them for ages, and yet it is a measure we still have not agreed on — we still wonder what shapes other nations gave it and what their true usage was. And what about the claim some make, that the heavens are growing old and sagging down closer toward us, throwing even our hours and days into uncertainty? Or what Plutarch says of the months — that in his time astrology still had not pinned down the motion of the moon? A fine condition we are in, to keep records of things past.
I was just now musing, as I often do, on what a free and roving thing human reason is. I see ordinarily that when something is set before men, they would rather hunt for reasons than find out the truth. They slide past the presuppositions but examine the consequences minutely. They leave the things themselves and run off after the causes. Comical reasoners! The knowledge of causes only concerns whoever runs the world, not us, who merely undergo it — and who get the full and perfect use of things, according to our need, without ever penetrating to their origin and essence. Wine is no more pleasant to the man who knows its first properties. On the contrary, both body and soul interrupt and weaken their right to the use of the world, and of themselves, by mixing in the pretension of learning. Effects concern us; the means, not at all. Determining and distributing belong to mastery and command; accepting belongs to subjection — and to us.
Let me scold a custom of ours. People commonly begin, "How does such a thing happen?" — when they ought to ask, "Does it happen at all?" Our reason is equipped to build a hundred other worlds and discover their beginnings and their architecture. It needs neither material nor foundation. Just let it run: it builds as readily on air as on earth, with emptiness as with substance — able, as the poet says, to give weight to smoke.
I find that in almost every case we ought to say, "There is no such thing." I would use that answer often myself, but I dare not: people cry that it is a dodge born of ignorance and a weak understanding. So most of the time I have to play along for company's sake, and chatter about frivolous subjects and tales I do not believe a word of. Besides, in truth, it is a little rude and quarrelsome to flatly deny a stated fact; and few people — especially with things hard to believe — will fail to insist they saw it themselves, or to name witnesses whose authority stops our mouths. By this method we come to know the foundations and causes of a thousand things that never happened, and the world scuffles over a thousand questions where both the pro and the con are false. The false stands so close to the true that a wise man should not trust himself near the edge.
Truth and lies wear the same face — the same bearing, the same taste, the same manners — and we look on both with the same eye. I find we are not merely slack in defending ourselves against deceit; we seek it out, we volunteer to be fooled. We love to tangle ourselves in vanity, since vanity suits the stuff we are made of.
I have watched the birth of many miracles in my time. Even when they died in the cradle, we can foresee well enough what they would have grown into, had they lived to full age. It is only a matter of finding the end of the thread; then a man can wind off as much as he pleases — and there is a greater distance between nothing and the smallest thing in the world than between the smallest thing and the greatest. Now the first people steeped in a budding marvel, when they go out to spread their tale, can tell from the resistance they meet exactly where the hard-to-believe part lies — and they caulk that seam with some false patch. Besides, men have a natural appetite for feeding rumors on purpose, so we naturally make it a point of conscience never to return what was lent us without some interest and addition of our own. First the private error creates the public error; then, in its turn, the public error creates the private one. And so this whole vast fabric goes on building and piling itself up from hand to hand, until the remotest witness knows more about the thing than the nearest one did, and the last man told is more thoroughly convinced than the first.
It is a natural progression. Whoever believes anything thinks it a work of charity to persuade somebody else of it; and to do that better, he never hesitates to add as much of his own invention as his story seems to need to overcome the resistance, or the dullness, he meets in others. I myself, who make a particular scruple of lying, and who hardly care whether what I say is believed or carries authority — even I notice that when I am heated, whether by someone's opposition or by the warmth of my own telling, I swell and puff up my subject with voice, gesture, vigor, and force of words, and with stretching and amplifying besides, not without some damage to the naked truth. But I do it on this condition: that to the first person who pulls me up short and asks for the plain bare fact, I instantly surrender my passion and hand the matter over without exaggeration, without emphasis, without any coloring of my own. A quick, emphatic way of talking, like mine, is prone to run into hyperbole.
There is nothing men are commonly more eager about than clearing a path for their own opinions; where the ordinary means fail us, we add command, force, fire, and sword. It is a misfortune to have come to the point where the best test of truth is the number of believers — in a crowd where the fools so vastly outnumber the wise. As if anything were so common as ignorance. As if a mob of madmen could vouch for sanity.
It is hard to stiffen your judgment against the common opinions. The first persuasion, drawn from the subject itself, seizes the simple; from them it spreads to the wise, under the authority of the number and the antiquity of the witnesses. For my part, what I would not believe from one man, I would not believe from a hundred and one. And I do not judge opinions by their age.
Not long ago, one of our princes — a man whose gout had spoiled a fine nature and a cheerful temper — let himself be so persuaded by reports of a certain priest who cured every kind of disease with words and gestures, that he made a long journey to find him; and by the sheer force of his imagination he talked his legs, for a few hours, into a service they had long forgotten. If fortune had piled five or six such accidents on top of one another, it would have been enough to install this miracle in nature. Afterward the author of these performances was found to be so simple, and so without art, that he was judged too contemptible to be worth punishing — as would happen with most such things, if they were examined at the source. We admire things that deceive us from a distance. In the same way our sight often shows us strange shapes far off that vanish as we approach. Rumor never survives being brought into focus.
It is astonishing from what idle beginnings and frivolous causes such famous impressions usually spring. That is exactly what blocks the inquiry: while we hunt for causes solid and weighty, worthy of so great a name, we lose the true ones. They escape our sight by being so small. And in truth, these investigations call for a very prudent, patient, and subtle examiner — impartial, with no theory already in his pocket. To this very hour, all these miracles and strange events have kept themselves hidden from me. I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself. Time and habit make us familiar with anything strange; but the more I frequent my own company and the better I know myself, the more my own deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself.
The chief right of producing and promoting such accidents is reserved to fortune. The day before yesterday, passing through a village two leagues from my house, I found the place still warm from a miracle that had just failed there. The neighborhood had been entertained by it for months; the neighboring provinces were beginning to catch the fever and run there in great troops of every sort of people. A young fellow of the place had one night, for fun, counterfeited the voice of a spirit in his own house — meaning nothing by it but the joke. It succeeded a little better than he expected; so, to extend the farce with more actors, he took in a dull, simple country girl, and in the end there were three of them, all of an age and an understanding. From household performances they advanced to public preaching, hiding under the altar of the church, speaking only at night, and forbidding anyone to bring a light. From words aimed at the conversion of the world and threats of the day of judgment (for these are subjects whose authority and reverence give imposture its safest cover), they moved on to visions and gesticulations so simple and ridiculous that hardly anything in the games of small children is so crude. Yet if fortune had favored the scheme ever so little, who knows how far the act might have gone? The poor devils are in prison now, and will likely pay shortly for the common folly — and I do not know whether some judge won't make them smart for his folly, too. We see clearly into this case, because it has been uncovered; but in many things of the same kind that pass our knowledge, my opinion is that we should suspend judgment — neither rejecting nor accepting.
Great abuses in the world — or, to put it more boldly, all the abuses in the world — are born of our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and being told we are bound to accept whatever we cannot refute. We talk about everything by precept and pronouncement. The style at Rome was that even what a witness swore he had seen with his own eyes, and even what a judge determined out of his most certain knowledge, was couched in this formula: "It seems to me." They make me hate likely things when people shove them at me as infallible. I love the words that soften and moderate the rashness of our claims: perhaps; in some sort; some; it is said; I think — and the like. And if I had been set to raise children, I would have put this way of answering into their mouths — inquiring, not settling: "What does this mean? I do not understand it. It may be. Is it true?" — so that they would rather have kept the manner of pupils at sixty than gone out as doctors, the way they do, at ten. Whoever wants to be cured of ignorance must confess it.
Iris is the daughter of Thaumas — the rainbow is Wonder's child. Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy; inquiry its progress; ignorance its end. But there is a kind of ignorance, strong and generous, that yields nothing in honor and courage to knowledge — an ignorance that takes no less knowledge to achieve than knowledge itself.
In my younger years I read a trial that Coras, a judge at Toulouse, put into print — the strange case of two men who each presented himself as the other. I remember (and I hardly remember anything else) that Coras made the imposture of the man he judged guilty seem so wonderful, so far beyond our knowledge and beyond his own — and he was the judge — that I thought it a verdict so bold it hanged a man on a guess. Let us accept some form of decree that says, "The court understands nothing of this matter" — more frankly and openly than the judges of the Areopagus, who, finding themselves cornered by a case they could not untangle, ordered the parties to come back in a hundred years.
The witches of my neighborhood are running for their lives every time some new author comes along to give body to their dreams. To fit the examples that Holy Writ offers us of such things — most certain and irrefutable examples — onto our modern events, when we can see neither their causes nor their means, takes a different sort of mind than ours. Perhaps it belongs to that single all-powerful testimony alone to tell us, "This one is, and that one is, and not that other." God ought to be believed in this — that is plainly reasonable. But not, for all that, one of us: a man astonished at his own story (and he must necessarily be astonished, unless he is out of his mind), whether he tells it about somebody else or against himself.
I am plain and heavy, and I hold to the solid and the probable, steering clear of the old reproaches: men give the most faith to what they least understand, and by a craving of the human mind, obscure things are the easiest to believe. I see well enough that people get angry, and that I am forbidden to doubt on pain of unspeakable insults. A new way of persuading! Thank God, I am not to be punched into belief. Let them be angry with those who accuse their opinion of being false; I only accuse it of being difficult and bold, and I condemn the opposite affirmation just as they do — only less imperiously. Whoever establishes his proposition by swagger and command shows that his reasoning is weak. In a verbal, scholastic wrangle, let them appear as plausible as their opponents — let them state probabilities, but not affirm. But in the real consequence drawn from the argument, the doubters have much the better of it. To kill men, you need a light that is clear and strong; and our life is too real and too essential to be staked on these supernatural and fantastic accidents.
As for drugs and poisons, I throw those out of my reckoning: that is homicide of the worst sort. Yet even there, they say, you cannot always rely on the personal confessions of these people, for they have sometimes been known to accuse themselves of murdering persons who later turned up alive and well. In these other extravagant accusations, I am inclined to say this: any man, whatever his reputation, deserves to be believed about human things; but about what is beyond his conception and of supernatural effect, he should be believed only when some supernatural approval has vouched for him. The privilege God has been pleased to grant to certain of our testimonies must not be cheapened and handed around lightly. My ears are battered with a thousand stories like this: "Three people saw him on such a day in the east; three more saw him the next day in the west; at such an hour, in such a place, dressed in such a way." Truly, I would not believe my own self on that evidence. How much more natural and likely do I find it that two men should lie than that one man, in twelve hours, should fly with the wind from east to west! How much more natural that our understanding should be blown out of its place by the whirl of our own unhinged minds than that one of us, flesh and bone as we are, should be carried up a chimney flue on a broomstick by a strange spirit! Let us not go hunting for illusions outside and unknown, we who are perpetually shaken by illusions homegrown and our own. It seems to me a man is pardonable for disbelieving a miracle wherever its proof can be sidestepped by some path that is not miraculous. And I am of St. Augustine's opinion, that it is better to lean toward doubt than toward assurance in things hard to prove and dangerous to believe.
Some years ago I traveled through the territory of a sovereign prince who, as a favor to me, and to beat down my skepticism, did me the honor of letting me see, in his own presence and in a private place, ten or twelve prisoners of this kind — among them an old woman, a genuine witch in ugliness and deformity, long famous in the profession. I saw evidence and free confessions, and some insensible mark or other on the miserable creature. I examined her and talked with her and the rest as much and as long as I pleased, and brought the best and soundest attention I could — and I am not a man who lets prepossession take his judgment captive. In the end, and in all conscience, I would have prescribed them hellebore rather than hemlock — medicine for madness rather than poison. The whole business looked more like minds possessed than minds guilty. Justice has its own corrections for such maladies.
As for the objections and arguments that worthy men have made to me, there and often elsewhere, I have met none that convinced me — none that did not admit a more likely solution than their conclusion. It is true that proofs and reasons founded on experience and fact I do not try to untie; they have no loose end to take hold of. I often cut them, as Alexander cut his knot. After all, it is putting a very high price on our conjectures to roast a man alive on their account.
We are told by various examples — as Praestantius tells of his father — that, sunk in a sleep far deeper than men usually sleep, he dreamed he was a mare serving the soldiers as a pack animal; and what he dreamed himself to be, he actually proved to be. Even if sorcerers dream this materially — even if dreams can sometimes take flesh in fact — still I cannot believe that our will should answer for it to justice. I say this as one who is neither judge nor royal councillor, who thinks himself many degrees unworthy to be either — an ordinary man, born and sworn to the obedience of public reason in both word and deed. Anyone who took my idle talk as an injury to the pettiest law, opinion, or custom of his parish would do himself a great wrong, and me a greater one. In what I say, I warrant no certainty except that it is what I had in my thought at the time — a tumultuous and wavering thought. Everything I say is by way of conversation, nothing by way of advice. And I am not ashamed, as those others are, to confess I do not know what I do not know.
I would not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed — and that is what I told a great man who complained of the sharpness and contentiousness of my exhortations. Seeing you set and ready on one side, I lay out the other for you with all the diligence and care I can — to clear your judgment, not to compel it. God holds your hearts in His hands and will furnish you the means of choosing. I am not so presumptuous as to wish that my opinions should tip you one way or the other in a matter of such importance; my fortune has not raised them to conclusions so potent and lofty. Truly, I have not only a great many moods but a great many opinions that I would try to teach my son to dislike, if I had a son. What if the truest opinions are not always the most convenient for man, wild as his composition is?
Whether this is to the purpose or not, no great matter: it is a common proverb in Italy that a man does not know Venus in her perfect sweetness who has never slept with a lame mistress. Fortune, or some particular incident, put that saying into people's mouths long ago; and it is said of men as well as of women — for the queen of the Amazons answered the Scythian who courted her, "The lame man does it best." In that republic of women, to escape the dominion of the males, they crippled them in infancy — arms, legs, and whatever other parts gave men an advantage over them — and used them only for the one purpose for which we, in our part of the world, use women.
