Or, as we might say, a pig in a poke: women don't know how the man will perform when they get home, a situation Montaigne sees as exacerbated by the contemporary fashion for codpieces, which make an unrealistic 'show of the shape of our pieces under our Gascon hose'.

Left to their own devices, women are quite capable of managing on their own, as Montaigne finds during a visit to the nuns of Poussay, a foundation established for the education of girls. There is no requirement of virginity, except for the abbess and the prioress, and they all dress as they please, except for a little white veil. They freely receive people in their rooms, even to solicit them in marriage. Yet the greater number of them choose to spend the rest of their days there. Perhaps with such examples in mind (and Montaigne's niece Jeanne de Lestonnac was to go on to found a similar order for the education of young women), Montaigne concludes: 'Women are not at all in the wrong when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made them without consulting them.'

But perhaps the most significant testament to Montaigne's att.i.tude towards women can be seen in his relationship with Marie de Gournay, who was to become Montaigne's editor and literary executor after his death. Born in 1565, she was thirty-two years younger than Montaigne, whom she had read in her late teens. They met after she had learned he was visiting Paris in 1588 and wrote to him, declaring 'the esteem she felt for his person and his book'. He responded by travelling to Picardy, to pay a visit to his admirer and her mother.

(ill.u.s.trations credit 9.2) Montaigne gave de Gournay the t.i.tle 'fille d'alliance', meaning adoptive daughter, which may sound a little strange, but her father had died when she was twelve, and Montaigne, with a wife and daughter of his own, may well have wanted to establish the relationship on a respectable footing. It is said he spent three months in her company: she transcribing some of his additions to the essays; he impressed by her humanistic learning. Clearly she was an impressive woman, with intellectual abilities beyond her age and well beyond her supposed station in life. And Montaigne's tribute to her talents was published in the posthumously printed 1595 edition of the Essays: Essays: I have taken pleasure to declare in several places the hopes I have of Marie de Gournay le Jars, my fille d'alliance fille d'alliance, who is loved by me with a more than paternal love and included in my solitude and retirement as one of the better parts of my own being. There is nothing I regard more in the world than her. If youth is any indication, her soul will be one day capable of great things, among others the perfection of that holy friendship to which, we read, her s.e.x has so far been unable to aspire...

As the pa.s.sage was included only in the edition of the Essays Essays that de Gournay herself edited, scholars have speculated, inconclusively, about the genuineness of this praise. As to the existence of an even closer relationship between Montaigne and de Gournay we will never know. But one pa.s.sage in the that de Gournay herself edited, scholars have speculated, inconclusively, about the genuineness of this praise. As to the existence of an even closer relationship between Montaigne and de Gournay we will never know. But one pa.s.sage in the Essays Essays does suggest a more pa.s.sionate attachment, certainly on her part: does suggest a more pa.s.sionate attachment, certainly on her part: When I came from that famous a.s.sembly of the Estates at Blois, I had a little before seen a girl in Picardy, to attest to the ardour of her promises and her constancy, stab herself with the bodkin she wore in her hair, four or five l.u.s.ty stabs in the arm, puncturing the skin and making herself bleed in good earnest.

However, given his inclusion of the description of her pa.s.sionate self-harming in his text we cannot be sure whether such a display of violent constancy would have endeared her to Montaigne, or would have had the opposite effect.

Montaigne ends 'On Some Verses of Virgil' with an intriguing metaphor: To conclude this notable commentary, which has escaped from me in a flow of chatter, a flow sometimes impetuous and hurtful.

Here picturing himself as almost feminine, writing the essay in something like a menstrual flow. And one wonders about those moments when Montaigne sees himself as labouring in expectation of giving birth to a kidney stone, or bathing in the women's bath at Lucca, or receiving one of Captain Paulino's gently administered enemas. He quotes Horace on a beautiful boy, indistinguishable from a line of girls 'with his long hair and ambiguous face', and himself mistakes a girl for a boy in a Church in Rome, asking her: 'Do you speak Latin?' He quotes Ovid on Tiresias, to whom 'Venus in both aspects was known', and he himself says that Cupid should be granted his fickle freedom, and is not served best when gripped in 'hairy, h.o.a.ry hands'.

