Montaigne break!

Yesterday, on my walk, I crested the ridge and saw, first, a cow, eating, then the tiny wet calf in the grass next to it, and then I realised that the cow was eating the umbilical cord. If I hadn't stopped on the way there to buy hair dye in Boots I would have witnessed the miracle of birth. The price of vanity.  Today it's raining. The internet is too abrasive for my mood, I've finished Hilary Mantel and the intelligent octopuses (those are two separate things, but just imagine if that were a band) and I'm drawn back to reading Montaigne.  The second essay in this short collection is appropriately titled On Books. Montaigne is a cheerfully modest literary companion. "If anyone is looking for knowledge let him go where such fish are to be caught: there is nothing I lay claim to less," he says in the opening paragraph. "I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing."  Hurray! Me neither. Or is that quite true? In the room where I am writing, there are two large bookshelves filled with books belonging to me which I left behind when I moved to the Netherlands. Looking around them, I admit that for most I only have the vaguest sense of what is in them - a broad idea of the plot, tone, a character or two - but what I do remember vividly is when I read them and how they made me feel. So I know that I tore through all the Tales of the City books after an English teacher recommended them to me when I was 15 and I fell in love with all the characters, including San Francisco itself, and that I read Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way when I was working in the Crockatt & Powell bookshop on Lower Marsh and I cried my eyes out and so did my boss, who said he never cries at books but clearly made an exception, and that reading Jonathan Coe's House of Sleep at university at the powerful urging of one of my housemates impressed me so much that I read all his other books in quick succession, but do I remember what House of Sleep was about? Not at all, not a crumb of it.  All of which suggests that the reason to keep all these books is to reread them once your memory has conveniently wiped out all the details, but actually that isn't why I keep my books, not really - I very rarely reread (although... writing this post is making me rethink that policy). It's because when I see their spines, I get a tiny dose of the feeling they once brought me. It's like seeing a photograph of an old holiday. The feeling of Florence remains long after the treasures of the Uffizi have faded.  Returning to Montaigne, delightfully, he can't be bothered to read anything that's too much like hard work.

I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even for learning's sake however precious it may be. From books, all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime... If I come across difficult passages in my reading I never bite my nails over them: after taking a charge or two I let them be... If one book wearies me I take up another, applying myself to it only during those hours when I begin to be gripped by boredom at doing nothing.

You and me both, Michel. In fact, how ironic that you yourself were cast aside until I was gripped by boredom at doing nothing. I read an interesting theory once - read and retained, although not well enough to know where I read it - that said how enjoyable you find a book is related to how quickly you can read it. Everyone has an optimum reading pace, a words-per-minute, and if the book is too dense for you to get through at that speed, you will find it boring regardless of what it is about. It's just too tiring, like walking uphill.  Montaigne then tears through his critiques of various ancient texts, which are more to his taste than modern books. (Montaigne was born in 1533 and died in 1592; Shakespeare was born in 1564 and started writing in the early 1590s. Which means Montaigne just missed out, which I find personally devastating on his behalf. Shakespeare read Montaigne though, and sprinkled him liberally over Hamlet, The Tempest and King Lear.) Montaigne's views on the classics are mostly lost on me, I have to admit, but I did slow down to admire his takedown of Cicero. I have somehow come to believe that the writers of the ancient world are beyond critique, that if you struggle with them them problem must be with you (me) - so imagine my delight when I came across this:

To tell the truth boldly (for once we have crosesd the boundaries of insolence there is no reining us in) his style of writing seems boring to me, and so do all similar styles. For his introductory passages, his definitions, his sub-divisions and his etymologies eat up most of his work; what living marrow there is in him is smothered by the tedium of his preparations. If I spend an hour reading him (which is a lot for me) and then recall what pith and substance I have got out of him, most of the time I find nothing but wind...

This means I am rather inclined to trust Montaigne when he praises Seneca and Plutarch ("Seneca is full of pithy phrases and sallies; Plutarch is full of matter") and might even give them a go myself. (Though let's be honest with ourselves: it will need to be a pretty long lockdown before I get there.)  Towards the end of the essay, Montaigne shares this:

To help my defective and treacherous memory a little - and it is so extrememly bad that I have more than once happened to pick up again, thinking it new and unknown to me, a book which I had carefully read years ago and scribbled all over with my notes - I have for some time now adopted the practice of adding at the end of each book (I mean of each book I intend to read only once) the date when I finished reading it and the general judgement I drew from it...

Who amongst us has not got well into a "new" book before realising we have in fact read it before? But I like this idea of leaving the date of completion and a few notes at the end, a little message from present me to future me, a bit more salt with which to season the sense memory, because maybe it would be nice, in fact, to remember Florence beyond the snapshot and the lingering taste of ice cream.

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