Introduction

One of my persisting pleasures is reading and thinking about Shakespeare. The notes to my Arbor editions refer often to the 16th century French philosopher Michele Montaigne. I recently decided to read him for myself, with the aim of understanding Shakespeare better. To my surprise I found that Salvador Dali selected and illustrated a book of his essays, and that I could check it out from my local library.

Looking and thinking about Dali is another of my pleasures. These illustrations are as delightful as the essays they illustrate. Yet very few of them are posted on the Web. So I decided to post scanned versions of these illustrations. Yet they would be incomplete without also seeing what Dali was illustrating, namely, specific passages in Montaigne's essays, usually right next to the illustration. So I will type out the relevant passage as well, including sometimes a verse or two from a classical poet that Montaigne quotes. I will mostly use the same translation that Dali used, a 17th century one that very much captures Montaigne's style. It does not translate the quotations from the Latin poets; I will get those translations elsewhere.

So here I go, starting with the drawing on title page and first color illustration. Click on any image if you want to see it larger. To find out about a particular essay, click on its title to the right of where you are now reading. Or click on the word "December" and you will have the whole blog to choose from.

Of course the tortoise symbolizes slowness, and the skull is death. In the face of his slow march toward death, Montaigne writes--and Dali draws.

The next illustration has the words "Homage a la France" on the bottom. Dali's version of Montaigne's portrait reminds me of Shakespeare, as we can see from putting the three side by side.





Is there any basis for the idea that Montaigne and Shakespeare have some connecton? Montaigne’s essays were published in 1580, 1588, and 1595. The first English translation appeared in 1603, by John Florio, although Shakespeare could have seen Florio’s manuscript earlier and perhaps even read it in French.

One Shakespeare play that seems to show clear influence, as we shall see, is Hamlet. The “bad” 1st quarto–an actor’s recall, including about half the play as we know it--was published in 1603, and the “good” 2nd quarto, where the influence appears, in December of 1604. The title “Hamlet” appears in the Stationer’s Registry of plays for 1602. So the influence of Montaigne on Shakespeare is chronologically possible.

My primary endeavor here will be to present Dali in the context of Montaigne; but from time to time I will also bring in Shakespeare. Mostly I will use the mid-17th century Charles Cotton translation of Montaigne that accompanies Dali’s illustrations; but when specific phrasing in Shakespeare on Montaigne is at issue, I will use Florio. There are many more correlations between Montaigne and Shakespeare besides than the ones I will pursue, and in this area I am mostly repeating what others have already said.

Dali’s color illustrations are all about 5 inches wide by 8 inches high. The ink drawings are of varying dimensions, up to 5 by 8.

"Of Custom" and "Of the Education of Children"

This drawing is inserted in the text of the essay “Of Custom, and That We Should Not Easily Change a Law Received,” just before a discussion of Plato. Montaigne relates how Alexander the Great tried to convince the Greeks to treat their dead parents in the manner of India, by eating them, and those of India to bury their dead like the Greeks; he was met with expressions of horror on both sides. Such is the relativity of custom, not founded on anything but itself. However custom must also be shaped, not simply passed down. Some customs need more emphasis than others. Montaigne says:

…‘Tis by this receipt that Plato undertakes to cure the unnatural and preposterous loves of his time: namely, that the public opinion condemns them: and that the poets, and all other sorts of writers, relate horrible stories of them: a recipe, by virtue of which the most beautiful daughters no more allure their father’s lust; nor brothers, of the finest shape and fashion, their sisters’ desire; the very fables of Thyeses, Oedipus, and Macareueus, having with the harmony of their song, infused this wholesome opinion and belief into the tender brains of children… (p. 11f)

Montaigne goes on to say that there are "fundamental and universal reasons" against incest, but they are a matter of "obscure and difficult research." Hence it needs to be presented to society as contemptible by other means than rational argument. Dali's first illustration, then, is of the philosopher condemning what reason tells him should be condemned, and urging others to do likewise. The arm gesture downward may also be a counterweight to Raphael’s famous painting in the Vatican of Plato with his arm pointing upward. Philosophy must be brought to earth.

But Montaigne is not simply for propaganda. He derides authoritarian methods in education. Of a tutor's relationship to his charge, he says:

Let him [the tutor] make him [the student] examine and thoroughly sift everything he reads, and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust. Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to him, than those of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of opinions be propounded to, and laid before him; he will himself choose, if he is able; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured. (p. 27, except the last sentence, which is in Frame, Complete Essays of Montaigne, p. 111)

Montaigne is also for personalized instruction, as opposed to giving the same lessons to pupils of varying abilities:

Such [teachers] as, according to our common way of teaching, undertake with one and the same lesson, and the same measure of direction, to instruct several boys of differing and unequal capacities, are infinitely mistaken; and ‘tis no wonder, if in a whole multitude of scholars, there are not found above two or three who bring away any good account of their time and discipline. (p 26f)

Thus we have in Dali's illustration one teacher and one pupil



The philosopher's head is approximately a dodecohedron, the fifth of the so-called "Platonic solids." Borrowing from the Pythagoreans, Plato theorized about the five so-called “perfect” solids, that is, those of which each of its faces is the same two-dimensional figure, and the sides of those figures are themselves all the same length. The tetrahedral pyramid and the hexahedral cube are the most familiar examples. Here are all of them:


(image from http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/P/Platonic_solid.html)

Plato relates how the creator-god, or “demiurge” used the first four to build the universe. Then he says,

There still remained one construction, the fifth; and the god used it for the whole, making a pattern of animal figures thereon. (Timaeus 55C)

According to Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, p. 218, this figure is the dodecahedron, whose 12 sides are all equilateral pentagons. As the one closest in shape to a sphere, it most closely fits what we see in the sky, the firmament of stars. The animal figures are either the 12 signs of the zodiac or the constellations in general. Plato says later:

To earth let us assign the cubical figure;…and the remainder the least mobile to water, the most mobile to fire, and the intermediate figure to air... (Timaeus 59b-60a)

The icosahedron gets water, the tetrahedron gets fire, and the octahedron gets air. Plato does not explicitly assign an element to the fifth solid, but Platonic tradition has made its element the stuff of the heavens, known as ether or the quintessence.

In relation to Dali, we can say that the dodecahedral head has the shape that represents the whole and the heavens, although from 12 different perspectives. That is what Dali’s tutor endeavors to provide: he is a conduit of the Eternal and of the whole. However the sides of the dodecahedron do not appear all the same: some are larger than others. And some are quadrangles rather than pentagons. Perhaps Dali's tutor is not as unbiased as Montaigne's idealized one.