But whatever Montaigne's eventual s.e.xuality, his final message is a challenge to the Stoic apartheid between men and women 'I say that male and female are cast in the same mould: education and usage excepted, the difference is not great' and to remind ourselves that it is our nearness, as well as our distance from our bodies, that makes us what we are. A familiar enough thought today, but one that taken in the context of sixteenth-century morality represents a shift of almost Copernican proportions: here, Montaigne returning our s.e.xual instincts to the centre of the human orbit, the axis around which all our other practices turn. Unlike other forms of interaction, s.e.x is based on 'reciprocity and mutual exchange'; it 'can only be paid in the same coin'. By contrast he castigates the hypocrisy and cruelty of what pa.s.ses for conventional virtue, his indignation captured in the fervent additions he makes to his text: Everyone runs from seeing a man born, everyone queues to see him die. To destroy him they search for a s.p.a.cious field in clear daylight; to create him they creep into a dark and narrow ditch To destroy him they search for a s.p.a.cious field in clear daylight; to create him they creep into a dark and narrow ditch. It is a duty to hide and to blush and to blush in making him, but it is glorious and the seed of many virtues in to unmake him. in making him, but it is glorious and the seed of many virtues in to unmake him.

Montaigne finally adds the bitter comment: 'We regard our being as a vice.'

In opposition to this callous prudishness, Montaigne accepts the natural and inevitable attraction of the s.e.xes, our deep desire for each other, and the centrality of s.e.x in the natural landscape of our being: 'The whole movement of the world leads towards and resolves itself in this coupling; it is a matter infused throughout, it is the centre to which all things look.' In a German church he sees the men and women seated on the right and left of the central aisle: the church in its very structure affirming the lesson of the Fall. But later he witnesses the overcoming of such divisions in the timeless reconciliations of a village dance: After a short pause the gentleman goes to retrieve his partner, he kisses his hand to her; the lady receives the gentleman but does not kiss her own; and then putting his hand under her armpit he embraces her, so that they are cheek to cheek...

The men are 'bare-headed and not very richly dressed', notes Montaigne, an indication of their modest status, but perhaps also like his reflections on the nakedness of the inhabitants of the New World a sign of their innocence and openness to each other, as the women place their hands on the shoulders of their partners, and they begin.

10.

The Touch of a Familiar Hand

(ill.u.s.trations credit 10.1)

I looked upon death indifferently when I looked at it universally as the end of life. I dismiss it in general, but in detail it worries me. The tears of a servant, the disposing of my clothes, the touch of a familiar hand, an ordinary phrase of comfort distresses me and reduces me to tears.

During the late 1580s Montaigne continued to play an active role in political and diplomatic life. In February 1588 he attended the court of Henry III on a mission from Henri de Navarre, an event noted by the English amba.s.sador, Sir Edward Stafford, as the arrival of 'one Montigny, a very wise gentleman of the King of Navarre, whom he hath given his word to present unto the King'; adding in a later letter: 'The man is a Catholic, a very sufficient man; was once Mayor of Bordeaux, and one that would not take a charge to bring anything to the King that should not please him.' And a few days later the Spanish Amba.s.sador Mendoza wrote to Philip II of the arrival of Montaigne, 'considered a man of understanding' albeit adding rather rudely about our hero: 'though somewhat addle-pated'. Despite Mendoza's dismissal, however, it was soon after that Montaigne was briefly imprisoned in the Bastille by the Catholic League, in reprisal for the seizing of a Leaguist at Rouen. Clearly Montaigne was still considered a man of influence, and he was released only at the personal insistence of Catherine de' Medici.

Montaigne's continued engagement with the dangerous world of diplomacy, despite his avowed retirement, is matched in the essays by their preoccupation with the way people act on, influence, and affect each other through their physical being. Of course, in a world without email or telephones this is, to a large extent, unremarkable. Even so, Montaigne's diplomatic undertakings stress the significance of personal relations and personal presence in sixteenth-century politics, as Mendoza goes on to clarify in his letter, saying how Montaigne will himself influence the Countess of Navarre, and through her gain influence over Henri.