I would have guessed it was the lame woman's rolling gait that added some new pleasure to the business and some extra spice for those who tried it. But I have lately learned that ancient philosophy itself has ruled on the question. It says that since the legs and thighs of lame women, because of their imperfection, do not receive their proper nourishment, the genital parts above come out fuller, better fed, and more vigorous. Or else that, since the defect prevents exercise, those who have it spend less of their strength and come more entire to the games of Venus — which is also why the Greeks called the weaving-women hotter than other women: a sedentary trade, carried on without much exercise of the body. At this rate, what can we not reason about? Of these weavers I might just as well say that the jiggling of their work as they sit stirs and provokes their desire, the way the swaying and jolting of coaches does for our ladies.
Do not these examples prove what I said at the start — that our reasons often run ahead of the facts, and hold so boundless a jurisdiction that they judge and exercise themselves on emptiness itself, on things that do not exist? Besides the suppleness of our invention in forging reasons for every sort of dream, our imagination is just as ready to take false impressions from the most frivolous appearances. On the sole authority of the ancient and common use of that proverb, I once made myself believe that I had gotten more pleasure from a woman because she was not straight, and counted that crookedness among her charms.
Torquato Tasso, in the comparison he draws between France and Italy, says he has observed that our legs are generally thinner than those of the Italian gentlemen, and credits it to our being constantly on horseback — the very same cause from which Suetonius draws the exactly opposite conclusion, for he says Germanicus thickened his legs by that same continual exercise.
Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding. It is the shoe of Theramenes — it fits every foot. It is double and diverse, and the matters it works on are double and diverse too. "Give me a drachma of silver," a Cynic philosopher said to Antigonus. "That is not a present fit for a king," he replied. "Then give me a talent." "That is not a present fit for a Cynic." Heat works on the soil, the poet says, either by opening hidden passages so the sap can rise into the new shoots, or else by hardening and binding the gaping veins against thin rains, the fierce sun, and the piercing cold of the north wind — one cause, argued both ways. Every medal has its reverse, as the Italians say.
This is why Clitomachus said, long ago, that Carneades had outdone the labors of Hercules: he had torn assent out of men — that is, opinion, and the courage of judging. That vigorous fancy of Carneades sprang, I believe, from the impudence of those who professed knowledge, and from their immeasurable self-conceit. Aesop was put up for sale with two other slaves. The buyer asked the first what he could do, and he, to raise his own price, promised mountains and marvels: he could do this and that and I don't know what all. The second said as much of himself, or more. When it came to Aesop's turn and he was asked what he could do — "Nothing," he said. "These two have gotten there ahead of me. They know everything." So it has happened in the school of philosophy. The pride of those who credited the human mind with a capacity for all things bred in others, out of spite and rivalry, the opinion that it is capable of nothing at all. The one party holds the same extreme in ignorance that the other holds in knowledge — making it undeniably plain that man is immoderate in everything, and never stops anywhere except from necessity, and from sheer inability to go further.
There is no desire more natural than the desire to know. We try every road that might lead us there. When reason fails us, we fall back on experience — as Manilius says, "through trial and error, experience created art, with example showing the way" — which is a weaker and cheaper instrument. But truth is so great a thing that we should not turn up our nose at any means of reaching it.
Reason has so many shapes that we don't know which one to grab. Experience has no fewer. And the conclusions we try to draw by comparing one event with another are shaky, because no two events are ever alike. Nothing in the whole catalogue of things is so universal as diversity and variety.
The Greeks, the Romans, and we ourselves all reach for eggs when we want the perfect example of sameness. And yet there have been men — one at Delphi in particular — who could spot the differences between eggs so well that he never mistook one for another. He kept many hens, and he could tell you which one had laid which egg.
Unlikeness forces its way into our works all by itself. No art can achieve perfect similarity. Neither Perrozet nor anyone else can polish and whiten the backs of his playing cards so carefully that some gambler won't tell them apart just from watching them shuffled in another man's hands. Resemblance does not make things one so much as difference makes them other. Nature has bound herself to make nothing that is not unique.
So I am not much impressed by the fellow who thought he could rein in the authority of judges by multiplying laws — cutting their meat into little pieces for them. He didn't realize that there is just as much liberty and elbow room in interpreting laws as in writing them. And people are fooling themselves when they think they can shrink and settle our disputes by sending us back to the exact words of the Bible. The mind finds the field no less spacious when it's quarreling over someone else's meaning than when it's delivering its own — as if there were less spite and bitterness in commentary than in invention.
We can see how wrong he was. France has more laws than all the rest of the world put together — more than would be needed to govern all the worlds of Epicurus. As Tacitus says, "once we suffered from our crimes; now we suffer from our laws." And yet we have left so much to the opinions and discretion of our judges that there was never such liberty, or such license.
What have our lawmakers gained by picking out a hundred thousand particular cases and attaching a hundred thousand laws to them? That number bears no proportion at all to the infinite diversity of human actions. Multiply our inventions as we like, they will never catch up with the variety of real examples. Add a hundred times as many more: it will still never happen that some future event, out of all those millions of selected and recorded cases, will match any one of them so exactly — pair up with it so perfectly — that no detail remains to demand a different judgment. There is very little relation between our actions, which are in perpetual change, and laws, which are fixed and unmoving. The most desirable laws are the rarest, simplest, and most general. And frankly I think we would be better off with no laws at all than with the prodigious heap of them we have.
Nature always gives us better and happier laws than the ones we make for ourselves. Witness the Golden Age the poets paint, and the condition of nations we see living with no other code. Some peoples take as their only judge the first traveler passing through their mountains, and let him settle their case. Others, on market day, pick out somebody on the spot to decide their quarrels. What would be the danger if the wisest among us settled ours the same way — case by case, at sight, without being chained to precedent and consequence? For every foot its own shoe. When King Ferdinand sent colonists to the Indies, he wisely provided that no students of law should go along, for fear lawsuits would take root in that new world — law being by its very nature a breeder of quarrels and division. He judged, with Plato, that lawyers and doctors are a bad provision for a country.
Why is it that our ordinary language, so handy for every other purpose, turns dark and unintelligible in wills and contracts? Why does a man who expresses himself perfectly clearly in everything else he says or writes find no way of declaring himself there that doesn't collapse into doubt and contradiction? Unless it's that the princes of that art, applying themselves with special care to choosing solemn words and constructing artificial clauses, have weighed every syllable and sifted every kind of finicky connection so thoroughly that they are now tangled and lost in an infinity of figures and tiny subdivisions — beyond the reach of any rule, any prescription, any certain understanding. As Seneca says, whatever is chopped down to dust becomes indistinguishable.
Have you watched children trying to divide a blob of quicksilver into a set number of parts? The more they press it and work it and try to force it to their will, the more they provoke the independence of that noble metal: it slips away from them and scatters into more little beads than anyone can count. It's the same here. By subdividing these subtleties, we teach men to multiply their doubts. We set them on the path of stretching and diversifying difficulties, of lengthening them and scattering them. Sowing questions and cutting them up for retail, we make the world ripen and teem with uncertainty and quarrels — the way soil is made fertile by being crumbled and dug deep. Learning begets difficulty, as Quintilian says.
We had our doubts about Ulpian; Bartolus and Baldus have left us more perplexed than ever. We ought to erase the trail of this endless diversity of opinions, not dress ourselves up in it and stuff posterity's head with quibbles. I don't know what to say about it — but experience makes it plain that so many interpretations scatter the truth and break it to pieces. Aristotle wrote to be understood; if he couldn't manage it, a lesser man won't do better, nor a third man removed yet further from Aristotle's own thoughts. We open up the matter and spill it in pouring it out. From one subject we make a thousand, and by multiplying and subdividing we land back in Epicurus's infinity of atoms. No two men ever judged the same thing the same way; and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly alike — not just in two different men, but in the same man at different hours. I often find room for doubt in passages the commentary didn't think worth a note. Like certain horses I've known that stumble most on the smoothest road, I trip most easily on level ground.
Who can deny that glosses multiply doubt and ignorance? You will not find one book, human or divine, of all the books the world busies itself with, whose difficulties have been cleared up by interpretation. The hundredth commentator hands the text on to the next one knottier and thornier than he found it. When have we ever agreed among ourselves, "This book has had enough; there is nothing more to say about it"?
This shows most plainly in the law. We give the force of law to an infinity of doctors, an infinity of rulings, and as many interpretations. Do we find any end to the need for interpreting? Is there any visible progress toward peace? Do we need any fewer advocates and judges than when this great mass of law was still in its infancy? On the contrary — we darken and bury understanding; we can no longer find it except behind a maze of fences and barriers. Men do not recognize the mind's natural disease: it does nothing but ferret and hunt, endlessly circling, contriving, tangling itself in its own work like a silkworm — and then suffocating in it. A mouse in a pitch barrel. It thinks it spots in the distance some glimmer of light, some imaginary truth; but while it runs that way, so many difficulties and obstacles and fresh questions cut across its path that they lose it the road and leave it drunk with the motion. Not unlike Aesop's dogs, who saw something like a dead body floating far out at sea and, since they couldn't reach it, set about drinking the water dry to open a path — and choked themselves. And what Crates said of the writings of Heraclitus fits perfectly here: they needed a reader who was a good swimmer, so that the depth and weight of the learning wouldn't pull him under and drown him.
It is nothing but personal weakness that makes us settle for what others — or we ourselves — have found in this hunt after knowledge. An abler mind will not settle. There is always room for someone to go further — yes, even for ourselves — and always another road. There is no end to our inquiries; our end is in the other world. When the mind is satisfied, that is a sign it has grown shortsighted, or grown tired. No generous mind stops inside itself. It keeps pressing on past its strength; it leaps beyond what it can actually do. If it doesn't advance and push and back up and crash about and turn, it is only half alive. Its pursuits have no limit and no form. Its food is wonder, the chase, ambiguity — which Apollo showed clearly enough by always speaking to us in a double, obscure, and sideways sense: not feeding us, but keeping us busy and guessing. It is an irregular, perpetual motion, without model and without aim. Its inventions kindle one another, chase one another, breed one another. As my friend Étienne de La Boétie wrote: in a running stream you watch one wave roll after another without end, each pursuing the one ahead, each fleeing the one behind — water forever flowing into water, always the same brook, but always different water.
There is more business in interpreting the interpretations than in interpreting the things themselves, and more books about books than about any other subject. We do nothing but write comments on one another. The whole place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is a great scarcity. Isn't the chief and most celebrated learning of our age the learning of how to understand the learned? Isn't that the common and final goal of all study? Our opinions are grafted one upon another. The first serves as rootstock for the second, the second for the third, and so we climb the ladder rung by rung — which is how it happens that the man perched highest often has more honor than merit, since he has climbed only one inch up the shoulders of the man below him.
How often, and perhaps how foolishly, have I stretched my own book to make it talk about itself? Foolishly, if only because it should remind me of what I say about others who do the same thing: that all those loving glances they keep throwing at their work prove their hearts are pounding with self-love, and that even the disdainful severity with which they whip their books is just a mother's fussing and fondling in disguise — like Aristotle, in whom valuing himself and undervaluing himself often spring from the same air of arrogance. My excuse is that I ought to have more liberty here than others, since I write specifically about myself and my writings, just as I do about my other actions — my subject turns back upon itself. But I don't know whether everyone will accept the excuse.
I noticed in Germany that Luther has left behind as many quarrels and disputes over the uncertainties of his opinions as he ever raised about Holy Scripture — and more. Our argument is an argument about words. I ask what nature is, what pleasure is, what a circle is, what substitution is. The question is made of words, and it is paid in the same coin. A stone is a body. But press further — and what is a body? A substance. And what is a substance? — and so on, until you chase the answerer to the back page of his dictionary. We swap one word for another, and often for one less understood. I know better what "man" is than I know what "animal" is, or "mortal," or "rational." To resolve one doubt, they hand me three: it's the Hydra's head. Socrates asked Meno what virtue was. "There is," said Meno, "the virtue of a man and of a woman, of a magistrate and of a private citizen, of an old man and of a child." "Wonderful," cried Socrates. "We went looking for one virtue, and you've brought us a whole swarm." We ask one question and they hand us back a hive.
Just as no event and no face is exactly like another, none is entirely different either: an ingenious mixture on nature's part. If our faces were not alike, we couldn't tell man from beast; if they were not unlike, we couldn't tell one man from another. All things hold together by some resemblance; every example limps; and any rule drawn from experience is always lame and imperfect. Still, comparisons can be fastened together at one corner or another — and that is how the laws are made to serve, stretched to fit each of our affairs by some twisted, biased, forced interpretation.
Since the ethical laws — the ones that concern each person's private duty to himself — are so hard to frame, as we see they are, it's no wonder the laws that govern multitudes of people are harder still. Just look at the form of this justice that rules over us: it is a standing testimony of human weakness, it is so full of error and contradiction. What we find in justice by way of leniency here and harshness there — and we find so much of both that I doubt the middle ground turns up as often — these are diseased and unjust limbs of the very body and essence of justice.
Some peasants have just come running to tell me that a moment ago they left, in a forest of mine, a man with a hundred wounds on him, still breathing, who begged them for water for pity's sake and for help to carry him somewhere. They tell me they didn't dare go near him and ran away, for fear the officers of justice would catch them there — for, as happens to anyone found near a murdered man, they would have been called to account for the incident, to their total ruin, having neither money nor friends to defend their innocence. What could I say to these people? It is certain that this act of humanity would have gotten them into trouble.
How many innocent people have we known to be punished — and through no fault of the judge — and how many that we never heard about? Here is something that happened in my own time. Certain men were condemned to death for a murder; the sentence was, if not pronounced, at least settled and decided. At just that moment, the judges are informed by the officers of a lower court nearby that they are holding some prisoners who have flatly confessed to that murder and shed unmistakable light on every detail of the deed. And yet the court gravely deliberated whether to suspend the execution of the sentence already passed on the first defendants. They weighed the novelty of the precedent, and the consequences of reversing judgments; they noted that the sentence had been passed and the judges were beyond the reach of second thoughts. In the end, these poor devils were sacrificed to the forms of justice. Philip, or some other king, handled a similar bind better. He had condemned a man to pay another man a heavy fine, in a final judgment. The truth came out later, and he found he had judged wrongly. On one side stood the merits of the case; on the other, the claims of judicial form. He satisfied both, more or less: he let the sentence stand and made up the condemned man's loss from his own purse. But he was dealing with a fixable wrong. My men were unfixably hanged. How many condemnations have I seen that were more criminal than the crime?