We will see better examples of the dodecahedron later on. Dali uses it 2 or 3 more times in these illustrations, twice in "Of Coaches" (although one, as the Emperor's head, is not very clear) and once in "Of the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers."



In his other work, Dali uses the dodecahedron most famously as the backdrop of his Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955; image, one of many on Google Images, from http://www.jsmatt.com/custom.html7.html). Again it represents the whole and the transcendent, in a clearly religious setting. Here the faces and sides of the figure are perfectly equal, as an allusion to divine perfection. In the context of the Last Supper, of course, the 12 sided figure also reflects the number of the disciples. In a telephone interview Dali pointed to the many occurrences of the number 12 in our world:

Contrary to the anecdotal and obscure conceptions in paintings on this subject, I wanted to materialize the maximum of luminous and Pythagorean instantaneousness, based on the celestial communion of the number 12: the 12 hours of the day--12 months of the year--the 12 pentagons of the dodecahedron--12 signs of the zodiac around the sun--the 12 apostles around Christ. (Apollo, May 1956, as quoted in Michael Novak, "Salvador Dali's The Sacrament of the Last Supper, a Theological Reassessment," http://ethicscenter.nd.edu/archives/documents/Novak.pdf.)

As Novak points out, the dodecahedron is a symbol of heaven, in which Dali has inserted a luminous torso representing God the Father, a figure similar to that of Christ because "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father," as the Gospel of John quotes Jesus. Since Jesus himself is translucent, hence present in the same sense as the dodecahedron, the painting is really about the mystical presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.

The pentagon, with its five points, is itself a symbol of the quintessence. Its apexes, moreover, form the points of the five pointed star, or pentagram. These points were represented as the end-points of the human figure, for example in Agrippa's Occult Philosophy (1531), atleft below. They are also the five wounds of Christ, as shown in Valeriano Bolzani's Hieroglyphica (1556). (Both images are from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagram.)



But enough about the dodecahedron for now. Toward the end of "On the Education of Children" Dali has inserted an ink drawing, of an older man with children of various ages:



In the text immediately following this drawing Montaigne talks about how old a student should be before he gets lessons in philosophy. He says that "since philosophy is that which instructs us to live, and infancy has there its lessons as well as other ages, why is it not communicated to children?" He objects that "A hundred students have got the pox before they have come to read Aristotle's lecture on temperance. " So:

Away with the thorny subtleties of dialectics, they are abuses, things by which our lives can never be amended: take the plain philosophical discourses, learn how rightly to choose, and then rightly to apply them; they are more easy to be understood than one of Bocaccio's novels; a child from nurse is much more capable of them, than of learning to read or to write. Philosophy has discourses proper for childhood, as well as for the decrepit age of men. (pp. 42-43)

Thus Dali's drawing is of the philosopher relating to children of a variety of ages.

"That Fortune Acts by Rules of Reason"

The next color illustration is in the chapter on the education of children, but it belongs with the quite similar line drawing on the same theme at the end of the next essay, "That Fortune is Oftentimes Observed to Act by the Rules of Reason."

The essay is devoted to illustrating how the accidents of fortune often seem to happen as though by design. Montaigne's prime example is of a father and a son who were both condemned to death by the triumverate, the group of three rulers, Mark Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus, after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Since suicide was considered nobler than execution, the two ran at each other's swords. Here is Montaigne's description of what happened next:

...Fortune so guided the points, that they made two equally mortal wounds, affording withal so much honor to so brave a friendship, as to leave them just strength enough to draw out their bloody swords, that they might have liberty to embrace one another in this dying condition, with so close and hearty an embrace, thathte executioners cut of both their heads at once, leaving the bodies still fast linked together in this noble bond, and their wounds joined mouth to mouth, affectionately sucking in the last blood and remainder of the lives of each other. (p. 62)

Montaigne's conclusion:

"Fortune, truly, in her conduct surpasses all the rules of human prudence...Is there not a direct applicaton of her favor, bounty and piety manifestly discovered in this action?" (p. 61f)

This sentiment is also one that Shakespeare has Hamlet endorse near the end of the play:

Our indiscretion serves us well
When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends
Rough-hew them how we will. (5.2.8ff)

John Robertson pointed out in 1909 that the term “rough-hew” is actually close to one that Montaigne’s first translator, John Florio in 1603, used to translate a different passage making the same point in another essay, “Of Confering”:

…My consultation doth somewhat roughly hew the matter, and by its first shew, lightly consider the same: the maine and chiefe point of the worke I am wont to resigne to heaven. (Montaigne’s Essays, trans. Florio, Vol. III, p. 171; also at http://www.stoics.com/montaigne_3.html).

It would seem that Shakespeare borrowed the term from Florio.



In this drawing put at the end of the essay, the onlookers seem to be pointing to the scene as a model worth emulating. Montaigne, too, admires their courage. But I think what most interests him is the juxtaposition of tenderness and cruelty present in the scene: the tenderness of father and son with the cruelty of the triumvirate.

That ironic juxtaposition was not lost on Shakespeare either. There is a brief interchange between Antony and Octavian in which they mutually agree to execute their own relatives:

ANTONY. These many, then, shall die; their names are prick'd.
OCTAVIUS. Your brother too must die; consent you, Lepidus?
LEPIDUS. I do consent.
OCTAVIUS. Prick him down, Antony.
LEPIDUS. On condition Publius shall not live,
Who is your sister's son.
ANTONY. He shall not live; look, with a spot I damn him... (4.1.1.ff)

This cold-bloodedness toward relatives and even friends is for Montaigne a sign of fear and weakness rather than inner strength, as he says elsewhere. For Shakespeare it is a sign of the inhumanity to which people descend in civil war. We will see another example later, in connection with Montaigne's essay "On Vanity."

"Of Cannibals" and "Of Coaches"

The next essay "On Cannibals," has one ink drawing. The point of the essay is that the customs of so-called "savages" are frequently more humane and cultured than those of our own culture. To be sure, "Everyone for a trophy brings home the head of an enemy he has killed, which he fixes over the door of his house." But:

After having a long time treated their prisoners very well, and given them all the regales they can think of , he to whom the prisoner belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends. They being come, he ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner...and gives to the friend he loves best the other arm...; which being done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, despatch him with their swords. After that they roast him, eat him among them, and send some chops to their absent friends. (p. 71)

Montaigne observes that this "cruel action" does indeed inspire us with horror. But:

I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb in racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not only read, but lately seen, not among inveterate and mortal enemies, but among neighbors and fellow-citizens, and which is worse, under color of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is dead. (p. 72)

Montaigne is referring to documented means of torturing people as they are being executed, as practiced in his own country in his own time.He concludes:

We may call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules of reason; but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them. (p. 72).