Montaigne's interest in these matters can be dated back to his earliest essays, where he writes about 'Of Quick or Slow Speech' and 'Ceremony at the Interview of Kings'. And indeed his very first essay 'By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same End' opens by addressing the effect our behaviour has on others, and whether it possesses any reason or rationale: The most common way of softening the hearts of such as we have offended, when they are in possession of the power of revenge and hold us at their mercy, is by submission to move them to commiseration and pity. And yet, audacity and resolution, quite contrary means, have sometimes had the same effect.

He goes on to add that he possesses what would be seen as a 'cowardly' disposition towards compa.s.sion, as opposed to the rulings of the Stoics, who would have us consider pity 'a vice'. Yet the essay ends despondently, in line with the harshness of the times, cataloguing the gratuitous cruelty of Alexander in his treatment of Betis, the defiant leader of the Gazeans, whom he had dragged behind a cart until he was dead.

But whilst Montaigne's essays perhaps start off despairing of human relations, in a world torn apart by the violence of civil war, as they progress, particularly in the third volume of essays that he adds to his work in 1588, he reveals a growing interest in the physical dimension of human relations, writing on themes such as 'Of Three Kinds of a.s.sociation', 'Of Physiognomy', and 'Of the Art of Conversation'. And in the ma.n.u.script additions that he makes to his text in the years up to his death, this interest seems to deepen. Despite the Stoics' view that we should see friends and relations as earthenware pots, and their deaths regretted little more than a breakage, Montaigne declares that the presence of grief is something for which we can never adequately prepare: No wisdom is so highly formed as to be able to conceive a cause of grief so vivid and so complete that it will not be increased by the actual presence, when the eyes and ears have a share in it...

He relates how he transported the body of his friend Monsieur de Grammont from the siege of La Fere and how in every place they pa.s.sed onlookers responded with 'tears and lamentations by the mere solemn presence of our convoy, for even the name of the dead man was not known to them'.

No matter how stoically we distance ourselves from our emotions, we can never cut ourselves off entirely from the affective influence of others: 'the tears of a servant...the touch of a familiar hand', bring us back to ourselves and bind us to life once more.

Of course, much of Montaigne's awareness of the effect of our behaviour on others was gained through his experience as local lord, magistrate, and mayor, and as a negotiator during the civil wars. And the essays contain many reflections on the art of diplomacy. He says that most people make themselves appear as close to one's own position as they can, whereas he uses a style all his own: I say nothing to one man that I could not, at the right time, say to another, given a little alteration in the accent...There is no useful point whatsoever for which I would permit myself to tell them a lie. What has been entrusted to my silence, I conceal religiously; but I take as few things for concealing as I can. The secrets of princes are a troublesome charge to such as have no business with them.

He boasts that 'few men have negotiated between rival parties with less suspicion' and renounces duplicity in favour of candour: 'An open speech opens up another's speech and draws it out, like wine and love.' And in an essay, 'Of Anger', he describes his own strategy in tense negotiations, asking his opponent to let him vent his anger, as he will let them vent theirs, saying that the storm is produced only when they are not allowed to run their course 'a useful rule,' he adds, 'but hard to observe'. Anger, he continues, can also be a useful weapon: he uses it 'for the better governing of my house', and confesses to being at times 'hasty and violent'. But it is also an unpredictable one: 'For we move other weapons, and this one moves us; our hand does not guide it, it guides our hand; it holds us, we do not hold it.'

On the other hand, a mild and accommodating demeanour can have an equally disastrous effect. He records the fate of Monsieur de Monneins, the governor of Bordeaux, who went out to quell a large mob during the Salt Tax riots of 1548, but conducted himself with a meek rather than a commanding mien, and hence was 'miserably slain'. By contrast he relates Socrates' composure whilst escaping from battle, noting 'the firmness and steadiness of his gaze...looking at friends and enemies, in a way to encourage the former and to show to the others that he was bound to sell his blood very dear'. And Montaigne himself relates how, when he was forced to flee during his country's disturbances, it 'served me in good stead' to do so in a way that did not appear 'bewildered or distraught', even though in reality he was 'not without fear'.