All this brings to mind the old opinions: that a man is forced to do wrong in the small change if he wants to do right in the large, and to commit injustice in little things if he wants to achieve justice in great ones; that human justice is built on the model of medicine, by which whatever works is also just and honest; that — as the Stoics held — Nature herself acts against justice in most of her own works; and — as the Cyrenaics held — that nothing is just in itself, but customs and laws make justice; and — as the Theodorians had it — that theft, sacrilege, and every kind of debauchery are just in a wise man, if he knows they will profit him.
There's no help for it: I stand where Alcibiades stood. I will never, if I can help it, put myself into the hands of a man who can decide about my head — where my life and honor depend more on the skill and diligence of my attorney than on my own innocence. I'd take my chances with a justice that would take note of my good deeds as well as my bad, where I had as much to hope for as to fear. Not being punished is poor pay for a man who has done better than merely not doing wrong. Our justice offers us only one of her hands, and the left one at that. Whoever you are, you come away with a loss.
In China — a kingdom whose government and arts, without any commerce with ours or knowledge of ours, outdo our best examples in several ways, and whose history teaches me how much bigger and more various the world is than either the ancients or we have managed to grasp — the officers sent by the prince to inspect the state of his provinces punish those who have abused their office, but they also generously reward those who have conducted themselves better than the run of men, beyond the bare requirements of duty. People come before these inspectors not just to be cleared but to gain something; not merely to be paid, but to be given a present.
No judge, thank God, has ever yet addressed me as a judge, in any cause whatever, my own or a third party's, criminal or civil. No prison has ever received me, even for a stroll. Imagination makes the very outside of a jail unpleasant to me. I am so in love with liberty that if someone forbade me access to one corner of the Indies, I would live a little less at ease for it. And as long as I can find earth or open air anywhere else, I will never sit hiding in a place where I have to hide. My God, how badly I would bear the condition I see so many people in — nailed to one corner of the kingdom, barred from the principal cities and the courts and the use of the public roads, for having quarreled with our laws! If the laws I live under so much as wagged a finger at me in threat, I would immediately go find others, wherever they might be. All my little prudence in these civil wars of ours goes into making sure they don't cut off my freedom to come and go.
Now, laws keep up their credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other — and it serves them well enough. They are often made by fools; more often by men who, hating equality, fail in equity; but always by men — vain and wavering authors. Nothing is so grossly, so widely, or so regularly faulty as the laws. Whoever obeys them because they are just does not obey them for the reason he ought. Our French laws, by their irregularity and deformity, rather lend a hand to the disorder and corruption that show up in their application and enforcement. The command is so confused and inconsistent that it goes some way toward excusing both disobedience and the faults of those who interpret, administer, and observe it.
Whatever fruit we may pluck from experience, the kind we draw from foreign examples will do little for our education if we make so poor a use of the experience we have of ourselves — which is more familiar to us, and certainly sufficient to teach us what we need. I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics. Let others ask what god steers this great house of the world, where the moon goes when it wanes and how its horns fill out again, where the winds get their power over the sea, where the clouds find their endless supply of water, and whether a day is coming that will bring the world's towers down — as Propertius wonders. "Ask that," says Lucan, "you whom the cares of the world torment."
In that great universal scheme, I let myself be carried along, ignorantly and carelessly, by the general law of the world. I will know that law well enough when I feel it. My learning cannot make it change course; it will not alter itself for my sake. It is folly to hope it might, and greater folly to fret about it, since the law is necessarily the same for everyone, public and common. The goodness and capacity of the governor ought to release us, completely, from worrying about the government. Philosophical probings and speculations serve no purpose but to feed our curiosity. The philosophers, quite rightly, refer us back to the rules of nature; but those rules have no use for such exalted knowledge. The philosophers falsify them, showing us nature's face painted in colors too high and too artificial — which is why we get so many different portraits of so uniform a subject. As nature has given us feet to walk with, so she has given us prudence to guide us through life: not the clever, muscular, showy prudence of the philosophers' invention, but a prudence that is easy, quiet, and healthy, and that does very well what the other only promises — in anyone lucky enough to know how to use it honestly and steadily, which is to say, naturally. To entrust yourself to nature most simply is to entrust yourself most wisely. Oh, what a soft, easy, wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, for resting a well-made head!
I would rather understand myself well in myself than in Cicero. In the experience I have of myself I find enough to make me wise — if only I were a good student. Whoever calls to mind the last excess of his anger, and how far that fever carried him, sees the ugliness of the passion better than in Aristotle, and hates it more justly. Whoever remembers the troubles he has been through, and the ones that merely threatened him, and the trivial causes that have moved him from one state to another, prepares himself by it for the changes to come and for knowing his own condition. The life of Caesar holds no greater lesson for us than our own. Emperor's life or common man's, it is still a life subject to every human accident. Let us only listen to it: we tell ourselves everything we chiefly need to hear.
A man who remembers how many, many times he has been wrong in his own judgment — isn't he a fool if he doesn't distrust it forever after? When someone else's reasoning convinces me I've held a false opinion, what I learn isn't so much the new thing he's told me, or my ignorance of that particular point — that would be a small purchase. I learn, in general, my own weakness and the treachery of my understanding — and from that I draw the reformation of the whole mass. With all my other errors I do the same, and I find the rule of great use in life. I don't treat the species or the instance as one stone I happened to trip over; I learn to distrust my footing everywhere, and I take care to plant it well. To learn that you have said or done a foolish thing is nothing; you must learn that you are nothing but a fool — a far broader and more important lesson.
The false steps my memory has so often made, even when it was most sure of itself, are not wasted on me. Let it swear and promise now till it's blue; I shake my ears. The first objection raised against its testimony throws me into doubt, and I wouldn't dare trust it in anything serious, or vouch for it in anyone else's business. And if it weren't that what I do from lack of memory, others do still more often from lack of good faith, I would always, in matters of fact, take the truth from another man's mouth rather than my own.
If everyone would watch closely the workings and the circumstances of the passions that rule him, as I have watched the ones I'm most prone to, he would see them coming and would slow their charge a little. They don't always leap at our throat without warning; there are threats first, and stages — as Virgil says, the sea first whitens under the wind, then swells little by little, lifting its waves higher, until it rises from the bottom of the deep to the sky.
In me, judgment occupies the magistrate's bench — or at least it tries hard to. It lets my appetites run their own course, including hatred and friendship — even the friendship I bear myself — without altering or corrupting them. If it can't reform the other parts to match its own model, at least it doesn't let itself be corrupted by them. It plays its game apart.
The advice to each of us to know ourselves must be important advice, since the god of wisdom and light had it written across the front of his temple at Delphi, as if it contained everything he had to tell us. Plato says, too, that prudence is nothing but the carrying out of that command, and Socrates proves it point by point in Xenophon. In any science, only those who have entered into it can see its difficulties and its dark places, for it takes a certain degree of intelligence to be able to know that you don't know — you must push on a door to find out whether it's bolted against you. Hence the Platonic subtlety: that those who know need not inquire, since they know; and those who don't know cannot inquire, since to inquire you must know what you're inquiring after. So with this matter of knowing yourself. The fact that everyone is seen to be so decided and so satisfied on the point, that everyone thinks he understands himself well enough, shows that no one understands anything about it — as Socrates teaches Euthydemus.
I, who profess nothing else, find in myself a depth and a variety so endless that all the fruit of my learning is to make me feel how much remains to learn. To my weakness, so often confessed, I owe my leaning toward modesty, toward obedience to the beliefs prescribed for me, toward a steady coolness and moderation in my opinions — and my hatred of that obnoxious, quarrelsome arrogance that believes and trusts wholly in itself, the capital enemy of discipline and truth. Just listen to them lay down the law: the first foolishness they utter comes out in the tone of men founding religions and handing down codes:
"Nothing is more shameful," as Cicero says, "than to let assertion and approval run ahead of knowledge and perception."
Aristarchus said that in ancient times you could scarcely find seven wise men in the world, and in his own day scarcely as many fools. Don't we have more reason to say that of our age than he had of his? Assertion and stubbornness are sure signs of stupidity. Here is a fellow who has fallen flat on his nose a hundred times in one day, and there he is back at his therefores, as resolute and sturdy as ever. You'd think some new soul, some fresh vigor of understanding had been poured into him since — that he was like that ancient son of the earth who, as Lucan tells it, recovered fresh strength in his broken limbs every time he touched his mother ground. Does this incorrigible blockhead imagine he picks up a new mind by picking up a new argument?
It's from my own experience that I accuse human ignorance — and that, in my opinion, is the surest lesson in the whole school of the world. Those who won't conclude it in themselves from so empty an example as mine, or their own, let them take it from Socrates, the master of masters. The philosopher Antisthenes used to tell his disciples, "Come, let's go hear Socrates; there I'll be a pupil along with you." And while he held the Stoic doctrine that virtue alone was enough to make a life completely happy, needing nothing else whatever, he added: "except the strength of Socrates."
That long attention I spend studying myself trains me to judge other people tolerably well, too — and there are few things I speak of better, or with a better excuse. I often manage to see my friends' qualities more precisely than they do themselves. I have astonished some of them with the accuracy of my description, and put them on notice about themselves. Because I've been used since childhood to seeing my own life mirrored in other people's, I have acquired a studious bent that way; and when I'm paying attention, I let little around me escape that serves the purpose — faces, moods, talk. I study it all: what I should avoid and what I should follow.
In my friends, then, I discover their inward inclinations by what they produce outwardly. But I don't sort this endless variety of scattered, disconnected actions into species and chapters, distributing my parcels neatly under known headings and classes — for, as Virgil says, there's no counting how many kinds there are, or what their names might be.
The wise deliver their ideas more specifically, piece by piece. I, who can see no further into things than experience shows me, present mine loosely, without rules, by trial — in disjointed installments, as something that cannot be said all at once and in a lump. Coherence and consistency are not to be found in low, common souls like ours. Wisdom is a solid, complete building, every piece in its place, every piece bearing its mark; "wisdom alone is wholly turned in upon itself," as Cicero says. I leave it to the experts — and I'm not sure even they can pull it off, in a business so tangled, so minute, and so governed by chance — to marshal this infinite diversity of faces into distinct bodies, to pin down our inconstancy and set it in order. I find it hard not only to connect our actions one to another, but even to label each one by itself with any single ruling quality — that's how ambiguous and many-colored they look under different lights.
What was remarked as rare in Perseus, king of Macedon — that his mind, fixing itself to no one condition, wandered through every kind of life, displaying manners so wild and erratic that neither he nor anyone else knew what sort of man he was — seems to me to fit nearly the whole world. And I have known one man especially, of his very stamp, to whom the conclusion applies even better: no middle setting anywhere, always careering from one extreme to the other for reasons nobody could guess; no path without crossings and astonishing contradictions; no single quality pure and unmixed. The best guess anyone will ever make about him is that he worked at making himself known by being unknowable.
You need sound ears to hear yourself frankly judged. And since few of us can stand to hear it without being stung, those who risk doing it for us show a rare effect of friendship. It is genuinely loving someone to be willing to wound and offend him for his own good. I find it harsh to judge a man whose bad qualities outnumber his good ones. Plato requires three things in anyone who would examine another man's soul: knowledge, goodwill, boldness.
I used to be asked, sometimes, what I would have thought myself fit for, if anyone had wanted to make use of me while I was still the right age — "while better blood gave me vigor," as Virgil has it, "before envious old age frosted my temples."
"For nothing," I said. And I'm happy to excuse myself from knowing anything that enslaves me to other people. But I would have told my master the truth, and regulated his conduct, if he'd allowed it — not wholesale, by schoolroom lessons, which I don't understand (and from which I see no true reform spring in those who do understand them), but by watching him at leisure, on every occasion, judging him simply and naturally, as an eyewitness, point by point; letting him know plainly how he stood in common opinion, against the chorus of his flatterers. There's not one of us who wouldn't be worse than kings if we were corrupted as constantly as they are by that breed of riffraff. How could it be otherwise, if even Alexander, that great king and philosopher, couldn't defend himself from them?
I would have had fidelity enough for the job, and judgment, and independence. It would have to be an office without a name — otherwise it loses its grace and its effect — and it's not a part just anyone can play. Even truth doesn't have the privilege of being spoken at all hours and in every manner; noble as its use is, it has its limits and discretions. It often happens, the way the world goes, that a man drops truth into a prince's ear not just uselessly but harmfully, even unjustly. No one will convince me that a virtuous rebuke cannot be viciously delivered, or that the interest of the substance should never give way to the interest of the form.
For such work I'd want a man content with his fortune — "pleased with what he is, and wanting nothing more," as Martial puts it — and of middling rank. On the one hand, he wouldn't be afraid to touch his master's heart to the quick for fear of losing his place; on the other, being of no great station, he'd have easier dealings with all sorts of people. And I would confine this office to one man only; to spread the privilege of such liberty and familiarity among many would breed a damaging irreverence. Of that one man, above all, I would require the fidelity of silence.
A king is not to be believed when he brags of his firmness in standing the shock of the enemy for his glory's sake if, for his own profit and improvement, he can't stand the freedom of a friend's advice — which has no power beyond pinching his ear, everything else remaining in his own hands. Now, no class of men needs true and frank advice as badly as kings do. They sustain a public life; they have to satisfy the opinion of a great crowd of spectators; and since everyone around them hides whatever might turn them from their course, they find themselves, without noticing, sunk in the hatred and loathing of their people — often over things they could have avoided at no cost even to their pleasures, if only someone had warned and corrected them in time. Their favorites usually look out for themselves more than for the master; and it pays them to, since in truth most offices of real friendship, when tried on a sovereign, are rough and dangerous experiments. What's needed there is not only great affection and frankness, but courage too.