In “Of Cannibals” there is a famous parallel to Shakespeare. Montaigne compares the cannibals’ society to that which Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, endorses. Here I cite Florio’s 1603 translation, as the one Shakespeare would have read:.

..It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common, no apparell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falshood, treason, dissimulations, covetousnes, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant would hee finde his imaginarie common-wealth from this perfection?

And here is Shakespeare, The Tempest:

GONZOLO. I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty... (2.1.147ff)

"OF COACHES"

This essay looks at the qualities of rulers in terms of their coaches. Here is what he says about some of the Romans. I have put in bold type the words that Dali is illustrating:...

...Marc Antony was the first at Rome who caused himself to be drawn in a coach by lions, and a singing wench with him. Heliogabalus did since as much, calling himself Cybele, the mother of the gods; and also drawn by tigers, taking upon him the person of the god Bacchus; he also sometimes harnessed two stags to his coach, another time four dogs, and another, four naked wenches, causing himself to be drawn by them in pomp, stark naked too. The Emperor Firmus caused his charito to be drawn by ostriches of a prodigious size, that it seemed rather to fly than roll. (p. 275)

Thus we have Dali's exotic drawing:



Montaigne's point is that such rulers are only showing their weakness and lack of dignity. He seconds the advice of the philosopher Isocrates, who advised his king to spend money on plates and furniture, which can be passed down to his successors, but not on things that will be soon forgotten.



Dali's color illustration refers to Montaigne's reflections in this essay on the butchery inflicted upon the peoples of the Americas by Europeans in his century. These were people who had no weapons except spears, hatchets, and arrows. Here is one short passage:

So many cities leveled with the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people fallen by the edge of the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic of pearl and pepper? Mechanic victories! Never did ambition, never did public animosities engage men against one another in such miserable hostilities, in such miserable calamities. (p. 286)

He goes on to describe the tortures inflicted for the sake of gold against the kings of Mexico and Peru, based on the conquistadors' own reports. "They boast of it and publish it," Montaigne says in amazement (p. 289).

The man sitting on the dodecahedron, staring at Death on horseback, would be the philosopher contemplating this carnage from the perspective of the whole. This time the faces of the solid are all regular; perhaps we may infer that this philosopher, unlike the earlier tutor in "Of the Education of Children," is unbiased; or more likely, it is easier to sit on a regular solid than one made to conform to the shape of a head.

And at the end he gets back to coaches. In battle the king of Peru was "set in a chair of gold in the middle of his army" (p. 292). The Spanish would shoot down its bearers, so as to take the king alive. But as soon as one was killed, more of the Inca soldiers contended to take their place, until finally the Spanish horsemen seized him.

"Of Democritus and Heraclatus"

This essay is about various philosophers' views about life and death. A paragraph near the end talks about Democritus and Heraclitus's contrasting attitudes toward humanity. Democratus laughed at the human condition as "ridiculous and vain," while Heraclitus, when contemplating it, had tears of sorrow in his eyes. Montaigne quotes Juvenal:

One always, when he o'er his threshold stepped,
Laughed at the world; the other always wept.

Montaigne sides with Democritus and Diogenes. He says

I am clearly for the first humour: not because it is more pleasant, but because it expresses more contempt and condemnation than the other, and I think we can never be despised according to our full desert. Compassion and bewailing imply some esteem of and value for the thing bemoaned; whereas the things we laugh at are by that expressed to be of no moment. I do not think that we are so unhappy as we are vain, or have in us as much malice as folly; we are not so full of mischief as inanity; nor so miserable as we are vile and mean. (p. 90f)

I think that in later life Montaigne would have disagreed with this view, as he wrote in other essays in praise of the common people and with compassion for their predicament. For example, at the end of his last essay, “Of Experience,” he says:

The fairest lives, in my opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common and human model: without miracle, without extravagance. (p. 472)

It was only people who suppose themselves better than others that he found laughable. He would have considered both attitudes, contempt and sympathy, appropriate in their place. For his part, Dali, in giving us two portrayals of the one in tears, seems to be emphasizing that one.

Here, Montaigne merely continues in the same vein, contrasting two other Greeks, Diogenes and Timon. I include this passage because it may have suggested to Shakespeare the subject of one of his plays, Timon of Athens:

And therefore Diogenes, who passed away his time in rolling himself in his tub, and made nothing of the great Alexander esteeming us no better than flies, or bladders puffed up with wind, as a sharper and more penetrating, and, consequently in my opinion, a juster judge than Timon, surnamed the Man-hater: for what a man hates he lays to heart. This last was an enemy to all mankind, who passionately desired our ruin, and avoided our conversation as dangerous, proceeding from wicked and depraved natures; the other valued us so little that we could neither trouble nor infect him by our example; and left us to herd one with another, not out of fear, but from contempt of our society: concluding us as incapable of doing good as ill. (p. 91)

In Shakespeare’s play, Timon is just such a man as Montaigne describes.

"Of Drunkenness" and "Of Thumbs"

"OF DRUNKENNESS"



Dali’s first illustration to this essay relates to a verse that Montaigne quotes from Lucretius:

When the strong wine has entered into man,
There follows straight a heaviness of limbs,
A tangle of the legs, as round he reels
A stuttering tongue, an intellect besoaked,
Eyes all aswim, and hiccups, shouts, and brawls.

Montaigne comments:

Other vices discompose the understanding; this totally overthrows it and renders the body stupid. The worst state of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and government of himself. (p. 96)

Yet the dancer in the middle seems drunk in a different sense, her mind set aside her mind so she can just be in her body. Perhaps she is drunk on music rather than wine. So Dali may be criticizing Montaigne a little: sometimes it is good to be out of one's head. Montaigne does qualify his condemnation later, recalling that

As Plato says, 'tis no purpose for a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy; so Aristotle says that no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness; and he has reason to call all transports, how commendable soever, that surpass our own judgment and understanding, madness; forasmuch as wisdom is a regular government of the soul, which is carried on with measure and proportion, and for which she is herself responsible. (p. 104f).

There is a hint here that Montaigne does not really think much of ecstatic visions as a source of wisdom. In fact, on the last page of his last essay he says, "nothing is hard for me to digest in the life of Socrates but his ecstasies and communication with demons" (p. 472).

Shakespeare, like others in the Renaissance, also sees a positive side to madness, most clearly in the insightful ramblings of King Lear on the heath.