And whilst Montaigne seems in many ways a typical humanist, his writing reveals a desire to get beyond the page, and meet with the ancients face-to-face. He says he would rather see what Brutus did in 'his study and in his chamber than in the public square and the senate', and imagines sitting next to Alexander at table, seeing him talking and drinking and 'fingering his chess-men'. And he notes the ancients' own awareness of the physicality of others: how the Romans would caress the hands of great men on meeting, and kiss the cheeks of friends, like the Venetians of his own time. Hippomachus claimed to be able to tell a good wrestler simply by the way he walked. Caesar, he notes, scratched his head, a sign that he was preoccupied, whilst Alexander inclined his, slightly affectedly, a little to one side. Cicero wrinkled up his nose, which suggests a man given to scoffing. And Emperor Constantius, appropriately named, in public always looked straight ahead, without turning or flexing one way or the other...planting his body immovably, without allowing it to be moved by the motion of his coach, not daring so much as to spit, blow his nose, or wipe his face in front of the people.

This Montaigne notes in an essay 'Of Presumption', to show that even when we think we don't reveal things about ourselves, we reveal them all the same.

And Montaigne's alertness to people's physicality also takes in the parts of the body, the individual instruments in the overtures we make to others. He examines the bust of t.i.tus Livius in Padua, his 'lean face suggesting a studious and melancholy man', and displays his knowledge of palmistry how when a line cuts across the base of the forefinger it is a sign of a cruel nature. He even writes an essay 'Of Thumbs', relating how barbarian kings sealed treaties by clasping hands with their thumbs interlocked, then p.r.i.c.king them to suck each other's blood. He reminds us that in the Roman forum a 'thumbs down' meant a thumbs up and a 'thumbs up' meant a thumbs down. Spartan schoolmasters, he notes, would punish their pupils by biting them on their thumbs. And he quotes Martial on the evolutionary advantages (or disadvantage) offered by the opposable digit: Neither with the persuasion of charming words, Nor with the thumb's soft coaxing does it surge.

i.e. masturbation.

And behind his interest in bodily behaviour, there perhaps lurks an anxiety in Montaigne about his own lack of physical presence. He says he is 'below middle height', only to raise himself up in his second edition to 'a little below middle height'. This is part of the reason for his preference to go on horseback: 'On foot I get muddy up to my b.u.t.tocks, and in our narrow streets small men tend to get jostled and elbowed for want of presence.' On his travels he says the best view of the prost.i.tutes in Rome 'is from horseback; but that is a matter for poor creatures like me'. And at the end of the 'Apology' he makes a philosophical point that seems to be marked by his own personal experience, saying that there is no point trying to make 'the handful bigger than the hand, the armful bigger than an arm, and to hope to straddle higher than our legs'. below middle height'. This is part of the reason for his preference to go on horseback: 'On foot I get muddy up to my b.u.t.tocks, and in our narrow streets small men tend to get jostled and elbowed for want of presence.' On his travels he says the best view of the prost.i.tutes in Rome 'is from horseback; but that is a matter for poor creatures like me'. And at the end of the 'Apology' he makes a philosophical point that seems to be marked by his own personal experience, saying that there is no point trying to make 'the handful bigger than the hand, the armful bigger than an arm, and to hope to straddle higher than our legs'.

And perhaps this lack of stature is part of the reason for Montaigne's self-consciousness about himself: 'A certain carriage of the body and certain gestures betokening some vain and foolish pride.' He continues to carry 'a stick or staff in my hand even aiming at a kind of elegance in it and resting on it with an air of affectation'. And in social situations, even among his own men, Montaigne feels the pressure to make his presence felt before it evaporates: It is a great annoyance to be addressed, as you stand among your servants, with the question: 'Where is Monsieur?' and to receive only the remainder of the greeting that is made to your barber or your secretary. As it happened to poor Philopoemen: having been the first of his company to arrive at an inn where he was expected, his hostess, who did not know him and having seen that he was of an unsightly appearance, employed him to go and help her maids draw up water and make a fire for Philopoemen's arrival. The gentlemen in his service, arriving and surprising him as he was busied in this fine labour, asked him what he was doing. 'I am', he replied, 'paying the penalty for my ugliness.'

