On February 28, 1571, the 38-year-old Michel de Montaigne marked his birthday by inscribing the fact of his retirement from public life on a wall near his library. The French nobleman was “long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments,” say the Latin words painted in the tower of his chateau.
“In calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out.” Yet Montaigne’s dream of a carefree retirement in the Dordogne countryside proved illusory as he was drawn into France’s religious war, suffered the loss of family and friends and nearly died in a riding accident.
Still, he had enough leisure to start writing in a new genre — essays of self examination that have entranced readers for more than four centuries. “I myself am the subject of my book,” Montaigne wrote, warning readers, “it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.”
The 1,000-plus pages of Montaigne’s essays speak to everyone, even though they likely have never have made it onto the reading lists of the leaders of China, Russia and the United States. Judging by this week’s news, Montaigne has something very relevant to say to each of those men.
As they were heading to a Tiananmen Square platform to review a military parade Wednesday, China’s President Xi Jinping said through a translator in Russian, “People rarely lived to be over 70, but these days, at 70, you are still a child.”
The translator gave Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reply in Mandarin: “Biotechnology is making advances. There’ll be constant transplants of human organs, and maybe even people will grow younger as they age — even achieving immortality.”
Xi commented, “It could be that in this century humans might be able to live to 150 years old.”
On one level, they were just commenting on medical advances. But the fact that this topic engaged the attention of the two 72-year-old leaders provided us with a rare peek into their private thoughts.
Putin and Xi have gone to great lengths to ensure there is no legal barrier to their remaining in power as long as each would like. They need not fear a revolt in their nations’ legislatures or from voters. They don’t allow criticism in the media. Perhaps the only thing that keeps them up at night is the fear of dying.
As for U.S. President Donald Trump, he recently mused about life after death: “I want to try and get to heaven if possible,” the 79-year-old Trump said August 19 on Fox & Friends. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole.” Last weekend, he batted away rumors about his health, making the highly unlikely claim on Truth Social: “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE!”
Preoccupied
Death preoccupied Montaigne, even as a young man. He cited Cicero’s saying that “philosophizing is nothing other than getting ready to die.”
Montaigne stated, simply: “The end of our course is death.” But he added, “If death frightens us how can we go one step forward without anguish? For ordinary people the remedy is not to think about it; but what brutish insensitivity can produce so gross a blindness?” Quoting Lucretius, he wrote: “They walk forward with their heads turned backwards.”
Death can come in an instant, wrote Montaigne:
Aeschylus was warned against a falling house; he was always on the alert, but in vain: he was killed by the shell of a tortoise which slipped from the talons of an eagle in flight. Another choked to death on a pip from a grape; an Emperor died from a scratch when combing his hair; Aemilius Lepidus, from knocking his foot on his own doorstep; Aufidius from bumping into a door of his Council chamber.
Montaigne’s 23-year-old brother died after being struck in the head by a tennis ball. “When there pass before our eyes examples such as these, so frequent and so ordinary, how can we ever rid ourselves of thoughts of death or stop imagining that death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment?”
The answer
The answer is to “deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.”
“At every instant let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects. Whenever a horse stumbles, a tile falls or a pin pricks however slightly, let us at once chew over this thought: 'Supposing that was death itself?' With that, let us brace ourselves and make an effort. In the midst of joy and feasting let our refrain be one which recalls our human condition.”
Referring to the ancient Egyptians, he added, “in the midst of all their banquets and good cheer they would bring in a mummified corpse to serve as a warning to the guests.”
Boots on
It’s not only a matter of keeping death ever present in one’s mind, but of changing how we think of death itself: as something inevitable and necessary, something to anticipate and prepare for, thought Montaigne.
“I am always just about as ready as I can be: when death does suddenly appear, it will bear no new warning for me. As far as we possibly can we must always have our boots on, ready to go...”
In her book, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, Sarah Bakewell noted that Montaigne’s view of death evolved from a youthful obsession to a mature resignation: “Death is only a few bad moments at the end of life, he wrote in one of his last added notes; it is not worth wasting any anxiety over. From being the gloomiest among his acquaintances, he became the most carefree of middle-aged men, and a master of the art of living well.”
Montaigne reasoned, “If our death is violent and short we have no time to feel afraid: if it be otherwise, I have noticed that as an illness gets more and more hold on me I naturally slip into a kind of contempt for life.”
He makes clear, though, that his attitude toward death is partly based on wishing rather than believing. “That leads me to hope that the further I get from good health and the nearer I approach to death the more easily I will come to terms with exchanging one for the other.“
You cannot fully judge a person’s life without knowing how it ended, Montaigne observed. “Fortune sometimes seems precisely to lie in ambush for the last day of a man's life in order to display her power to topple in a moment what she had built up over the length of years.”
In 1592, Montaigne suffered an attack of kidney stones, a condition that had long plagued him. This time, it led to an infection which left him struggling to breathe. He suffered for several days before completing his will and having the last rites of the Catholic Church administered. He died at 59.
Message
In Montaigne’s day, living into your 70s, as Putin, Xi and Trump have, would have been considered a more than full life. In his essays, Montaigne made light of old men who are unwilling to recognize the reality that they could be near the end of their lives. He wrote, “However decrepit a man may be, he thinks he still has another twenty years to go in the body, so long as he has Methuselah ahead of him. Silly fool, you!”
Such people “have already exceeded the usual term of life; to prove it, just count how many more of your acquaintances have died younger than you are compared with those who have reached your age.”
Look at the lives of Jesus and of Alexander, Montaigne wrote. Both died at 33.