Dali's second illustration for this essay is put just before these comments by Montaigne:

Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that good deity who restores to younger men their gayety, and to old men their youth; who mollifies the passions of the soul, as iron is softened by fire; ... drunkenness being, he says, a true and certain trial of every one's nature, and, withal, fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare not attempt when sober. (p. 101f)

All this Dali seems to be heartily endorsing in his drawing.

"OF THUMBS"



"On Thumbs" gives Dali another chance to express his surreal spirit. Montaigne speaks of various ancient customs around thumbs. The best known is the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" gesture in Rome, by which the spectators indicated their verdict on the losing gladiators at the Coliseum. Montaigne quotes Juvenal:

When the people's thumb turns up,
They kill their men to please them.

Evidently the "thumbs up" gesture meant the death-sentence. The thumbs down gesture "was a sign of favor," Montaigne tells us (p. 162). I am not sure what the thumbs up gesture meant for Dali.

"Of Glory," Of Presumption," and "We taste nothing pure"

"OF GLORY"

An old man with a crutch looks over at some memorial to a king's glory. But what he looks at is not the king but the statue of an angel above him. Montaigne says that the reward for courageous action in the course of duty is not glory but something else:

It is not for outward show that the soul is to play its part, but for ourselves within, where no eyes can pierce but our own; there she defends us from the fear of death, or pain, of shame itself; there she arms us against the loss of our children, friends and fortune, and when opportunity presents itself, she leads us on to the hazards of war, "Not for any profit, but for the beauty of merit itself" [Cicero]. (p. 112)

Dali's angel, I think, represents this inner reward in Montaigne. For Montaigne it is vastly more significant than the king beneath. In themselves honor and glory are of no account. Montaigne himself makes no reference to rewards in Heaven, or approval in the eyes of God or angels. It is one's own conscience that matters.

Hamlet speaks in a similar vein:

But I have within that which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.85f).

And he, too, operates from inner necessity rather than any hope of reward.

"OF PRESUMPTION"

What interests Dali is Montaigne's remarks about the little gestures and ways of carrying themselves that people make unconsciously, and yet reveal things about their character. Dali sketches what Montaigne writes:

...It was an affectation conformable with his beauty, that made Alexander carry his head on one side...

...Julius Caesar scratched his head with one finger, which is the fashion of a man full of troublesome thoughts...



...and Cicero, as I remember, was wont to pucker up his nose, a sign of a man given to scoffing....

Dali is having some fun while he makes his money. The irony is that when to put someone on a pedestal is to idealize them; Dali puts the great men's quirks on display.

Then Montaigne turns to his own pretensions, notably in writing. He says:

My works are so far from pleasing me, that as often as I review them, they disgust me:

When I reread I blush, for I see quite enough
Fit to erase, though it was I who wrote the stuff. [Ovid]

I have always an idea in my soul, and some sort of disturbed image, which presents me as in a dream with a better form than that I have made use of; but I cannot catch it nor fit it to my purpose; and even that idea is but of the meaner sort. Hence I conclude that the productions of those great and rich souls of former times are very much beyond the utmost stretch of my imagination or my wish; their writings do not only satisfy and fill me, but they astound me, and ravish me with admiration; I judge of their beauty; I see it, if not to the utmost, yet so far at least as 'tis possible for me to aspire. (pp. 127f)

Dali's drawing is of a melancholy Montaigne-figure observing from his garden wall these sublime apparitions.



There is a color illustration attached to this essay, but I do not see anything in the essay that it illustrates. I think it actually belongs to the next essay.

"THAT WE TASTE NOTHING PURE"



For “That We Taste Nothing Pure,” Dali gives us a statue of a woman with two faces showing opposite emotions. Here is Montaigne:

Our extremist pleasure has some air of groaning and complaining in it: would you not say that it is dying of pain? Nay, when we frame the image of it in its full excellence, we stuff it with sickly and painful epithets and qualities, languor, softness, feebleness, faintness, morbidezza. The most profound joy has more of severity than gayety in it... (p. 156)

Painters hold that the same motions and screwings of the face that serve for weeping, serve for laughter too; and indeed, before the one or the other be finished, do but observe the painter's manner of handling, and you will be in doubt to which of the two the design tends; and the extreme of laughter does, at last bring tears. (p. 157)

The two faces in the drawing do not in fact look much alike. Dali likes to play with us.

Shakespeare also has the same Renaissance love of combining contraries, as for example in Hamlet’s uncle’s opening speech, announcing his marriage to the Queen not long after her husband's death:

KING. Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,...
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife. (1.2.8ff)

In “Of Experience,” Montaigne gives us an eloquent restatement of the point:

Our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things--of diverse tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, sprightly and solemn: the musician who should only effect some of these, what would he be able to do? he must know how to make use of them all, and to mix them; and so we should mingle the goods and evils which are consubstantial with our life; our being cannot subsist without this mixture, and the one part is no less necessary to it than the other. (p. 442f).

Notice the similarity to Shakespeare in All's Well that Ends Well:

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues. (4.3.74ff)

Separated from the essay, this illustration of a red-robed man and a blue-robed woman joined at their posteriors. it is quite obscure. But it is similar to the ink drawing; here is a passage I think fits, more or less:

...common and less speculative souls are found to be more proper for and more successful in the management of affairs; and the elevated and exquisite opinions of philosophy unfit for business. The sharp vivacity of soul, and the suppleness and restless volubility attending it, disturb our negotiations. We are to manage human enterprises more superficially and roughly and leave a great part to fortune;...a man loses himself in the consideration of so many contrary lusters, and so many various forms...(p. 159)

Hence in Dali's color illustration the two opposites are conjoined. The philosopher on the left offers his opposite number a rose, a thing of beauty. The woman on the right, practical and long-suffering, hands him a sheaf of grain, food for the body.

Montaigne elaborates on this contrast between the speculative and the practical soul further in his next paragraph:

He who dives into and in his inquisition comprehends all circumstances and consequence, hinders his elections: a little engine well handled is sufficient for executions, whether of less or greater weight. The best managers are those who can worst give account of how they are so; while the greatest talkers, for the most part, to nothing to the purpose... (p. 159f)

There is much of Hamlet in all this. Hamlet calls himself a "John O'Dreams,/ Unpregnant of my cause" (2.2.563). Later, he observes that:

…the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. (3.1.84ff).

And again:

...Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event—
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward—I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing's to do,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do't. (4.4.39ff)

And about how less thought produces better effect, there are the lines I quoted earlier:

Our indiscretion serves us well
When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends
Rough-hew them how we will. (5.2.8ff)

And earlier in the play, as recited by the Player King:

Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown:
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own. (3.2.206.)