In short, this whole hodgepodge I'm scribbling here is nothing but a register of the trials of my own life — which, as far as inward health goes, is exemplary enough, provided you take its instruction against the grain. But as for bodily health, no man can offer more useful experience than I can, because I present it pure, not corrupted or doctored by art or theory. In the matter of medicine, experience is on its own dunghill, and reason yields it the whole field. Tiberius said that anyone who had lived twenty years should be answerable to himself for what hurt or helped him, and should know how to manage himself without medicine. He might have learned that from Socrates, who advised his disciples to make their health a chief study, adding that it would be strange if a man of sense, attending to his exercise and his diet, didn't understand better than any doctor what was good or bad for him.
And medicine itself professes that experience is the test of all its operations. So Plato was right to say that to be a true physician, a man should first have passed through all the diseases he means to cure, and all the accidents and conditions he is to judge of. It's only fair they should catch the pox if they want to know how to cure it. I would honestly trust myself to such hands. The others merely guide us, like the man who paints seas and rocks and harbors while sitting at his table, sailing his model ship there in perfect safety — but put him to the real work and he doesn't know which end to begin at. They describe our diseases the way a town crier describes a lost horse or dog: such a coat, such a height, such an ear — but bring the animal to him and he can't pick it out for all that. If medicine ever gives me some real, visible relief, I will cry out in good earnest, with Horace, "show me a science that works, and I'll take its hand."
The arts that promise to keep our bodies and souls in health promise the most of all — and none keep their promise less. And in our time, those who profess these arts among us show their effects less than any other sort of men. The most you can say of them is that they sell medicinal drugs; that they are physicians, you cannot say.
I have lived long enough to give an account of the regimen that has carried me this far. For anyone who wants to try it, I've been his taster: I have run the experiment. Here are a few of the articles, as memory supplies them. I have no habit that hasn't varied with circumstances; I only record the ones I've known best, the ones that have held the most possession of me up to now.
My way of life is the same in sickness as in health. The same bed, the same hours, the same food, even the same drink serve me in both conditions; I add nothing but a little more or less moderation, according to my strength and appetite. Health, for me, means keeping my accustomed state undisturbed. I see that sickness knocks me off it on one side, and that if I let the doctors have their way, they'll knock me off it on the other — so that between fortune and art, I'm forced clean off my road. The thing I believe most certainly is this: that I cannot be hurt by the use of things I have been so long accustomed to.
It's custom's business to give a man's life whatever shape she pleases; in that, she is everything — she is Circe's potion, changing our nature however she likes. How many nations, only three steps from us, think the fear of the evening damp — which so obviously hurts us — a ridiculous fancy; and our own boatmen and peasants laugh at it too. You make a German sick by laying him on a mattress, an Italian by laying him on a featherbed, and a Frenchman by leaving him without curtains and a fire. A Spanish stomach can't hold out at eating the way we do, nor ours at drinking like the Swiss.
A German amused me greatly at Augsburg by attacking our open hearths with the very arguments we always use against their stoves. To tell the truth, that smothered heat, and the smell of the heated stuff that gives it off, do bother people who aren't used to them — though not me. And since their heat is even, constant, and spread everywhere, without flame, without smoke, and without the wind that comes pouring down our chimneys, their stoves stand up to comparison with our fires in plenty of ways. Why don't we imitate the Roman architecture? They say that in the old days fires were built not inside the house but outside, at its foot, and the heat was carried through the whole building by pipes laid inside the walls, winding around the rooms to be warmed — I have seen this plainly described somewhere in Seneca. This German, hearing me praise the conveniences and beauties of his city — which it truly deserves — began pitying me for having to leave; and the first hardship he named was the heaviness of head the chimneys elsewhere would bring on me. He had heard somebody make that complaint, and fastened it on us — custom having robbed him of the means of noticing it at home. Any heat that comes from a fire weakens and dulls me. Evenus said fire is life's best seasoning; I'd rather warm myself any other way.
We are afraid of wine from the bottom of the cask; in Portugal those fumes are counted delicious — it's the drink of princes. In short, every nation has plenty of customs and usages that are not merely unknown to other nations, but savage and miraculous in their sight.
What should we do with people who accept no evidence unless it's in print, who won't believe men unless they're in a book, or truth unless it's of a respectable age? We dignify our foolishness when we send it to the press. "I have read such a thing" carries a great deal more weight than "I have heard such a thing." But I don't distrust a man's mouth any more than his pen; I know men write as carelessly as they speak; I value this age as if it were already a past one; and I quote a friend as readily as Aulus Gellius or Macrobius, and what I've seen as readily as what they wrote. As they hold of virtue that it is not greater for having lasted longer, so I hold of truth that it is none the wiser for being older. I often say it's pure folly that sets us chasing foreign and bookish examples; the supply is just as rich now as it was in the days of Homer and Plato. Isn't the truth that we want honor from the citation rather than truth in the matter at hand — as if proof borrowed from the print shops of Vascosan or Plantin counted for more than what's there to be seen in our own village? Or else we simply lack the wit to sift what's in front of us and judge it clearly enough to make an example of it. For if we say we lack the authority to make our testimony believed, we're missing the point. In my opinion, the most ordinary, common, familiar things — if we could only find their light — would furnish the greatest miracles of nature and the most wonderful examples, especially on the subject of human actions.
Now, on that subject — setting aside what I've gathered from books, and what Aristotle says of Andron the Argive, who crossed the parched sands of Libya without drinking — a gentleman who has acquitted himself well in several offices said, in company where I was present, that he had ridden from Madrid to Lisbon in the heat of summer without drinking at all. He is healthy and vigorous for his age, and there is nothing unusual in his way of living except this: he can go two or three months, even a whole year, so he has told me, without drinking. He feels thirsty sometimes, but he lets it pass; he holds that thirst is an appetite which fades easily on its own, and he drinks more from whim than from need or pleasure.
Here is another. Not long ago I found one of the most learned men in France — a man of considerable fortune, too — studying in a corner of a hall they had partitioned off for him with a tapestry, while a rabble of his servants carried on around him at full license. He told me — and Seneca says nearly the same of himself — that he turned the racket to profit: battered by the noise, he gathered and withdrew into himself all the more for contemplation, and the storm of voices drove his thoughts inward. As a student at Padua he had kept his study so long amid the rattle of coaches and the tumult of the square that he trained himself not just to ignore the noise but to use it, in the service of his studies. Socrates, when Alcibiades marveled at how he could endure his wife's perpetual scolding, answered: "the way men do who are used to the constant creak of the water-wheel." I am just the opposite. I have a tender head, easily ruffled; when it's bent on something, the least buzzing of a fly murders it.
Seneca in his youth, having warmly taken up the example of Sextius and resolved to eat nothing that had been killed, went a whole year without such food — with pleasure, he said — and gave it up only so he wouldn't be suspected of borrowing the rule from certain new religions that prescribed it. He likewise adopted, from the precepts of Attalus, the custom of never lying on bedding that yielded under his weight, and even into old age used the kind that doesn't give. What the usage of his day made men count as hardness, the usage of ours makes us count as softness.
Just look at the difference between my laborers' way of living and my own: the Scythians and the Indians are no more remote from my capacity and my form. I have taken on charity boys as servants, who quit my kitchen and my livery soon after, just to get back to their old life; I found one of them afterwards picking mussels out of the sewer for his dinner, and neither pleading nor threats could pull him away from the sweetness he found in poverty. Beggars have their splendors and their luxuries, just like the rich — and, people say, their ranks and their politics.
These are the effects of custom. She can mold us not only into whatever form she pleases — the sages say we should apply ourselves to the best one, and she will soon make it easy for us — but also into change and variety, which is the noblest and most useful lesson she teaches. The best of my bodily qualities is that I'm flexible and not very stubborn. I have inclinations that are more my own, more usual, and more agreeable to me than others; but it takes very little to turn me from them, and I slip easily into the opposite course. A young man ought to cross his own rules now and then, to wake up his vigor and keep it from going stale and rusty. There is no way of life so weak and silly as one run entirely by rule and discipline — like Juvenal's man, who consults the almanac before letting himself be carried out to the first milestone, and if the corner of his eye itches, won't reach for ointment until he has checked his horoscope.
If he'll take my advice, a young man should even throw himself into excess once in a while; otherwise the smallest indulgence will lay him flat, and he'll make himself tiresome and disagreeable in company. The worst quality in a well-bred man is fussiness — being bound to one particular way of doing things; and it is particular, if it isn't pliable and supple. It's a kind of disgrace not to be able, or not to dare, to do what you see everyone around you doing — people like that should stay home. In any man it's unbecoming; in a soldier it's a vice, and intolerable: a soldier, as Philopoemen said, should accustom himself to every variety and unevenness of life.
Though I was brought up, as far as possible, for liberty and independence, still — growing old, and having settled by sheer indifference into certain forms (my age is past schooling now; it has nothing left to do but hold itself together as best it can) — custom has already stamped her character into me, in certain things, so deeply that I'd call it excess to give them up. Without doing violence to myself, I cannot sleep in the daytime, or eat between meals, or eat breakfast, or go to bed without a long gap — three hours or so — between supper and sleep; cannot make children except before sleep, and never standing; cannot bear my own sweat; cannot quench my thirst with plain water or with wine unmixed; cannot keep my head bare for long, or get my hair cut after dinner. I'd be as uncomfortable without my gloves as without my shirt, or going unwashed when I rise from the table or my bed; and I couldn't sleep without canopy and curtains, as if they were necessities. I could dine without a tablecloth; but without a clean napkin, German style, only with real discomfort — I soil napkins more than the Germans or the Italians do, making little use of either spoon or fork. I'm sorry we never kept up the fashion, begun on the example of kings, of changing napkins with each course the way we change plates. We're told of Marius, that hard-bitten old soldier, that as he aged he grew fussy about his drink and would only use one particular cup of his own. I have let myself develop the same fancy for a certain shape of glass, and I don't like drinking from a common glass any more than from a common hand. All metal offends me next to clear, transparent material: let my eyes have their taste too, as far as they're able.
Several such daintinesses I owe to custom. Nature, for her part, has contributed some of her own: I cannot handle more than two full meals a day without overloading my stomach, nor skip one of them entirely without filling up with wind, drying out my mouth, and deadening my appetite. I take real harm from too much evening air. These last few years, on night marches — and they often run the whole night — after five or six hours my stomach turns queasy, my head starts pounding violently, and I never make it to daybreak without vomiting. When the others go to breakfast, I go to sleep; and when I get up, I'm as brisk and cheerful as before.
I had always been told that the night damp rises only at nightfall; but in recent years the long and familiar company of a lord — a man convinced that the damp is sharpest and most dangerous as the sun declines, an hour or two before it sets, and who carefully avoids that hour while shrugging off the night's — nearly stamped on me not so much his reasoning as his sensations. What — shall mere doubt and inquiry strike our imagination hard enough to change us? Those who give way to these tendencies all at once and headlong bring total ruin on themselves. And I am sorry for the several gentlemen who, through the folly of their doctors, have shut themselves up indoors while still young and healthy. Better to endure a cough than to lose, forever and through disuse, your commerce with common life in things of such great use. Malignant science, that forbids us the pleasantest hours of the day! Let us keep possession to the last. Mostly, a man toughens himself by being stubborn, and corrects his constitution — as Caesar did his falling sickness — by sheer contempt. A man should commit himself to the best rules, but not enslave himself to them, except to the kind (if any such exist) where obligation and servitude actually pay.
Kings and philosophers go to stool, and ladies too. Public lives are bound to ceremony; mine, obscure and private, enjoys every natural dispensation — and soldier and Gascon, besides, are qualities a little prone to indiscretion. So I'll say this about the act of relieving nature: it's good to assign it to certain set, nighttime hours, and to force yourself to that by custom, as I have done. But don't enslave yourself, as I have done in my declining years, to a particular comfort of place and seat for the purpose, making it a burden through long sitting. And yet, in the fouler offices, isn't there some excuse for demanding extra care and cleanliness? "Man is by nature a clean and delicate animal," as Seneca says. Of all the actions of nature, that is the one I am most impatient to have interrupted. I've seen many a soldier troubled by an unruly belly; mine and I never miss our appointment, which is at the leap out of bed — unless some urgent business or some sickness intrudes.
So, as I was saying, I think sick men can put themselves nowhere safer than sitting tight in the course of life they were bred and trained to. Change, whatever it is, unsettles and damages. Do you believe chestnuts can hurt a man of Périgord or of Lucca, or milk and cheese the mountain folk? Yet we prescribe them a way of life that's not just new but contrary — a change the healthy themselves couldn't endure. Order water for a seventy-year-old Breton; shut a sailor in a stove-heated room; forbid a Basque footman to walk. You are stripping them of motion, and in the end of air and of light.
Is life worth that much? To keep ourselves alive we are made to give up the very things we live by — to live, we stop living. As the poet asks, can you call a man alive when the air he breathes and the light he steers by have been turned into burdens?
If the doctors' regimens do no other good, they do at least this much: they get their patients ready for death early, by undermining the use of life and trimming it away little by little.
Sick or well, I have always willingly obeyed the appetites that pressed on me. I give my desires and inclinations a long rein. I don't like curing one disease with another, and I hate remedies that are more trouble than the sickness itself. To suffer from colic and to be forbidden oysters is two evils instead of one: the disease torments you from one side, the diet from the other. Since we're always in danger of guessing wrong anyway, let's at least risk our mistake after we've had the pleasure. The world goes the opposite way and counts nothing as beneficial unless it hurts; ease makes it deeply suspicious.
My appetite, in any number of things, has fit itself to the health of my stomach quite happily on its own. Sharp, spicy sauces pleased me when I was young; when my stomach later turned against them, my taste followed at once. Wine is bad for the sick — and it's the first thing my mouth rejects when I'm ill, with an unconquerable distaste. Whatever I take against my inclination harms me; nothing I eat with appetite and delight ever does. I have never been hurt by any action that gave me real pleasure, and so I've made every medical pronouncement yield, generously, to my enjoyment.
