A room at the back of the shop

Let's discuss Montaigne.  No, I'm not joking. Yes, it is a swerve, but we can't laugh about bums every day. Well, I mean, yes, we probably can? 

But if I am going to maintain this mail-out as a daily thing - or a dailyish thing, I really should do some other work at some point - it's going to rise and fall with my mood, and my mood right now is pretty low. I'm sad and frustrated and lonely. I need a friend, but my nearest friend is over three hours drive away, and even if I could get to them I'd have to stay six feet away when what I would really want to do is give them a huge, snotty, tearful hug, but I can't, because for all we know my tears and snot are LETHAL WEAPONS. You all know what I'm talking about. Times are hard. So we must go looking for friends elsewhere, and one of the most reliable places to look is in the pages of a book.  Therefore, Montaigne.  Back in Costa Rica, I was surprisingly calm about the possibility that I might be stuck there for several months, until one evening when my Kindle broke, with a 27% read Hilary Mantel novel forever trapped inside it. It's one thing to be caught indefinitely in a foreign jungle with a fully stocked Kindle, quite another to find yourself there with nothing to read. There weren't a lot of books at the retreat, just a handful that other people had left behind. I whizzed through Normal People in two days (really very good, lots more shagging than anticipated) and Ishmael in an afternoon (talking gorilla dispenses spiritual wisdom, better than it sounds), which left me with the book I mentioned a few emails ago about octopus intelligence, which had been a Christmas present from my cousin Tom. This is Tom: 

He is the one in the kayak.  Anyway, the octopus book is great, but I wasn't certain it would see me through the rest of the holiday plus the flight home (I couldn't be sure that David Tennant would send me into a coma). Fortunately, one of my fellow guests at the retreat had a couple of books she'd already finished and was kind enough to pass them on to me. One was a book of Confucius, and the other was a selection from Montaigne, named after the first essay in the collection: On Solitude.  Well, the octopus book was pretty dense (in a good way) and it actually kept me going just fine - I'm still working my way through it - but yesterday, the Montaigne caught my eye. I could do with a little advice on solitude, I thought. Solitude is hitting me quite hard right now. Maybe Montaigne has written something here that's going to help me out.  GUESS WHAT? He did.  I first tried to read Montaigne about ten years ago and I really didn't get it. I am easily put off by stuffy-sounding translations of old texts (one day let's chat about how far I got [didn't get] in Proust), and I admit, shamefully, that pretty much all philosophy sets off my THIS IS GOING TO BE BORING, THIS IS GOING TO BE HARD klaxon. In fact the number of philosophers I have read any significant quantity of could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and I would have some spare fingers. But having dipped a toe (or finger) into Montaigne, I'm wondering if maybe I have been approaching this wrong. Instead of picking up a random philosophy book, reading a few paragraphs of it, and then thinking AAAARRGGH NO, TOO DIFFICULT, maybe I needed to wait until there was something I really needed to learn, a burning question I had, and then go looking for answers.  And today I have a question. Today my question is: how am I going to get through this isolation? And now Montaigne does not seem boring at all.  According to Sarah Bakewell's How To Live: A Life Of Montaigne, which I also found, incorrectly, boring the first time I tried to read it, but by great good fortune is on the shelf at the house here, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) spent the first half of his life mainly terrified of dying. Then, in his thirties, he had a truly horrific fall from his horse (there are descriptions of vomiting blood clots that I prefer not to dwell on although here I am dwelling on them, such is the nature of things you don't want to dwell on), nearly died, and realised that dying was actually no big deal at all. He quit his job - as a result? not as a result? it isn't clear - and within a couple of years he started writing essays on pretty much anything that took his fancy. The essays are curious, friendly, not didactic, just his own observations on himself and the world around him, sometimes odd, sometimes funny, often contradictory, always wise. Montaigne, in other words, is the secular patron saint of bloggers everywhere. I'm rather falling in love with him, at a distance of over 400 years, though as we've established, what difference does that make now?  There are 107 essays, running to over a thousand pages, and I have barely scratched the surface of the surface. You can read his essays on sleep and on liars and on cannibals and on thumbs - nothing on bumjets, though maybe they get a mention in the essay entitled "That We Laugh And Cry For The Same Thing" - but for now let's stick with On Solitude.  It's a short essay, but it packs a lot in, and I'm not going to summarise it all here. The part of the essay that really struck a chord was his argument that there is a lot more to solitude than just being on your own. If your mind is still in the outside world, then you will never succeed in being alone. (He's talking about voluntary solitude here; the next bit goes into involuntary solitude.)

It is not enough to withdraw from the mob, not enough to go to another place: we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession [...] We take our fetters with us; our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind; our imagination is full of them.

What we have to do, he says, is to learn to withdraw within ourselves, learn to be content in our own company, so that if ever we only have our own company to draw on, then we will be prepared for it. The room at the back of the shop in the quote below is both literal and metaphorical I think. (It's no surprise that Virginia Woolf was a huge Montaigne fan.)

We should have wives, children, property and above all good health... if we can: but we should not become so attached to them that our happiness depends on them. We should set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum. Within it our normal conversation should be of courselves, with ourselves, so privy that no commerce or communication with the outside world should find a place there; there we should talk as if we had no wife, no children, no possessions, no followers, no menservants, so that when the occasion arises that we must lose them it should not be a new experience to do without them. We have a soul able to turn in on herself; she can keep herself company; she has the wherewithal to attack, to defend, to receive and to give. Let us not fear that in such a solitude as that we shall be crouching in painful idleness: in solis sis tibi turba locis [in lonely places, be a crowd unto yourself]. 'Virtue,' says Antisthenes, 'contents herself, without regulations, words or actions.' Not even one in a thousand of our usual activities has anything to do with our self.

Obviously ideally we'd have all already got started with this, long before now, and in a way I have, with my meditation practice. But he is right: I am not my trips to the theatre and the cinema, I am not my local pub, I am not my stroll around the shops, I am not my storytelling nights, I am not my London park on a sunny Saturday, I am not my friends. And I am not my online yoga session, I am not my Zoom drinks, I am not my Twitter feed, I am not my live streamed National Theatre play, I am not my one essential outing for exercise a day, I am not my books, I am not my writing, I am not this email. I am myself, and I'm still here.  And if nothing in that speaks to you, if you are feeling far from solitary, quite the opposite in fact, here's another moment from the same essay which might just resonate for a few of you...

[People] often think they have left their occupations behind then they have merely changed them. There is hardly less torment in running a family than in running a whole country.

I highly recommend reading the essay in full - you can pick up the tiny edition (13 essays) I'm reading for 4.50 on Amazon (sorry to keep linking to Amazon but the places I usually go to are not currently delivering - if you have a local bookshop that is still sending books, please do buy from them instead).  I will now reture to my room at the back of the shop. Back next week, lest I overstretch myself and turn into the Dowager Duchess of Grantham.