"Of the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers"

Dali has given us three illustrations for this essay. The first is what must have struck him as a novel way to see the resemblance between father and son. We are used to people commenting on children's physical resemblances to their parents, and even occasionally resemblances in ability as they grow up. But at age 45 Montaigne discovers that he has takens after his father by way of a chronic disease he has developed, painful attacks of kidney stones. He writes: '

'Tis to be believed that I derive this infirmity from my father, for he died wonderfully tormented with a great stone in his bladder, he was never sensible of his disease till the sixty-seventh year of his age; and before that had never felt any menace or symptoms of it... I was born above five and twenty years before his disease seized him, and in the time of his most flourishing and healthful state of body, his third child in order of birth, where could his propension to this malady lie lurking all that while? And he being then so far from the infirmity, how could that small part of his substance where with he made me, carry away so great an impression for its share? and how so concealed, that till five and forty years after, I did not begin to be sensible of it? being the only one to this hour, among so many brothers and sisters, and all by one mother, that was ever troubled with it? He that can satisfy me in this point, I will believe him in as many other miracles as he pleases... (p. 169)

Even when he was well, Montaigne says, he suffered from the anxiety that he would get his father’s disease. Hence Dali’s small little man looking up at his lame father.And so we have, in Dali's drawing, the son looking up at the diseased father in fear and wonder.

A larger sense of wonder applies to Dali's color illustration for this essay. The dodecahedron is a frequent image in Dali's work. As I have said already, in Plato’s Timaeus the creator-god or “demiurgos” uses this so-called “Platonic solid” as a model for “the universe as a whole.” Thus it represents creation in general, in all its inscrutable imperfection.



When Dali painted this, the mysteries of genetics were just beginning to unfold. There did in fact turn out to be a basic geometric structure containing the answer to Montaigne's question, the double helix.

Of course there is much we still do not know; future generations will undoubtedly look at our times in the way that we look on Montaigne's. We have also lost some of what was known in his time: much knowledge of natural healing, for example, was lost in the burning of witches that was at a fever pitch in his time, and which Montaigne condemned, in an essay entitled "Of Cripples."

There is also the question of why a creator-god would design our physical vehicle so imperfectly as to allow such unjust suffering to be endured generation after generation. That is a question which is more accessible to Montaigne. He does not offer an answer in this essay, but he does discuss it in later essay, "On Experience." We will consider his remarks in the section on his essay, "That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die."

In the present essay, Montaigne reflects that despite the untold miseries that afflict people, they continue to cling to life, even he, who had often declared himself ready to die whenever death chose (again, see the section on "That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die," which Dali puts later but was written earlier):

I have so inured myself to it as to be content to live on in it; and have found wherein to comfort myself, and to hope; so much are men enslaved to their miserable being, that there is no condition so wretched they will not accept provided they may live!

Make me lame in hand
Lame in foot and thigh,
Shake out my loosened teeth;
While life stays, so stay I. [Seneca] (pp. 164-165).

It may such sentiments that prompted the drawing that appears near the end of this essay, in which a mother offers up her child to heaven, and the angel, I think, is refusing to take him. The angel perhaps corresponds to that force in Montaigne that wills to live despite all.

"Upon Some Verses of Virgil"

This essay is Montaigne's musings on love and marriage, as are Dali's illustrations. Stanley Cavell (in Disowning Knowledge) has already drawn attention to the similarity in theme between Montaigne here and Shakespeare's Othello, although not specifically to the passages that seem to have interested Dali. Dali first gives us a pen and ink drawing. It seems to illustrate two verses of Virgil and Montaigne's comment. Here are the verses:

Who flies too much from Venus sins no less
Than he who does pursue her to excess.

Thou, goddess, thou alone rulest all things,
And without thee naught sees the light of day,
Nor aught groes bright and lovely.

Then Montaigne makes an observation not so much on Virgil's lines but rather on the fashion of viewing Wisdom and Love as mutually exclusive choices, that if one chooses Love one is lost to Wisdom and Justice. It was the so-called "choice of Hercules," either the steep path of Virtue and eternal life or the lazy road of Pleasure and damnation, as portrayed in numerous artworks of the time. Montaigne objects:

I know not who could set Pallas and the Muses at variance with Venus, and make them cold toward Love; but I see no deities so well met, or that are more indebted to one another. Who will deprive the Muses of amorous imaginations, will rob of the best entertainment they have, and of the noblest matter of their work; and who will make Love lose the communication and service of poesy, will disarm him of his best weapons: by this means, they charge the god of familiarity and good will, and the protecting goddesses of humanity and justice, with the vice of ingratitude and unthankfulness. (p. 220)

In this vein, Dali draws a voluptuous nude lying in expectation, while the young man looks only at the high cliffs ahead of him, fists clenched in determination. How absurd!

Then Montaigne turns his thoughts to the subject of marriage. Here is a quotation physically close to the illustration in the book:

Our poet [Virgil] represents a marriage happy in good intelligence, wherein nevertheless there is not much loyalty. Does he mean, that it is not impossible but a woman may give the reins to her own passion, and yield to the importunities of love, and yet reserve some duty toward marriage, and that it may be hurt, without being totally broken? A serving man may cheat his master, whom nevertheless he does not hate. Beauty, opportunity, and destiny (for destiny also has a hand in't), have attached her to a stranger; though not so wholly, peradventure, but that she may have some remains of kindness for her husband. They are two designs, that have several paths leading to them, without being confounded with one another; a woman may yield to a man she should by no means have married, not only for the condition of his fortune, but for those also of his person. (p. 225)

Dali's illustration shows a woman beckoning to a man in the distance. Is he the husband, or a potential lover? I am not sure. We know that ashortly after the time of these illustratons Dali bought his wife her own chateau, to which Dali would come only by appointment, so she could be free with lovers.



Dali's third illustration applies to Montaigne rather generically. He might have had in mind another verse by Virgil that Montaigne quotes:

A fate controls the parts beneath our clothes;
For if the stars forgo their influence,
The strength of manhood will avail thee naught.

Montaigne's comment containts this anecdote:

Galba, …having entertained Maecenas [his King] at supper, and observing that his wife and he began to cast sheep's eyes at one another and to complot love by signs, let himself sink down upon his cushion, like one in a profound sleep, to give opportunity to their desires: which he handsomely confessed, for, at the same time, a servant making bold to lay hands on the plate that stood upon the table, he frankly cried, “What, you rogue? do you not see that I only sleep for Maecenas?” (p. 241)

In the same way, Dali could devote himself to his artistic ambitions in Figueres unburdened of marital obligations.