When I was young — back when Cupid fluttered about me, as the poet says, splendid in his saffron tunic — I gave myself the rein as freely and recklessly as any man alive to whatever desire had hold of me. I soldiered in those wars not without glory, as the line goes — though my strength lay more in lasting out the campaign than in the charge: I can scarcely remember six bouts in a night.
It is a misfortune and a marvel at once to confess how young I was when I first came under love's power. It was pure chance — long before the age of choice or knowledge. I can't remember myself back that far. My case might be paired with Quartilla's, who couldn't remember ever having been a maid. Hence, as the poet says, the early hair, and the beard that astonished my mother.
Doctors bend their rules to fit the violent cravings of their patients, and usually with good success; no craving can be so strange and wrong-headed that nature doesn't have some hand in it. And besides, how small a thing it is to satisfy the imagination! In my opinion that faculty matters most of all — at least more than any other. The heaviest and most common evils are the ones imagination loads onto us. There's a Spanish saying I like from several angles: Defienda me Dios de mí — "God defend me from myself."
When I'm sick, I'm sorry not to have some craving I could enjoy satisfying; all the rules of medicine would hardly keep me from it. I do the same when I'm well: I can see little more left to hope or wish for. It would be pitiful to be so weak and faded that even wishing is beyond you.
The art of medicine is not so settled that we can't find authority for whatever we choose to do. It changes with climates and changes with moons; it changes from one famous doctor to the next — Fernel says one thing, Scaliger another. If your physician thinks it bad for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat such-and-such, don't worry: I'll find you another who disagrees with him. The variety of medical arguments and opinions covers every shape a thing can take. I saw one poor sick man panting and burning with thirst — denied water in order to be cured — and laughed at afterward for his pains by a second physician, who condemned the first one's advice as harmful. Hadn't he tortured himself to good purpose? A man of that profession died lately of kidney stones, having used extreme fasting to fight his disease; his fellow physicians say the fasting was exactly what dried him up and baked the gravel in his kidneys.
I've noticed that in wounds and in sickness alike, talking unsettles and hurts me as much as any excess I could commit. My voice is loud and effortful, and it pains and tires me — so much so that when I've gone to whisper in some great man's ear about serious business, he has often asked me to lower my voice.
Here's a story worth the detour. Someone in a Greek school was speaking loudly, the way I do, and the master of ceremonies sent word for him to speak more softly. "Then have him send me," the man replied, "the tone he wants me to use." The answer came back: take your tone from the ears of the person you're speaking to. That was well said — if it meant "suit your voice to the business you have with your listener." But if it meant "it's enough that he hears you; let him set your volume," I don't see the sense of it. The tone and movement of my voice carry a great part of my meaning, and I'm the one who has to govern them to make myself understood. There is a voice for teaching, a voice for flattering, a voice for scolding. I want my voice not just to reach a man but, on occasion, to strike him and pierce him. When I'm dressing down my valet in sharp and bitter language, it would be a fine thing for him to say, "Speak lower, master — I hear you perfectly well." There is a voice fitted to the hearing, as the rhetorician says, not by its loudness but by its rightness. Speech belongs half to the speaker and half to the listener. The listener should prepare to receive it the way it comes — as in tennis, where the man receiving the ball shifts and sets himself according to the motions of the server and the character of the stroke.
Experience has also taught me this: we ruin ourselves by impatience. Evils have their life spans and their limits — their sicknesses and their recoveries.
Diseases are built on the pattern of animals: they have their fortunes and their allotted days from birth. Whoever tries to bully one short by force in the middle of its course only lengthens and multiplies it, and provokes it instead of calming it. I'm of Crantor's opinion: we should neither stubbornly stonewall our evils nor collapse under them for lack of spine, but give way to them naturally, according to their condition and ours. We should grant diseases free passage. I find they stay a shorter time with me because I let them alone; I have shed some of the most stubborn and tenacious kinds, the ones with the worst reputations, by their own decay — without help, without art, and against all of art's rules. Let nature have her way for a while; she understands her business better than we do. But so-and-so died of it! So will you — if not of that disease, then of another. And how many people have failed to escape dying with three doctors at their tails? Example is a vague and universal mirror, reflecting in every direction. If a medicine is delicious, take it: that much, at least, is present good. I will never balk at the name or the color if the thing is pleasant going down — pleasure is one of the chief varieties of profit.
I have allowed colds, gouty discharges, looseness, palpitations of the heart, migraines, and other ailments to grow old in me and die a natural death. I lost them just as I was getting half-fond of keeping them. Courtesy persuades them away faster than bluster. We have to bear the laws of our condition patiently. We are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, despite all medicine. It's the first lesson the Mexicans teach their children: the moment they come out of the womb they greet them with, "Child, you have come into the world to endure. Endure, suffer, and say nothing." It is unjust to complain that what may happen to anyone has happened to you. Be angry, says Seneca, when something is decreed unjustly against you alone.
Look at an old man begging God to keep his health whole and vigorous — that is, asking to be made young again. Fool, why these childish wishes, doomed in advance? His condition no longer allows it. Gout, kidney stones, indigestion — these are the symptoms of long years, the way heat, rain, and wind are the symptoms of long journeys. Plato doesn't believe Aesculapius bothered prescribing regimens to drag out life in a weak and wasted body, useless to its country and its calling, incapable of fathering strong and healthy children. He doesn't think such fussing fits the justice and prudence of God, which directs all things toward use. My good friend, your business is done; nobody can restore you. At most they can patch you and prop you a little, and stretch your misery out an hour or two — like a man who shores up a collapsing house with prop after prop, until the appointed day when house, props, and all come down together.
We must learn to endure what we cannot escape. Our life is composed of contrary things, like the harmony of the world — different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, lively and solemn. What could a musician do who loved only some of them? He has to know how to use them all and mix them. And so must we mix the goods and evils that are of one substance with our life. Our being cannot survive without that mixture, and the one half is no less necessary to it than the other. Trying to fight natural necessity is to reenact the folly of Ctesiphon, who got into a kicking contest with his mule.
I consult almost nobody about the changes I feel in myself, because these doctors take advantage of you. Once they have you at their mercy, they stuff your ears with prognoses. Catching me once weakened by sickness, they handled me insultingly with their dogmas and their schoolmaster scowls — threatening me now with great pains, now with approaching death. I was shaken by it, I admit, but not beaten, not knocked off my ground; my judgment was neither changed nor confused, but it was disturbed. And that is always agitation and struggle.
Now I handle my imagination as gently as I can, and would relieve it, if I could, of all strain and conflict. You have to help it along, flatter it, fool it if you can. My mind is well suited to the job — it never lacks for plausible arguments. If it could persuade as well as it preaches, it would set me up perfectly.
Would you like an example? My mind tells me that it's for my own good that I have kidney stones. It says that buildings my age must naturally suffer some leakage — it is time they began to loosen and admit a breach. It's a common necessity; there is nothing miraculous or new in it. I am paying old age its due, and I cannot expect a better bargain. It says the company should comfort me, since I've fallen into the most ordinary ailment of men my age: everywhere I look I see men tormented by the same disease, and the fellowship is honorable, since it most often strikes men of quality. It's a noble disease, a dignified one. It says that of the men struck by it, few get off with less pain than I do — and even they pay for it with strict diets and daily doses of disgusting medicines, while I owe my better condition purely to good luck. The few ordinary broths of eryngo and burst-wort I've taken — twice or three times, to oblige certain ladies who, with more kindness than my pain was sharp, insisted on giving me half of theirs — seemed to me equally easy to swallow and useless in effect. Other men must pay a thousand vows to Aesculapius and as many crowns to their physicians to pass a little gravel that I pass often with nature's help alone. Even my composure in company is undisturbed; I can hold my water ten hours, as long as any man in health.
"The fear of this disease," my mind goes on, "used to terrify you, back when you didn't know it — the cries and despairing groans of those who make it worse by their impatience gave you a horror of it. It's an affliction that punishes the very organs you sinned with most. You are a man of conscience; we are only entitled to complain of punishment we haven't earned. Look at this chastisement: it's gentle compared to others, and laid on with a father's tenderness. Notice how late it came — it occupies and inconveniences only that stretch of your life which is sterile and lost anyway, having, as if by contract, left the license and pleasures of your youth their full term.
"The fear and pity people feel for this disease serve your vanity, too — a quality you may have purged from your judgment and half-cured from your reason, but your friends can still spot the tincture in your complexion. There is pleasure in hearing people say of you: now that is strength of mind, that is patience! They see you sweat with pain, turn pale and turn red, tremble, vomit blood, suffer strange contractions and convulsions, drip great tears from your eyes, pass urine thick, black, and dreadful, or have it stopped by some sharp, jagged stone that cruelly pricks and flays the neck of your bladder — and all the while you keep an ordinary face, chatting with your people in the gaps, holding up your end of a conversation, excusing your pain now and then and underselling your suffering. Do you remember the men of the old days who hunted out diseases on purpose, to keep their virtue in training? Suppose nature has driven and pushed you into that glorious school — one you would never have entered on your own.
"If you tell me it's a dangerous, mortal disease — which ones aren't? It's a doctor's trick to exempt any disease at all from the road to death. What does it matter whether they go there directly or slide and slip toward the path that leads us to it? You do not die because you are sick; you die because you are alive. Death kills you perfectly well without sickness's help — and sickness has actually postponed death for some men, who lived longer precisely because they thought they were always dying. Besides, there are diseases, as there are wounds, that are medicinal and good for us.
"Your stones are often as long-lived as you are. There are men who've kept them company from childhood into extreme old age; if the men hadn't quit first, the stones were ready to stay longer. You kill them more often than they kill you. And even if the disease keeps the image of approaching death before you — is it not a kindness, at your age, to be reminded of your end? And here's the worst of it: you no longer have anything left that should make you want to be cured. One way or another, the common necessity will call for you soon. Consider how skillfully and gently this disease puts you out of love with life and weans you from the world — not bullying you with a tyrant's grip, like so many other infirmities you see in old men, which hold them in continual torment and unbroken weakness and pain, but by warnings and instructions spaced out at intervals, with long rests in between, as if to give you the chance to meditate on its lesson and chew it over at your own leisure. And to give you the means to judge sanely, and to summon the resolve of a brave man, it sets your whole condition before you, the good and the bad — a thoroughly cheerful life and an unbearable one, in one and the same day. If you don't embrace death, at least you shake hands with it once a month. So you have all the more reason to hope it will take you one day without warning — that having been led so often down to the water's edge, still assuming the usual terms apply, you and your confidence will some morning be ferried across before you know it. A man cannot reasonably complain of a disease that splits its time fairly with health."
I am grateful to Fortune for attacking me so often with the same weapons. She shapes and trains me by repetition, hardens me, habituates me, so that I know now within a little what it will cost me to be quit of an attack. Lacking a natural memory, I make one out of paper: whenever some new symptom appears in my disease, I write it down. So by now, having run through nearly every kind of episode, whenever something alarming threatens me I leaf through these little loose notes like the Sibyl's leaves — and I never fail to find, somewhere in my past experience, a favorable precedent to comfort me. Habit also makes me hope better of the future: this clearing-out has gone on so long that nature is unlikely to change her course now, and nothing worse is likely to come than what I already feel.
Besides, the temperament of this disease suits my quick and sudden nature. When it attacks me gently, I get frightened — that means a long siege. But its natural style is the brisk, vigorous flare-up: it claws me thoroughly for a day or two. My kidneys held out a whole age without trouble; I have now lived almost another age since they changed their state. Evils have their seasons, like benefits; perhaps this infirmity is drawing to a close. Age cools the heat of my stomach; its digestion, less perfect now, sends crude matter on to my kidneys. Why shouldn't the heat of my kidneys, in their own turn and season, cool as well, so that they can no longer petrify my phlegm, and nature finds some other route of purging? The years have visibly helped me dry up certain discharges. Why not these residues too, that supply the matter for gravel?
And is there any pleasure on earth like that sudden change — when after extreme pain, by the passing of a stone, I recover, fast as a flash of lightning, the beautiful light of health, free and full, the way it happens in our sharpest and most sudden colics? Is there anything in the pain endured that can outweigh the joy of so swift a recovery? How much fairer health looks to me after sickness — sickness so close, so nearly touching it, that I can see the two of them face to face in their full dress, squaring off like rivals to dispute the field! The Stoics say vices were usefully introduced to give value and luster to virtue. We can say, with better reason and a less reckless guess, that nature has given us pain for the honor and the service of pleasure and ease. When Socrates was relieved of his chains and felt the delicious itch in his legs where their weight had been, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure — how the two are yoked by a necessary connection, taking turns following and begetting one another — and he called out to good old Aesop that he should have made a fine fable out of exactly that.
The worst thing I see in other diseases is that they are less grievous in their action than in their aftermath. You spend a whole year recovering, full of weakness and fear the entire time. There's so much hazard, so many stages on the way back to safety, that there's no end to it. Before they've unwrapped you of your kerchief, and then of your cap — before they'll let you walk out for air, drink wine, lie with your wife, eat melons — the odds are you've relapsed into some new misery. Kidney stones have this privilege: they carry themselves clean away. Other maladies always leave some imprint and alteration behind, which makes the body prone to the next disease — they lend each other a hand. The excusable ones are content to possess us without spreading or ushering in their followers; but courteous and kind are those whose passing leaves us some profit. Since the stones came, I find myself free of my other ailments — more so, it seems to me, than I was before — and I haven't had a fever since. I reason that the extreme and frequent vomiting I'm subject to scours me out, while my loss of appetite for this and that, and the strange fasts I'm forced to keep, digest away my unhealthy humors, and nature voids in those stones whatever is excess and harmful in me. Don't ever tell me it's medicine bought too dear. What about all the stinking potions, the cauteries, incisions, sweats, drainage-cords, diets — all the apparatus of cure that, because we can't withstand its violence and persistence, so often brings us to the grave instead? So when I have the stone, I count it as medicine; when I'm free of it, as outright deliverance.
