The Swerve

Excellent review in yesterday's Times by Montaigne biographer Sarah Bakewell, on a new account of ancient atomism in Lucretius (and before him Democritus and Epicurus)...

The Swerve - How the World Became Modern - By Stephen Greenblatt - Book Review - NYTimes.com:

“What human beings can and should do is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.”

Montaigne, too, was a fan of ancient atomism. He scooped Nietzsche on eternal recurrence:

“Since the movements of the atoms are so varied, it is not unbelievable that the atoms once came together in this way, or that in the future they will come together like this again, giving birth to another Montaigne.”

In a separate review, Dwight Garner finds a Woody Allen angle and adds that for Lucretius

“there is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design.” Religious fear, Lucretius thought, long before there was a Christopher Hitchens, warps human life... living a full life include[s] friendship and philanthropy and fundamental happiness.

As for the atomism itself,

the philosopher George Santayana would call this “the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.” 

Well, maybe... 'til Darwin had the best idea ever.

'via Blog this'

Montaigne

We were talking about Montaigne the other day...

well, a handful of us were. He was the subject of a New Yorker feature story by Jane Kramer in September, abstracted here:

Every French schoolchild learns the date: February 28, 1571, the day that the educated nobleman Michel de Montaigne retired from court and public duties, retreated into the tower of his family castle, near Bordeaux, shut the door, and began to write. It was his thirty-eighth birthday. His plan was to spend the second half of his life looking at himself. Montaigne’s pursuit of the character he called Myself lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision that he called “essais.”

His first two books of essays appeared in 1580. By the time he published a third book, in 1588, everyone in France with a philosophic bent and a classical education had read the first two. His books were utterly original. They were not confessional nor were they autobiographical. They made no claim to composing the narrative of a life, only of the shifting preoccupations of their protagonist in an ongoing conversation with the Greek and Roman writers on his library shelves—and, of course, with himself. His belief that the self, far from settling the question “Who am I?,” kept leaping ahead of its last convictions was so radical that some describe Montaigne as “the first modern man.”

He left his tower in 1580 for a year of traveling. He left it again in 1581 to become the mayor of Bordeaux. He was also a close friend and confidant of Henri de Navarre, as well as his emissary to the court of Henri III.

“On Vanity,” perhaps Montaigne’s greatest essay, is a meditation on dying and, at the same time, on writing. It draws pretty much the whole cast of characters from his library into the conversation. The penultimate pages are an homage to Rome. But he ends the essay in the oracular heart of Greece, with the Delphic admonition to “know thyself,” and in a few pages turns the idea of vanity on its head, defending his pursuit of himself as the only knowledge he, or anyone, can hope to gain. It is the one argument for a “truth” he makes in a hundred and seven essays.

Montaigne was seven years into the essays when he suffered his first serious attack of kidney stones. When Navarre succeeded to the throne, in 1589, becoming Henry IV, Montaigne wrote to volunteer his services again. In July of 1590, Henry summoned Montaigne to court, but by September Montaigne was too sick to travel. He died at the age of fifty-nine.

NOTE TO SIS: It was great having you here for Thanksgiving weekend! Y'all come back now, hear?!