All of this puts Othello's jealousy around his wife's suspected affair with his boss in a new light, of course. It becomes a service and an honor rather than a cause for shame and vengeance.

"Of Vanity," and "Of Physiognomy"

"OF VANITY"



This drawing seems to illustrate some lines that Montaigne quotes from Horace (Odes I, 35), describing the recurrent times of civil strife that plagued Rome:

By brothers blows, by brothers' blood
Our souls are gashed and stained.
Alas! What horror have we fled?
What crime not wrought? When hath the dread
Of heaven our youth restrained?
Where is the altar unprofaned
By them? (Jacob Zeitlin translation, p. 162-163)

Montaigne was writing in the midst of France's Wars of Religion, not long after the terrible St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Likewise Dali had seen--from a distance, to be sure--his own Catalonia plunged into civil war.

Shakespeare's England had of course seen its own civil war in the War of the Roses, described in his history plays. Here is an example of Shakespeare's similar treatment of the theme. One man comes on stage with the body of another whom he has just slain, his face covered by a visor. The King, Henry VI, is looking on in the background, unobserved.

SON. Who's this? O God! it is my father's face,
Whom in this conflict I unwares have kill'd.
O heavy times, begetting such events!
From London by the King was I press'd forth;
My father, being the Earl of Warwick's man,
Came on the part of York, press'd by his master;
And I, who at his hands receiv'd my life,
Have by my hands of life bereaved him.
Pardon me, God, I knew not what I did!
And pardon, father, for I knew not thee!
My tears shall wipe away these bloody marks;
And no more words til they have flow'd their fill.
KING HENRY. O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!
While lions war and battle for their dens,
Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity.
Weep, wretched man, I'll aid thee tear for tear;
And let our hearts and eyes, like civil war,
Be blind with tears, and break o'ercharged with grief. (III Henry VI 2.5.61f.)

Montaigne was not for civil war, but he also did not ignore the underlying issues, in his time, freedom of worship. He was a close adviser to Henry of Navarre, who eventually became Henry IV of France and ruled France through a brief period of religious tolerance.

Later in the same essay we come upon this drawing of Dali's:



Here Dali is depicting the mood of the text that surrounds it, in which Montaigne describes his feelings when visiting Rome:

Finding myself of no use to this age I throw myself back upon that other; and am so enamored of it, that the free, just, and flourishing state of ancient Rome (for neither love it in its birth nor its old age) interests me to a degree of passion; and therefore I cannot so often visit the places of their streets and houses and those ruins profound as the Antipodes, that it does not always put me into the dumps...I ruminate those great names between my teeth, and make them ring in my ears. Of things that are in some part great and admirable, I admire even the common parts; I could wish to see them talk, walk and sup... (p. 369).

Shakespeare obliges him with his Roman plays, where these great figures do indeed “walk, talk, and sup,” and who, as Montaigne concludes, “by their example, give us so many good instructions, knew we how to follow them” (p. 369).

Montaigne emphasizes that almost nothing remained of the ancient city. New palaces were simply built over the rubble of the old. The palace in the background is new; only the headless statue is of the past.

"OF PHYSIOGNOMY"



Montaigne describes his thought in the midst of civil war, subject not only to the two sides but also to those who would take advantage of the general lawlessness. And he was a Catholic in a region dominated by Protestants. Montaigne ponders his situation:

I was already considering to whom, among my friends, I might commit a helpless and decrepit age; and having turned my eyes quite round, I found myself bare. ..At last I saw that it was safest for me to trust to myself in my necessity; and if it should so fall out, that I should be but upon cold terms in fortune's favor, I should so much the more pressingly recommend me to my own, and attach myself and look to myself all the more closely...( p. 384f.)

So it is that Dali illustrates this movement of turning one's eyes "quite round," and finding oneself "bare"--all except for one's virtues or vices, which were conventionally represented by the planets.

In such times as his, when everyone sees himself on the brink of total ruin,” one must “have his courage supplied with the strongest and most vigorous provisions” (p. 385). And more than just this one virtue is required. Montaigne gives examples from his own life.

One time, during the Wars of Religion, a Protestant neighbor asked for refuge in his house, for him and whoever of his men survived, to escape some enemies on the road. Montaigne obliged. Then bit by bit others came, and Montaigne began to wonder if perhaps the whole thing was a ruse. But he decided that since he began by being courteous, he would continue that way, because "I could not disengage myself from them without spoiling all" (p. 400). So he continued in as kind a manner as he had started. The result was that the chief of the men simply had them all ride away. Later the neighbor said that Montaigne's "countenance and frankness had snatched the treachery out of his hands" (p. 400).

Thus it is a combination of virtues, especially an air of innocence and good-will, and not just courage, that saved him.

However, for Montaigne it was not only that. He observes:

I am, moreover, .a man who willingly commit myself to Fortune, and throw myself headlong into her arms, I have hitherto found more reason to applaud than to blame myself for so doing, having ever found her more discreet about, and a greater friend to my affairs, than I am myself. There are some actions in my life whereof the conduct may justly be called difficult or, if you please, prudent; of these, supposing the third part to have been my own, doubtless the other two-thirds were absolutely hers. We make, methinks, a mistake, in that we do not enough trust to heaven with out affairs, and pretend to more from our own conduct than appertains to us; and therefore it is that our designs so often miscarry. Heaven is jealous of the extent that we attribute to the right of human prudence above its own, and cuts it all the shorter by how much the more we amplify it. (p. 400)

And so Dali illustrates these words with a friar bowing to heaven. We have to treat Heaven in the same non-threatening way that we would treat a political superior to whom we are beholden.

This is of course something he has said before, and which Shakespeare had Hamlet notice as well, in his comment that "There's a divinity shapes our ends." But our own humility in relation to this divinity also matters.

Montaigne's image here does capture some of the sense of this passage. But he would probably have disliked the saintly get-up; he has already, in “Of Cannibals,” decried the cruelty justified in the name of religion; And in “On Experience” he comments, “There are two things I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct” (Frame translation, p. 856). Montaigne’s generic image of appropriate behavior is that of the common peasant, who submits to what comes but keeps his common sense.