And here is another particular favor my disease does me: it pretty much plays its own game by itself and lets me play mine, if I have the courage to take it up. In its greatest fury I have held out ten hours on horseback. Just endure — you need no other regimen. Play, run, dine, do this and that if you can; your indulgence will do you more good than harm. Try saying that to a man with the pox, the gout, or a hernia! Other diseases bind you everywhere — they rack everything you do, throw your whole order into disarray, and drag your entire way of life into their orbit. This one only pinches the skin. It leaves your understanding and your will entirely at your own disposal, along with your tongue, your hands, and your feet. It wakes you up rather than stupefies you. The soul is struck by the burning of a fever, crushed by an epilepsy, knocked off her seat by a fierce migraine — in short, staggered by every disease that injures the whole mass or the noblest parts. This one never touches the soul. If anything goes wrong with her, it's her own fault — she has betrayed, unhorsed, and abandoned herself. Only fools let themselves be persuaded that this hard, solid body baked in our kidneys can be dissolved by drinks. Once it stirs, there is nothing to do but give it passage; and for that matter, it will make one for itself.
I notice one more particular convenience in it: it's a disease that leaves us little to guess at. We're spared the trouble that other diseases throw us into through the uncertainty of their causes, conditions, and course — a trouble that is infinitely painful. There's no need of consultations and doctoral interpretations: the senses tell us perfectly well what it is and where it is.
With arguments like these, strong and weak — like Cicero with the disease of his old age — I try to rock my imagination to sleep and dress its wounds. If they look worse tomorrow, I'll provide new stratagems. And here's proof it's true: lately I've reached the point where the slightest movement forces pure blood out of my kidneys. So what? I move about exactly as before, and ride after my hounds with a young man's insolent ardor. I count it a very good settlement for an affliction of that importance, when all it costs me is a dull heaviness and unease in that region. It's some large stone wasting and consuming the substance of my kidneys — and of my life, which I drain away little by little, not without a certain natural pleasure, as an excretion that is from now on superfluous and a nuisance.
And if I feel something stirring, don't imagine I run to consult my pulse or my urine in order to brace myself with some annoying precaution. I'll feel the pain soon enough, without lengthening it in advance with the disease of fear. He who fears he will suffer already suffers what he fears. Add to that the doubts and ignorance of those who presume to expound nature's designs and inner workings, and the endless false forecasts of their art, and we ought to conclude that her ways are inscrutable and utterly unknown. There is great uncertainty, variety, and obscurity in what she promises and what she threatens. With the exception of old age — which is an unmistakable sign of death's approach — in everything else I see few signs of the future we could ground a prediction on. I judge myself only by actual sensation, not by reasoning. What would be the use, since I'm resolved to bring nothing to it but waiting and patience? Would you like to know what I gain by that? Look at the people who do otherwise, who hang on so many different persuasions and counsels — how often imagination presses on them without any pain in the body at all! Many times, while feeling well and safe and entirely free of these dangerous attacks, I've amused myself by describing them to physicians as just beginning in me. I sat through the verdict of their dreadful conclusions in perfect comfort — and came away that much more indebted to the favor of God, and that much better instructed in the vanity of this art.
There is nothing youth should be urged to more than activity and alertness. Our life is nothing but movement. I get myself moving with difficulty, and I'm slow at everything — rising, going to bed, eating. Seven in the morning is early for me; where I'm in charge, I never dine before eleven or sup before six. I used to blame the fevers and other illnesses I fell into on the sluggishness that too much sleep had laid on me, and I have always regretted falling back asleep in the morning. Plato is angrier at excess of sleep than at excess of drink. I like to sleep on a hard bed, and alone — even without my wife, in the royal style — and fairly well covered. My bed is never warmed for me, though since I've grown old they give me, when I need them, cloths to warm my feet and stomach. People found fault with the great Scipio for being a heavy sleeper — for no other reason, in my opinion, than that it annoyed them that he alone should have nothing in him to find fault with. If I'm particular about anything in my way of living, it's about my bed more than anything else; but in general I give way and adapt to necessity as well as anyone. Sleep has taken up a great part of my life, and even at my present age I still sleep eight or nine hours at a stretch. I am weaning myself, with profit, from this leaning toward sloth, and I'm clearly the better for it. The change is a little hard, true, but in three days it's done. And I know few men who can live on less sleep when they need to, who keep up their exercise more steadily, or who feel long journeys less.
My body is up to steady exertion, but not violent or sudden effort. These days I steer clear of strenuous exercise, the kind that puts me in a sweat: my limbs tire before they warm. I can stay on my feet a whole day, and walking never wearies me; but from my youth I've preferred to ride when the road is paved — on foot you're up to your haunches in mud, and small fellows like me get elbowed and jostled in the streets for want of presence. And I have always loved to rest, sitting or lying, with my heels as high as my seat or higher.
There is no profession as pleasant as the soldier's. It is noble in its practice — for valor is the sturdiest, proudest, most generous of all the virtues — and noble in its cause: no service is more universal or more just than defending the peace and greatness of your country. You enjoy the company of so many noble, young, active men; the daily sight of great and tragic spectacles; the freedom of plain, artless conversation; a masculine, unceremonious way of living; the variety of a thousand different actions; the brave music of war that fires both your ears and your soul; the honor of the work — even its hardships and difficulties, which Plato rates so lightly that in his Republic he gives women and children a share of them. You volunteer for particular exploits and dangers according to your own judgment of their brilliance and importance, and you find that even life itself may be excusably spent there — for, as the poet says, it is a fine thing to die with sword in hand.
To fear dangers shared by such a multitude of men — not to dare what so many kinds of souls dare, what a whole people dares — is for a heart poor and mean beyond all measure. Company gives courage even to children. If other men outdo you in knowledge, in grace, in strength, in fortune, you have outside causes to blame; but if you give way to them in steadiness of soul, you have no one to blame but yourself. Death is more abject, more lingering, more painful in bed than in battle; fevers and catarrhs are as agonizing and as fatal as a musket shot. Whoever has braced himself to bear the accidents of ordinary life has no need to screw up extra courage to be a soldier. To live, my Lucilius, as Seneca says, is to be a soldier.
I don't remember ever having had the itch — and yet scratching is one of nature's sweetest gratifications, and always within reach. But repentance follows too close behind. I practice it mostly on my ears, which itch from time to time on the inside.
I came into the world with all my senses entire, almost to perfection. My stomach is conveniently good, and so are my head and my lungs; they generally hold up even at the height of a fever. I have passed the age that some nations — not without reason — fixed as so proper a limit of life that they allowed no one to exceed it. And yet I still have stretches, short and inconstant as they are, so clean and sound that they fall little short of the health and cheerfulness of my youth. I'm not talking about vigor and sprightliness; it isn't reasonable to expect those to follow me past their boundary. As Horace says, I can no longer stand waiting at a lady's door in the rain.
My face and eyes immediately give my condition away. All my changes begin there, and they look somewhat worse than they really are; my friends often pity me before I feel the cause in myself. My mirror doesn't frighten me, because even in my youth it happened more than once that I wore a sickly complexion of bad omen without any serious consequence — so that the doctors, finding nothing inside to answer for the change outside, put it down to the mind, to some secret passion gnawing at me within. They were wrong. If my body took orders from me as well as my mind does, we would travel a little more comfortably together. My mind at the time was not only free of trouble but full of joy and satisfaction, as it usually is — half by its constitution, half by its own design. As Ovid says, the sickness of the body does not infect the mind.
I am of the opinion that this even temper of my soul has often helped my body up from its lapses. The body is often down; but if my soul is not exactly brisk and gay, it is at least tranquil and at rest. I had a quartan fever for four or five months that made me look completely wretched; my mind the whole time was, if not calm, at least pleasant. If the pain stays outside me, the weakness and languor don't much depress me. I can name various bodily collapses that horrify me even to mention, and yet I fear them less than a thousand passions and agitations of the mind that I see all around me. I have made up my mind that I am done with running; it's enough that I can crawl along. Nor do I complain of the natural decay I feel in myself — who is surprised, asks Juvenal, to find a goiter in the Alps? — any more than I regret that my term will not be as long and entire as an oak's.
I have no complaint against my imagination. Few thoughts in my life have so much as broken my sleep, except thoughts of desire — which woke me without afflicting me. I dream seldom, and then of chimeras and fantastic things, usually spun out of pleasant thoughts, more ridiculous than sad. And I believe it is true that dreams are faithful interpreters of our inclinations — but it takes art to sort them and understand them. It's small wonder, as the old poet says, that the things men practice, think about, care for, see, and do while awake should run through their heads when they sleep.
Plato goes further and says it is the office of wisdom to draw prophetic instruction about the future from dreams. I don't know about that — except that Socrates, Xenophon, and Aristotle, men of unimpeachable authority, relate wonderful instances of it. Historians say the Atlantes never dream; they also never eat anything that has been killed, and I add that fact because it may be the very reason they don't dream — for Pythagoras prescribed a certain diet to produce the right kind of dreams. My own are very gentle, without any thrashing of the body or talking aloud. I have seen plenty of people in my time wonderfully disturbed by theirs. Theon the philosopher walked in his sleep, and so did Pericles' servant — on the tiles, on the very roof of the house.
At table I hardly ever choose my dish; I take the nearest at hand, and I'm reluctant to trade it for another. A confusion of meats and a clatter of dishes displease me as much as any other kind of confusion. I am easily satisfied with few dishes, and I'm an enemy of Favorinus's notion that at a feast they should snatch away the meat you like and set a plate of something else in front of you — that it's a pitiful supper if you haven't stuffed your guests with the rumps of assorted fowl, and that only the songbird deserves to be eaten whole. I usually eat salted meats, yet I prefer my bread without salt, and my baker, against the custom of the region, never sends any other kind to my table. In my childhood, what they mostly had to correct in me was a refusal of the things children usually love best — sugar, sweets, marzipan. My tutor fought this aversion to delicacies as a kind of delicacy itself; and in truth that's all it is: pickiness of taste, whatever it fastens on. Whoever cures a child of a stubborn attachment to brown bread, bacon, or garlic, cures him of pampering his palate. There are people who play at plainness by pining for beef and ham among the partridges. Very fine — that is the daintiness of the dainty. It's the taste of a pampered fortune that loses its relish for ordinary, familiar things; the kind of luxury, as Seneca says, by which wealth amuses itself with the tedium of riches. Refusing to enjoy what another man is enjoying, fussing over what you eat — that is the essence of this vice; as Horace puts it, if you cannot be content with herbs in a small dish for your supper.
There is, granted, this difference: it's better to bind your appetite to the things easiest to come by. But it is always a vice to bind yourself at all. I once called a kinsman of mine overdelicate because his time in our galleys had untaught him the use of a bed and the habit of undressing to sleep.
If I had sons, I would gladly wish them my upbringing. The good father God gave me — who has nothing from me but the acknowledgment of his goodness, though truly it is a hearty one — sent me from my cradle to be raised in a poor village of his, and kept me there through my nursing and beyond, training me to the lowest and most common way of living. A well-disciplined stomach, as Seneca says, is a great part of liberty. Never take the rearing of your children into your own hands — and still less hand it over to your wives. Leave their formation to fortune, under common and natural laws; leave it to custom to train them up to frugality and hardship, so that they will have to climb down from rigor rather than up to it. My father's scheme aimed at something else as well: to make me familiar with the people, and with the condition of those who most need our help. He reckoned I should be made to look toward the men who stretch out their arms to me rather than those who turn their backs on me. And for the same reason he chose people of the humblest fortune to hold me at the baptismal font — to bind and attach me to them.
His plan has not turned out badly. Whether because there is more honor in stooping, or out of a natural compassion that has enormous power over me, I lean toward the humbler sort of people. Whatever faction I would condemn in our wars, I would condemn it more sharply when it was flourishing and successful; it will go some way toward reconciling me to it when I see it miserable and crushed. How willingly I admire the fine spirit of Cheilonis, daughter and wife of kings of Sparta. While her husband Cleombrotus, in the city's upheaval, had the upper hand over her father Leonidas, she played the good daughter — stuck close to her father in all his misery and exile, set against the conqueror. But the moment the luck of war turned, she changed her allegiance with the change of fortune and bravely took her husband's side, following him wherever his ruin carried him. She admitted, it seems to me, no other choice than to join whichever side needed her most, where her compassion could do the most good. I am naturally more inclined to follow the example of Flamininus, who gave his help to those who needed him rather than to those with the power to repay him, than that of Pyrrhus, whose disposition was to grovel before the great and lord it over the poor.
Long sittings at table both annoy me and do me harm — perhaps because I formed the habit as a child, but I keep eating the whole time I sit. So at my own house, though our meals are on the short side, I usually sit down a little after the others, in the manner of Augustus. But I don't imitate him in rising before the rest. On the contrary, I love to sit on a long while after and listen to the talk — provided I take no part in it. Talking on a full stomach tires me and does me harm, though I find it thoroughly wholesome and pleasant to argue and exercise my voice before dinner.
The ancient Greeks and Romans had better sense than we do. Unless some extraordinary business prevented them, they set aside for eating — which is one of the principal actions of life — many hours, and the better part of the night. They ate and drank more deliberately than we do, who rush through everything at a gallop, and they stretched this natural pleasure out into more leisure and better use, seasoning it with profitable conversation.
The people whose business it is to look after me could very easily keep me from anything they think will hurt me, for in such matters I never crave or miss what I don't see. But once a thing is in front of my eyes, persuading me to abstain is a waste of breath. So when I mean to fast, I have to be kept away from the supper table entirely and given just enough for a prescribed light meal; if I sit down at table, I forget my resolution. When I order my cook to dress some dish a different way, my whole household knows what it means: my stomach is out of order, and I won't touch a thing.