Montaigne goes on to give another example in the same vein. Again the chief of the pillagers changes his mind, by the courage by which the author conducted himself. For example, he had freely declared his Catholic faith to this Protestant. And in particular it was the way these qualities showed on his face--hence the essay's title, "On Physiognomy." His face and manner showed courage but no haughtiness, which the pillager might have wanted to lay low. Montaigne observes:

If my face did not answer for me, if men did not read in my eyes and in my voice the innocence of my intention, I had not lived so long without quarrels and without giving offense, seeing the indiscreet liberty I take to say, right or wrong, whatsoever comes into my head, and to judge rashly of things. (p. 402)

Rashness, of course, is the excess of courage. As the owner of an isolated chateau, and for a time Mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne was often required to make snap decisions on insufficient knowledge. Rashness was a necessity.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Hamlet makes a similar endorsement of rashness, recounting to his friend Horatio what occurred on the sea voyage to England that his uncle had forced upon him:

…Rashly--
And praised by rashness for it: let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well…
--Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf’d about me, in the dark,
Grop’d I to find out them, had my desire… (5.2.6)

Hamlet rashly rifled the pockets of his traveling companions in the night. What he found was a letter from his uncle to the King of England, sealed with the King’s own seal. Hamlet broke the seal and read the letter, written in his uncle’s hand: it was an order to execute him, in lieu of the customary tribute money. If Hamlet had thought about what he was doing, he probably wouldn’t have dared to do it. But “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends.” Hamlet had learned the same "fair" handwriting as his uncle, and even had with him his father's seal, identical to the one his uncle now used. The forgery of a new letter was easily accomplished.

In Montaigne’s case, God protected the innocent. In addition, for Montaigne, the virtues of goodwill, straightforwardness, charitableness, and humility tended to inspire the same in others.

Here Shakespeare might have added qualifiers. It depends upon one's opponents. Do they feel themselves free to honor such qualities? Or do they feel themselves bound to suspect treason and danger even in the kindest of faces? I am thinking of England's Henry VIII beheading Sir Thomas More; or his contemporary, Emperor Charles IV, burning countless Protestants at the stake, regardless of their humility and goodwill. Had Montaigne been an ordinary Protestant in the hands of renegade members of the Catholic League, would his virtues have helped? The same question would arise if he were someone accused of witchcraft by either Protestants or Catholics. People's hearts are often hardened by what seems to them to threaten the basic structure of their society. Hamlet, once set on betraying and killing his king, was in the same predicament.

Montaigne knows full well about such situations. The point is, to the extent one is able, to prevent them from occurring, so that people are not so threatened, even if one has to hide one's fears, suspicions, and even knowledge of others' plots in order to do so. That is what Montaigne does in his first example, hiding his suspicions about his neighbor's true intent and continuing to act with good will. That is what Hamlet learns too late.

"That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die"

Now we come to that most Shakespearean of images, the young man with a skull. Montaigne quotes Horace. First I will give Zeitlin's translation:

One road, and to one bourne
We all are goaded. Late
Or soon will issue from the urn
Of unrelenting Fate
The lot that in your bark exiles us all
To undiscovered shores.

You will perhaps notice the similarity here to Hamlet's words in his "To be or not to be" soliloquy:

"...the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns. (Hamlet 3.3.1.78ff)

But Frame's version of the Horace is

We are all forced down the same road. Our fate
Tossed in the urn, will spring out soon or late,
And force us helpless into Charon's bark,
Passengers destined for eternal dark. (Complete Essays, p. 57)

This version is not quite so Shakespearean. Zeitlin in 1933, consciously or unconsciously, is echoing Hamlet. The play itself echoes a different source, namely Cardanus, Comfort, Bk. 2, 1576 translation: "...there is nothing that doth better or more truly prophesy the end of life than when a man dream that...he traveleth in countries unknown without hope of return..."

We come soon enough to the man with the skull. In the text shortly after Dali's full-page image, Montaigne says of death:

Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thought as death...The Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room to serve for a memento to their guests.

Look on each day as if it were your last,
And each unlooked-for hour will seem a boon. [Horace]

Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die, has unlearned to serve. There is nothing of evil in life, for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil, to know how to die, delivers us from all subjection and constraint. (p. 300)

Hence it is good to talk to a human skull once in a while. This is not the end of his argument. What follows is impossible to summarize --or to illustrate-- and anyway, he said it better later. Here is the most famous part:

I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my garden's not being finished...(pp. 302-303)

Dali picks up the thread a few pages later. Montaigne has noticed that when ill he has less interest in life than when well. Nature gives us misery, that we may more easily leave life.



Then he observes:

Caesar, to an old weather-beaten soldier of his guard, who came to ask him leave that he might kill himself, taking notice of his withered body and decrepit motion, pleasantly answered, "Thou fanciest, then, that thou art yet alive." Should a man fall into this condition on the sudden, I do not think humanity capable of enduring such a change; but nature, leading us by the hand, an easy and, as it were, an insensible pace step by step conducts us to that miserable state, and by that means makes it familiar to us, so that we are insensible of the stroke when our youth dies in us, though it be really a harder death than the final dissolution of a languishing body, than the death of old age; forasmuch as the fall is not so great from an uneasy being to none at all, as it is from a sprightly and flourishing being to one that is troublesome and painful. The body, bent and bowed, has less force to support a burden; and it is the same with the soul... (pp. 304-305)

In his later essay, "On Experience," he makes the same point in fewer words:

God is favorable to those whom he makes die by degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age; the last death will be so much the less painful; it will kill but a quarter of a man or but half a one at most; ...'Tis so I melt and steal away from myself... (p. 456)

The point is reminiscent of King Lear, when Shakespeare has Edgar comment on the sight of his father the Duke of Gloucester, recently blinded by one of Lear's sons-in-law:

EDGAR. But who comes here? My father, poorly led?
World, world, O world!
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,
Life would not yield to age. (King Lear 4.1.10ff)

As the editor's note to these lines explains, the meaning is that if it were not for the hateful changes in our worldly conditions, we would not be willing to let the world go as we age and die (Arbor ed. of King Lear, p. 304) .

At the end of the essay Montaigne imagines a long monologue by Mother Nature. It starts:

"Go out of this world," says she, "as you entered into it; the same pass you made from death to life, without passion or fear, the same, after the same manner, repeat from life to death. Your death is a part of the order of the universe, 'tis a part of the life of the world.

Men live and die by turns, and each
In turn to others hands the torch of life,
As runners do. (Lucretius.) (p. 306)

Another section repeats the point about the inevitability of death, but by means of a quote from Lucretius puts it in the context of the unity of opposites and a return to the beginning:

Does not all the world dance the same brawl that you do? Is there anything that does not grow old, as well as you? A thousand men, a thousand animals, a thousand other creatures, die at the same moment that you die:

No night has ever followed day, no day the night,
That has not heard, amid the newborn infants' squalls,
The wild laments that go with death and funerals. (Lucretius)

The verse, too, is reminiscent of Lear, when Lear says, among the lamentations of two old men:

LEAR. We came crying hither:
Thou knowst the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee: mark me.
GLOUCESTER. Alack, alack the day!
LEAR. When we are born we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools... (4.6.172ff)

Toward the end of Mother Nature's monologue, Dali inserts his image of death as Nature:



Or in Montaigne's words, above and below this image:

"...Water, earth, air, and fire, and the other parts of this creation of mine, are no more instruments of thy life than they are of thy death. Why dost thou fear thy last day? it contributes no more to thy dissolution than every one of the rest: the last step is not the cause of lassitude; it does but confess it. Every day travels toward death: the last only arrives at it." These are the good lessons our mother Nature teaches. (p. 310).

We have reached the end of the essay. But Montaigne is not done thinking about death. His last essay, “Of Experience,” written 14 years after “To Study Philosophy is to Learn How to Die,” and four years before his death at age 60, has new things to say about it. Since Dali's illustration for “Of Experience” is on a different theme, I will take up his later thoughts on death now.

First, he sees his repeated bouts of excruciating pain from his kidney stones, suffered in the expectation of its remission, all as so many rehearsals for his eventual departure from this world. He imagines his mind telling him, "If thou embracest not death, at least thou shakest hands with it once a month." As a result:

To give thee means to judge aright, and to assume the resolution of a man of courage, it presents to thee the state of thy entire condition, both good and evil, the one while a very cheerful and another an unsupportable life, in one and the same day; whence thou hast more cause to hope that it will one day surprise thee without menace; and that being so conducted to the water side [i.e. the bank of the River Styx], still thinking thyself to be upon the accustomed terms, thou and thy confidence will at one time or another be unexpectedly wafted over. (p. 445).

Whenever Montaigne has his attacks, they motivates him once again to strengthen his courage and his character, as well as granting him more time in which to do so. Then, when he really is dying, perhaps from his expectation that life will soon be back to normal (while being prepared for the worst as usual), he will die filled with that same hope and confidence.

Montaigne also puts another aspect of the fear of death in clearer perspective. An important aspect of it is the fear of not having completed whatever it was that one wanted or felt called to do in life, of feeling at the end that too much was wasted on trivialities, leaving important matters undone. Montaigne replies:

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 fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. "If I had been placed in a position to manage great affairs, I would have shown what I could do." Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all...To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. (Frame, Complete Essays of Montaigne, 850f).

The great task in life turns out to be within everyone's grasp all the time. I am reminded again of Shakespeare:

HAMLET. ...If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves, knows [aught], what is it to leave betimes? Let be. (V.ii.216ff)

This 2nd Quarto Hamlet (with the modern editor's addition of the 2nd "aught," for clarity) is very close to Montaigne. All we leave behind that is truly ourselves is our conduct, as the expression of our character. Of books written or not written, who knows whether they would make any difference for the good? And others write books, too. A good idea will be stumbled upon by others. Of money accumulated, who knows if it would help the ones they are destined for, or make them worse? It is all up to fortune. All we can do is muddle through, in both humility and courage, and pass on the torch of life to those who come after.

"Of the Force of Imagination" and "Of Experience"

"OF THE FORCE OF IMAGINATION"

This is an early essay, but Dali places it near the end. It gives him the occasion for one of his familiar themes, objects floating as if by levitation.

Montaigne begins the essay with the words “Fortis imaginatio generatum casum,” which means “A strong imagination creates the event” (Frame translation, p. 68). Dali has put the Latin at the bottom of his illustration.

The subject of the essay is the power of the imagination to effect things in the real world. Montaigne gives numerous examples, among which are the following. I have puy in bold type the part most relevant to Dali:

Some attribute the scars of King Dagobert and of St. Francis to the force of imagination. It is said, that by it bodies will sometimes be removed from their places; and Celsus tells s of a priest whose soul would be ravished into such an ecstasy that the body would, for a long time, remain without sense or respiraton. (p. 465)

Dali has taken the second of these eventualities, the moving of bodies by the force of imagination, as his playful theme. Elsewhere he has many paintings showing the mysterious levitation of ordinary objects; Montaigne has just the one mention. The bulk of the essay is devoted to what is today called "the placebo effect:" that merely thinking that something will cure one will have much to do with actually being cured. Montaigne's most entertaining examples are of cures for impotence. These Dali did not see fit to illustrate.

"OF EXPERIENCE"



Montaigne’s last essay, despite its meditations on death, is overall a passionate affirmation of life. The downward hand gesture in Dali’s illustration brings us back to his illustration for the first essay, “Of Custom.” The first two passages below make the basic point; but the sentences I have put in bold typem, added in his last year, give Dali’s imagined gesture another meaning as well:

As for me, I love life and cultivate it, just as God has been pleased to grant it to us. I do not go about wishing that it should lack the need to eat and drink, and it would seem to me no less excusable a failing to wish that need to be doubled. “The wise man is the keenest searcher for natural treasures.” [Seneca] Nor do I wish …that we should beget children insensibly with our fingers or our heels, but rather, with due respect, that we could also beget them voluptuously with our fingers and heels, nor that the body should be without desire and without titillation...We wrong that great and all-powerful Giver by refusing his gift, nullifying it, and disfiguring it. Himself all good, he has made all things good…

Philosophy is very childish, to my mind, when she gets up on her hind legs and preaches to us that it is a barbarous alliance to marry the divine with the earthly, the reasonable with the unreasonable, the severe with the indulgent, the honorable with the dishonorable: that sensual pleasure is a brutish thing unworthy of being enjoyed by the wise man, that the only pleasure he derives from the enjoyment of a beautiful young wife is the pleasure of his consciousness of doing the right thing, like putting on his boots for a useful ride. May her followers have no more right and sinews and sap in deflowering their wives than her lessons have! (Complete Works, Frame translation, p. 854f.)

...Now old age stands in need of being treated a little more tenderly. Let us commend it to that god who is the protector of health and wisdom [i.e. Apollo], but a gay and sociable wisdom:

Grant me, Latona's son, but health,
Grant me a mind entire,
Contentment and a dignified old age,
Not lacking in the sweetness of the lyre.
[Horace] (p. 317, Zeitlin translation)

“Gay wisdom” is a phrase from the 12th century troubadours, "gay sabor."Nietzsche used it later in various contexts, including as a book title, Die Froeliche Wissenschaft.

And so the book ends. I hope you have enjoyed the ride.