I like most meats — those that can stand it — barely boiled or roasted, and very well hung, even, for some, downright gone. Nothing offends me, generally, except toughness; toward every other quality I am as patient and indifferent as any man I've known. So, contrary to the common taste, even fish often strikes me as too fresh and too firm. Not for lack of teeth — mine have always been good, even excellent, and age hasn't yet begun to threaten them; I've always rubbed them with a napkin every morning, and before and after dinner. God is kind to those whom He makes die by degrees. That is the one benefit of old age: the final death will be that much less complete and less painful — it will kill only half a man, or a quarter. One tooth just fell out, without pulling and without pain; it had reached the natural end of its term. That part of my being, and several others, are already dead — others half dead — and they were among the most active, in the front rank during my vigorous years. This is how I melt and slip away from myself. What folly it would be in my understanding to feel the height of this fall, already so far along, as if it were from the very top! I hope I won't. Truly, I draw one principal consolation from thinking on my death: that it will be just and natural, and that from now on I can neither ask nor hope of Destiny any favor in this matter that isn't an unlawful one. Men persuade themselves that in former ages lives were longer, as men were taller. But they deceive themselves: Solon, who belonged to those elder times, sets the limit of life at seventy years. And I — who have so thoroughly and so universally worshipped that golden mean of the time gone by, and concluded that the most moderate measure is the most perfect — shall I now claim an immeasurable, prodigious old age? Whatever runs against the course of nature may be troublesome, but whatever comes according to her should always be pleasant. All things done according to nature, says Cicero, are to be counted good.
And so, says Plato, the death that comes by wounds or disease is violent, but the death that comes upon us with old age leading the way is of all deaths the easiest — in a certain sense, even delicious. Young men, says Cicero, have their lives taken from them by force; old men, by ripeness.
Death mixes and blends itself with life all the way through. Decay runs ahead of its hour and shoulders its way into the very course of our growth. I have portraits of myself at twenty-five and at thirty-five. I compare them with one painted recently: how many times over it is no longer me! How much further is my present image from those than from the image of my dying! It is abusing nature to make her trot so far that she is forced to quit us — to abandon our conduct, our eyes, teeth, legs, and all the rest to the mercy of a foreign, haggard countenance, and hand us over into the keeping of art, being weary of following us herself.
I'm not excessively fond of either salads or fruit — except melons. My father hated every kind of sauce; I love them all. Eating too much hurts me; but as for the quality of what I eat, I don't yet know for certain that any food disagrees with me, nor have I noticed that full moon or new, autumn or spring, has any effect on me. We have movements in us that are fickle and unaccountable. Radishes, for example, I first found agreeable to my stomach, then nauseating, and now agreeable again. In several other things I find my stomach and appetite shifting the same way: I've changed back and forth from white wine to claret, from claret to white.
I am a great lover of fish, and so I make my fast-days feasts and my feast-days fasts. And I believe what some people say, that fish is easier to digest than meat. As I make it a matter of conscience not to eat meat on fish-days, so my taste makes it a matter of conscience not to mix fish and meat: the difference between them seems too wide.
From my youth I have sometimes skipped a meal — either to sharpen my appetite for the next day (for as Epicurus fasted and ate lean to teach his pleasure to do without abundance, I do it the other way round, to train my pleasure to make better and merrier use of abundance); or I fasted to keep my vigor fresh for some work of body or mind, for both of those are cruelly dulled in me by a full stomach. And above all I hate that stupid coupling of so healthy and sprightly a goddess with that little belching god, bloated with the fumes of his liquor. Or I fasted to settle a sick stomach; or for lack of fit company — for I say, as that same Epicurus did, that one should not so much consider what one eats as with whom one eats it. And I commend Chilo for refusing to commit himself to Periander's feast until he learned who the other guests would be. No dish is so sweet to me, no sauce so appetizing, as the one drawn from good company. I think it healthier to eat at more leisure and eat less, and to eat more often. But I would have appetite and hunger consulted: I would take no pleasure in being fed three or four meager, rationed meals a day, on a doctor's schedule. Who will guarantee me that the good appetite I have in the morning will still be there at supper? Let us old fellows especially seize the first opportune hour of eating, and leave the hopes and forecasts to the almanac-makers. The ripest fruit of my health is pleasure; let us hold fast to the present and the known. I avoid rigid consistency in these laws of fasting. Whoever wants a habit to serve him, let him avoid continuing it: we harden in it, our strength falls asleep there; six months later you'll find your stomach so broken in that all you've gained is the loss of your liberty to do otherwise — except at your own cost.
I keep my legs and thighs no warmer in winter than in summer: one simple pair of silk stockings, nothing more. I have allowed myself, for relief of my colds, to keep my head warmer, and my belly on account of my colic. But my ailments got used to these measures in a few days and turned up their noses at my ordinary provisions. From a coif we soon climb to a kerchief over it, from a plain cap to a quilted hat; the padding of the doublet must no longer serve as mere ornament; you must add a hare's skin or a vulture's skin, and a skullcap under the hat. Follow this staircase and you'll go a fine way. I will do nothing of the sort, and would gladly undo the little I've begun. If you fall into some new trouble, all that gear is wasted — you're used to it; go find something else. This is how men ruin themselves who let themselves be pestered with these enforced, superstitious regimens: they must add something more, and then something more after that. There is no end to it.
For the sake of our affairs and our pleasures, it is far more convenient to do as the ancients did — skip dinner and put off good cheer until the hour of retirement and rest, so as not to break up the day; and that's what I used to do. For health, on the other hand, I have since found by experience that it's better to dine, and that digestion goes better while we're awake. I'm seldom thirsty, well or sick; my mouth is apt to go dry, but without thirst. Usually I drink only with the thirst that eating creates, well along in the meal. I drink pretty well for a man of my size: in summer, at a tasty meal, I not only exceed the limit of Augustus, who drank precisely three times and no more, but — so as not to offend the rule of Democritus, who forbade stopping at four as an unlucky number — I proceed at need to a fifth glass, about three half-pints. The little glasses are my favorites, and I like to drain them dry, which other people avoid as bad manners. I dilute my wine, sometimes by half, sometimes by a third, with water; and when I'm at home, by an old custom my father's doctor prescribed both for him and for himself, what is meant for me is mixed in the buttery two or three hours before it's brought in. They say Cranaus, king of Attica, invented this custom of watering wine; whether it does any good or not, I've heard argued both ways. I think it more decent and more wholesome for children to drink no wine until sixteen or eighteen. The most usual and common way of living is the most becoming; all peculiarity, in my opinion, is to be avoided. I would hate a German who put water in his wine as much as a Frenchman who drank it pure. Public usage lays down the law in these matters.
I dread fog, and flee from smoke as from the plague. The first repairs I rushed into at my own house were the chimneys and the privies — the common, insufferable defects of all old buildings. And among the hardships of war I count the choking dust they kept us riding in for whole days together. My breathing is free and easy, and my colds mostly pass off without troubling the lungs and without a cough.
The heat of summer is more my enemy than the cold of winter. Besides the discomfort of heat, which is harder to remedy than cold, and besides the beating of the sun's rays on the head, all glittering light hurts my eyes — so that nowadays I couldn't sit at dinner facing a blazing fire.
To dull the whiteness of the paper, back in the days when I read more, I used to lay a piece of glass over my book, and it relieved my eyes considerably. To this hour — at fifty-four — I am a stranger to spectacles, and I can see as far as I ever did, as far as anyone. It's true that toward evening I begin to feel a little dimness and weakness in my sight when I read — an exercise that has always strained my eyes, especially at night. There's one step backward, and a plain one. I shall retreat another; from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth, so softly that I'll be stone blind before I feel my sight aging and failing. So cunningly do the Fates untwist the thread of our lives. So too I suspect my hearing is starting to thicken; and you'll see that when I've half lost it, I'll still be blaming the voices of those who speak to me. You must wind the soul up to a high pitch to make it feel how it is ebbing away.
My walk is quick and firm, and I couldn't say which of the two, my mind or my body, I've had more trouble holding in one place. The preacher who can fix my attention through a whole sermon is a good friend of mine indeed. In ceremonious places, where every face is starched, where I have seen the ladies hold even their eyes perfectly still, I have never managed to keep some part of me from breaking loose. Seated I may be; settled, never. And as for fidgeting — I am never without a switch in my hand, walking or riding. As the philosopher Chrysippus's maid said of her master, that he was only drunk in his legs — for he had the habit of forever kicking them about wherever he sat, and she said it at a time when wine had made all his companions drunk and he felt no change at all — so it might have been said of me from infancy that I had either folly or quicksilver in my feet, so much fidgeting and restlessness is in them wherever I put them.
It is unmannerly, besides being bad for the health and even for the pleasure of eating, to eat as greedily as I do. In my haste I often bite my tongue, and sometimes my fingers. Diogenes, meeting a boy eating that way, gave the boy's tutor a box on the ear. There were men at Rome who taught people to chew, as well as to walk, with a good grace. Eating this way, I lose the leisure of talking, which gives such relish to the table — provided the talk suits it, that is, pleasant and short.
There is jealousy and envy among our pleasures; they cross and hinder one another. Alcibiades, a man who well understood good cheer, banished even music from the table so that it wouldn't disturb the pleasure of conversation — because, as Plato tells us, it is the custom of ordinary people to call in fiddlers and singers to their feasts for lack of the good talk and pleasant discourse with which men of understanding know how to entertain one another. Varro asks this of a dinner party: people of graceful presence and agreeable conversation, neither mute nor chattering; cleanness and delicacy in the food and in the place; and fair weather. The art of dining well is no small art, and its pleasure no small pleasure: neither the greatest generals nor the greatest philosophers have disdained the practice or the science of eating well. My imagination has handed three meals over to the keeping of my memory, which fortune made supremely sweet to me, each at a different moment of my more flourishing years. My present state shuts me out of such things; for every guest, according to the happy temper of body and mind he brings with him, furnishes his own share of the grace and savor.
I, who only crawl upon the earth, hate that inhuman wisdom that would have us despise and resent all care of the body. I count it as much an injustice to turn up our noses at natural pleasures as to take them too much to heart. Xerxes was a blockhead — wrapped in every human delight, he offered a reward to anyone who could invent him new ones. But hardly less a blockhead is the man who cuts off any of the pleasures nature has provided him. We should neither chase them nor flee them; we should receive them. I receive them, I admit, a little too warmly and gladly, and let myself follow my natural inclinations easily enough. There is no need for us to exaggerate their emptiness; they make us feel it quite enough on their own, thanks to our sickly, kill-joy mind, which puts us out of taste with them as it does with itself. The mind treats both itself and everything it takes in now better, now worse, according to its insatiable, wandering, ever-shifting nature.
As Horace says, "unless the vessel is clean, whatever you pour into it turns sour."
I, who brag about how carefully and particularly I embrace the comforts of life, find them, when I look at them closely, to be little more than wind. But so what? We are all wind, through and through. And the wind itself, wiser than we are, is content to bluster and shift from corner to corner, doing its proper work without wishing for stability and solidity — qualities that are not its own.
The pure pleasures of the imagination, some say, are the greatest, just as its pure pains are — that was the verdict of Critolaus's famous scales. No wonder: imagination makes its pleasures to order, cuts them out of whole cloth. I see notable examples of this every day, maybe even enviable ones. But I am of a mixed and earthbound constitution. I cannot snap at so simple and single a bait. I let myself be carried along, lazily, by the present pleasures available under the general human law — pleasures intellectually sensual and sensually intellectual.
The Cyrenaic philosophers held that bodily pleasures, like bodily pains, are the more powerful — being double, and being more honest. There are some, as Aristotle says, who reject them out of a kind of savage dullness; and I know others who do it out of ambition. Why don't they go further and give up breathing? Why not live on their own resources, and refuse light because it is free and costs them neither invention nor effort? Let Mars or Pallas or Mercury feed them, instead of Venus, Ceres, and Bacchus, and we shall see how they get on. These swaggering moods can fake a kind of contentment — what won't fancy do? But of wisdom there is not a touch in them. Will they be working on squaring the circle while lying with their wives?
I hate being told to keep my mind in the clouds while my body is at the table. I do not want the mind nailed there, or wallowing there either; I want it to take its seat there — to sit, not to lie down. Aristippus defended only the body, as if we had no soul; Zeno took account only of the soul, as if we had no body. Both were wrong. Pythagoras, they say, followed a philosophy that was all contemplation; Socrates, one that was all conduct and action; Plato found the middle way between them. But people only say that for the sake of talking. The true balance is found in Socrates; and Plato is far more Socratic than Pythagorean, and it suits him better.
When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. And when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift off for a while to other matters, for another while I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of that solitude, and to myself.
Nature, like a mother, has seen to it that the actions she requires of us for our needs should also give us pleasure; she invites us to them not only through reason but through appetite, and it is unjust to break her rules. When I see Caesar and Alexander, in the thick of their greatest business, enjoying human and bodily pleasures so fully, I do not say they were relaxing their souls. I say they were strengthening them — using sheer force of spirit to make all that violent work and laborious thinking submit to ordinary daily life. Wise men, if they had believed the second was their ordinary occupation and the first the extraordinary one.
We are great fools. "He has spent his life in idleness," we say; "I have done nothing today." What — have you not lived? That is not only the most fundamental of your occupations, it is the most illustrious. "If I had been put in charge of great affairs, I would have shown what I could do." Have you known how to think about your life and manage it? Then you have done the greatest work of all. Nature needs no grand stage to show herself; she shows herself equally at every level, behind a curtain as well as in front of one. Have you known how to order your own conduct? Then you have done more than the man who has written books. Have you known how to take your rest? Then you have done more than the man who has taken cities and empires.
The glorious masterpiece of man is to live to the point. Everything else — ruling, hoarding, building — is at best a little appendix, a prop. I love to see a general of an army, at the foot of a breach he is about to assault, give himself up whole and free to his dinner, laughing and talking among his friends. And Brutus, with heaven and earth conspiring against him and against Roman liberty, stealing an hour from his night rounds to read Polybius at his ease. It is the little souls, buried under the weight of business, who cannot cleanly step out of it — who cannot set it down and pick it back up. As Horace says, "Brave hearts, who have borne worse with me — drown your cares in wine today; tomorrow we put out again upon the vast sea."
Whether it is meant in jest or in earnest that "theological wine" and Sorbonne feasts have become a proverb, I find it reasonable that the doctors dine all the more comfortably and cheerfully for having spent the morning profitably and seriously at their lessons. The consciousness of having used the other hours well is the right and savory sauce of the dinner table. That is how the sages lived. Even that inimitable straining after virtue that astonishes us in both Catos — a temper so severe it becomes almost a nuisance — submitted itself gently to the laws of the human condition, and to Venus and to Bacchus. For their own school's precepts require the perfect sage to be as expert and skilled in the use of natural pleasures as in every other duty of life: a discerning heart should come with a discerning palate.
Ease and flexibility, it seems to me, are wonderfully honorable in a strong and generous soul, and become it best. Epaminondas did not think that joining — and joining heartily — in the songs and games and dances of the young men of his city took anything away from the honor of his glorious victories or from the perfect purity of his character. And among all the admirable actions of the elder Scipio, a man worthy to be thought of heavenly descent, nothing gives him more grace than to see him idling like a child, picking up and sorting seashells on the beach, playing run-and-fetch games, amusing himself writing comedies about the commonest doings of ordinary people — and, with his head full of that tremendous campaign against Hannibal and Africa, touring the schools of Sicily and sitting in on philosophy lectures, to the point of arming the blind envy of his enemies back in Rome.
Nor is there anything more remarkable in Socrates than that, old as he was, he found time to take lessons in dancing and in playing instruments, and counted the time well spent. This is the same man who stood in an ecstasy a whole day and night on his feet, before the eyes of the entire Greek army, seized and carried off by some profound thought. The same man who, first among so many brave soldiers, ran to the rescue of Alcibiades when the enemy had him surrounded, covered him with his own body, and pulled him out by main force of arms. The same who, in the Delian battle, lifted up and saved Xenophon after he was thrown from his horse; who, when all Athens was enraged at the shameful spectacle, was the first to step forward to rescue Theramenes as the Thirty Tyrants' guards led him to execution — and gave up that bold attempt only at the urging of Theramenes himself, though just two men in all had followed him. He was known, when a beauty he loved courted him, to hold to a strict abstinence when it mattered. He was known to march to war and to walk on ice barefoot; to wear the same robe winter and summer; to outlast all his companions in bearing hardship; to eat no more at a banquet than at his own plain table. For twenty-seven years he endured, with the same face, hunger, poverty, the unruliness of his children, and the claws of his wife — and at the end, slander, tyranny, prison, chains, and poison. Yet if civility required this man to drink his share, he was also the man in the whole army who came out best from the drinking. And he never refused to play nuts with children, or to ride the hobby-horse with them, and it suited him well; for all actions, says philosophy, equally become a wise man, and equally honor him.
We have material enough, and we should never tire of holding up the image of this great man as the pattern and model of every kind of perfection. There are very few full, clean examples of how to live; and our teaching is wronged every day when we set before ourselves weak and imperfect ones, hardly good for a single use — examples that pull us backward, corrupters rather than correctors. People deceive themselves. It is in fact much easier to travel along the edges, where the extreme serves as boundary, stop, and guide, than by the middle way, wide and open — easier to go by art than by nature. But it is also much less noble, and much less commendable. Greatness of soul does not consist so much in climbing and pressing forward as in knowing how to govern and limit oneself. It counts as great whatever is enough, and it shows its height by preferring moderate things to eminent ones. There is nothing so fine, and so legitimate, as to play the man well and properly; no knowledge so hard to come by as knowing how to live this life well and naturally. And of all our diseases, the most barbarous is to despise our own being.
Whoever wants to set his spirit apart when the body is sick, to keep it from the contagion — let him do it by all means, if he can. But otherwise, let him take the body's side: let him assist it, favor it, not refuse to share in its natural pleasures, but delight in them like a fond spouse — bringing moderation along, if he is the wiser partner, for fear that through carelessness pleasure should get mixed up with pain. Intemperance is the plague of pleasure; and temperance is not its scourge but its seasoning. Eudoxus, who made pleasure the sovereign good, and his companions, who prized it so highly, tasted it in its most charming sweetness by means of temperance — which in them was singular and exemplary.
I order my soul to look on pain and on pleasure with the same steady eye — for, as Cicero says, it is as much a defect for the soul to spill over in joy as to shrink in sorrow — and with the same firmness: but gaily at the one, sternly at the other, and, so far as it can manage, as eager to snuff out the one as to stretch out the other. Seeing good sanely brings with it seeing evil sanely. Pain has something unavoidable in its mild beginnings, and pleasure something avoidable in its excessive endings. Plato couples them together and holds that it is equally the job of fortitude to stand against pain and to stand against the seductive charms of pleasure. They are two fountains: whoever draws from them — city, man, or beast — when he should and as much as he needs, is very fortunate. From the first we should drink as medicine, only of necessity, and sparingly; from the second for thirst, but not to drunkenness. Pain, pleasure, love, and hatred are the first things a child feels; if, when reason comes, those feelings take reason as their guide — that is virtue.
I have a vocabulary all my own. I "pass the time" when the time is bad and disagreeable; when it is good, I do not want to pass it — I taste it again, I hold onto it. One should run across the bad and settle on the good. The common phrases "pastime" and "passing the time" express the habit of those clever people who think they can do nothing better with their life than let it run out and slide away — to pass over it, sidestep it, and, as far as they can, ignore it and shun it, as if it were some tiresome, contemptible thing. But I know life to be something else entirely. I find it valuable and pleasant, even in this last decline of it, where I now hold it; and nature has put it into our hands dressed in such favorable circumstances that we have only ourselves to blame if it weighs on us or escapes us uselessly. As Seneca says, "It is the fool's life that is joyless and anxious, and given over wholly to the future."
Even so, I am composing myself to lose mine without regret — but as a thing that is by its nature losable, not as a thing that is a burden and a torment. Not minding death really suits only those who have enjoyed living. There is a good husbandry in enjoying life. I enjoy it twice as much as others do, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the attention we give it. Especially now, when I see my remaining time is short, I want to deepen its weight. I will stop the swiftness of its flight by the swiftness of my grip, and make up for the speed of its running out by the vigor of my use of it. The shorter my lease on life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.
Others feel the sweetness of contentment and prosperity; I feel it as much as they do, but not as something gliding past. It should be studied, savored, chewed over, so that we can give fitting thanks to Him who grants it. Other people enjoy their pleasures the way they enjoy sleep — without knowing it. So that even sleep should not escape me so stupidly, I used once to have mine interrupted, so that I could catch a glimpse of it. I deliberate with myself over a contentment; I do not skim it, I sound its depths — and I bend my reason, grown cranky and peevish with age, to take it in. Do I find myself in some calm and settled state? Is there some pleasure tickling me? I do not let my senses pilfer it alone; I bring my soul in on it — not to get entangled there but to take delight there, not to lose itself but to find itself there. And I set the soul, for its part, to look at itself in this prosperous moment, to weigh its happiness, appraise it, and amplify it.
It reckons how much it owes to God that its conscience and its inner passions are at peace; that the body is in its natural condition, enjoying in an orderly and adequate way the soft and soothing functions by which He is graciously pleased to balance out the sufferings His justice inflicts on us in its turn. It considers what a benefit it is to be so placed that wherever it casts its eye, the sky around it is calm — no desire, no fear, no doubt troubles the air; no difficulty, past, present, or future, that its imagination cannot pass over without injury. This consideration takes on great luster by comparison with conditions different from mine. So I summon up, in a thousand forms, those whom fortune or their own error tosses and torments — and also those nearer my own case, who accept their good fortune so carelessly, so incuriously. Those are people who truly "pass" their time: they skip over the present, and over what they actually possess, to wait on hope — chasing shadows and vain images that fancy dangles in front of them, like the phantoms said to flit about after death, or the dreams that mock our sleeping senses, which speed up and stretch out their flight the harder they are chased. The fruit and goal of such pursuit is more pursuit — as Alexander said that the purpose of his labor was to labor, thinking nothing done while anything remained to do.
As for me, then: I love life, and cultivate it, just as it has pleased God to grant it to us. I do not go wishing it were free of the need to eat and drink; indeed I would think it at least as pardonable a fault to wish that need were doubled — for, as Seneca says, the wise man is the keenest seeker after natural riches. Nor do I wish we could keep ourselves going by merely placing on the tongue a little of that drug by which Epimenides killed his appetite and stayed alive; nor that we could dully produce children with our fingers or our heels — rather, speaking with reverence, I wish we could also produce them voluptuously with our fingers and heels; nor that the body should be without desire and without its ticklings. These complaints are ungrateful and unfair. I accept with a glad and grateful heart what nature has done for me; I am well pleased with it, and proud of it. We do wrong to that great and all-powerful Giver when we refuse His gift, cancel it, or deface it. Himself all goodness, He has made everything good; as Cicero says, all things that are according to nature are worthy of esteem.
Of philosophy's opinions, I prefer to embrace the most solid ones — that is, the most human, the most our own. My talk, matching my conduct, is low and humble. Philosophy is playing the child, to my mind, when it gets up on its hind legs of logic to preach to us that it is a barbarous match to wed the divine to the earthly, the reasonable to the unreasonable, the strict to the indulgent, the honest to the dishonest; that pleasure is a brutish thing, unworthy of a wise man's taste; that the only enjoyment he gets from his fair young wife is the conscience-pleasure of performing a proper act in its proper order — like pulling on his boots for a useful journey. May philosophy's followers have no more right, nerve, or vigor with their brides than there is in its lesson!
That is not what Socrates says — and he is philosophy's master and ours. He values bodily pleasure as it deserves, but he prefers the pleasure of the mind, as having more force, more constancy, more ease, more variety, more dignity. The mind's pleasure, by his account, by no means walks alone — he is not so fanciful as that — it merely walks first. For him temperance is the moderator of pleasures, not their enemy.
Nature is a gentle guide, but no more gentle than prudent and just. As Cicero says, "we must enter into the nature of things, and see thoroughly what she requires." I hunt for her track everywhere. We have muddled it over with artificial trails, and that is why the sovereign good of the Academics and the Peripatetics — "to live according to nature" — becomes so hard to pin down and explain; and likewise its neighbor, the Stoic good, "to consent to nature." Is it not an error to count any actions less worthy because they are necessary? They will never knock it out of my head that the marriage of pleasure with necessity is a most suitable match — a match, as an ancient says, in which the gods always conspire. Why do we tear apart, by divorce, a structure woven of such close and brotherly correspondence? On the contrary, let us bind it tighter with mutual services. Let the mind rouse and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body steady and fix the lightness of the mind. As Augustine says, he who praises the soul's nature as the supreme good and condemns the flesh as evil shows that he desires the soul carnally and flees the flesh carnally — for he judges by human vanity, not divine truth.
In this gift God has made us, there is nothing unworthy of our care. We are accountable for it down to a single hair. And it is no token errand for a man to conduct mankind's nature according to its condition: it is express, plain, and the principal commission of all, and the Creator has given it to us seriously and sternly. Authority alone has power over common understandings, and weighs more in a foreign tongue — so let us have one more charge at it here. As Seneca says, "who will deny that it is folly's own trademark to do what must be done sluggishly and grudgingly — to push the body one way and the mind another, and be torn apart between utterly opposite motions?"
To see this for yourself, ask any one of these men, some day, to tell you what notions and speculations he was stuffing into his head when they made him turn his thoughts away from a good meal and grudge the time spent eating. You will find there is nothing so insipid among all the dishes on your table as that fine meditation of his (most of the time we would do better to sleep outright than to stay awake for what we stay awake for), and that all his thoughts and reasonings are not worth your worst plate of stew. Even if they were the raptures of Archimedes himself — what of it? I am not here speaking of, and I do not mix in with our rabble of ordinary men and the vanity of the desires and musings that distract us, those venerable souls raised by ardent devotion and religion to constant and conscientious meditation on divine things: souls that, by the force of a vivid and vehement hope, taste in advance the eternal nourishment which is the final aim and last step of Christian desire, the only constant and incorruptible pleasure — and so disdain to attend to our needy, fluid, ambiguous comforts, and easily hand over to the body the care and use of its sensual, temporal feed. That is a privileged study. Between ourselves, I have always observed that supercelestial opinions and subterranean morals go together with singular harmony.
Aesop, that great man, saw his master pissing as he walked. "What next," he said, "must we shit as we run?" Let us manage our time as well as we can; plenty of it will still lie idle or badly spent. The mind hardly admits it has enough other hours for its own business that it must refuse to keep the body company for the little stretch the body requires for its needs.
These people want to get outside themselves; they would escape from the man. It is madness: instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they sink. These transcendental humors frighten me, like high and unreachable places. Nothing in the life of Socrates sits harder with me than his ecstasies and his dealings with his daemon; nothing is so human in Plato as the very things for which they call him divine. Of our sciences, the ones that have climbed highest seem to me the most earthbound and low; and I find nothing so humble and so mortal in the life of Alexander as his fantasies about his own immortality. Philotas pricked that bubble nicely in a letter, congratulating him on the oracle of Jupiter Ammon that had enrolled him among the gods: "For your sake I am glad of it; but I pity the men who will have to live with a man, and obey a man, who exceeds the measure of a man and is not content with it." As Horace says, "because you carry yourself below the gods, you rule."
The graceful inscription with which the Athenians honored Pompey's entry into their city says just what I mean: "You are a god in so far as you confess yourself a man."
It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine, for a man to know how to enjoy his being rightfully. We go looking for other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and step outside ourselves because we do not know what it is like within. Yet it is no use climbing onto stilts, for even on stilts we must still walk on our own legs; and on the loftiest throne in the world, we are still sitting only on our own behind.
The fairest lives, to my mind, are those that fall into the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without extravagance. Now old age needs to be treated a little more tenderly. Let us commend it to that god who is the protector of health and of wisdom — but of a gay and sociable wisdom. As Horace prays:
Grant me, Apollo, to enjoy what I have, in good health; leave my mind sound and whole; let my old age be without dishonor, and not without music.