In the Travel Journal Travel Journal, Montaigne's secretary hints at his master's short stature during a visit to the tomb of Ogier the Dane near Paris, whose upper arm bone is as long as 'the length of the whole arm of a man of nowadays, of ordinary measure, and somewhat longer than Monsieur de Montaigne's' (which puts him somewhat shorter than the average height of around five feet and seven inches). Caius Marius, notes Montaigne, did not enlist any soldiers who were under six feet; and according to Aristotle, 'Little men are pretty but not handsome.' Whereas women are afforded all kinds of beauty, Montaigne complains, stature is the only beauty allowed in a man, despite the additional qualifications he adds to the second edition of his text (in italics): Where there is smallness, neither the breadth and roundness and roundness of the forehead, nor the brightness of the forehead, nor the brightness and softness and softness of the eyes, nor the moderate shape of the nose, nor the littleness of the ears and mouth, nor the regularity and whiteness of the teeth, nor the uniform thickness of the beard, brown like the sh.e.l.l of a chestnut, of the eyes, nor the moderate shape of the nose, nor the littleness of the ears and mouth, nor the regularity and whiteness of the teeth, nor the uniform thickness of the beard, brown like the sh.e.l.l of a chestnut, nor curly hair nor curly hair, nor a well-rounded head, nor a fresh complexion, nor an agreeable expression of face, nor a body without smell nor a body without smell, nor the regular proportion of the limbs, can make a handsome man.

He is, however, 'strong and well-knit'; 'my face full without being fat', and he goes around with 'my face and my heart open', his voice 'loud and emphatic', and 'my head erect'. He says that 'movement and action put life into words' especially with those like himself, who 'move briskly and become heated'. He is quick to remove his hat: 'especially in summer, and never receive a salutation without returning it, whatever the status of the man may be, unless he is in my service'.

Between the lines of Montaigne's writing, increasing as it evolves through his Travel Journal Travel Journal, the various editions of his essays, and his relationship with his cat, is an intuitive sense of the disciplines we would now call proxemics the anthropology of people's relationship to each other in s.p.a.ce and also kinesics what their movements and gestures reveal. At the heart of these studies is the idea that the physical distance between people is intrinsically linked to their social and emotional intimacy. It is from here that we derive such terms as 'personal s.p.a.ce' (anywhere between 1 and 4 feet), and 'intimate s.p.a.ce' (anywhere closer). As the founder of proxemics, Edward T. Hall, wrote in the sixties: 'Like gravity, the influence of two bodies on each other is inversely proportional not only to the square of their distance but possibly even the cube of the distance between them.' Or, as Walt Whitman said more poetically: 'Every cubic inch of s.p.a.ce is a miracle.'

This proxemic sense is a faculty we have largely lost or become unconscious of since the Renaissance. But it is an awareness that was second nature to people of Montaigne's time, what might almost be called the sixteenth century's sixth sense. Art historians thus speak of the art of 'body-arranging' in Renaissance art, where the distribution of bodies in s.p.a.ce does not equate to a naturalistic depiction, but frequently articulates dynastic and diplomatic links. Dance represented a way of codifying these affiliations, used by the court as not simply entertainment but a way of giving tangible form to the intimacies and alliances between rulers and their n.o.bility. And clearly Montaigne's awareness of such things is linked to his aristocratic status, where his relationships to his fellow n.o.blemen and the King were conducted through affiliations of clientage and personal acquaintance. Montaigne's boast that Henri de Navarre slept in his bed when he visited his house might strike us as a slightly embarra.s.sing a.s.sertion, but for Montaigne there could be no clearer expression of the closeness of their amitie amitie.

Montaigne thus observes how not only every country, but every city and profession 'has its own forms of civility', and describes how manners 'smooth over the first approaches to sociability and friendliness'. From his retirement he keeps making 'sidelong glances' at the attractions of power: 'A nod, a friendly word from a great man, a gracious look, tempt me.' And in his essay 'Of the Education of Children' he says he would have the child's 'outward manners, and his social behaviour, and the carriage of his person and the carriage of his person, formed at the same time as his mind'. He says that we wish to know our neighbours, not only in terms of their kinship and alliances, but 'to have them as friends and build a relationship and understanding with them'. And he remembers the advice his father gave him: 'to consider the man who stretches out his arms to me rather than the one who turns his back upon me', meaning the people and the peasants of his region.

He knows that loans asked for in person are more difficult to refuse than those requested by letter, and he says he understands others 'by their silence and their smiles, and perhaps understand them better at the dining-table than in the council-chamber'. Facile and vacuous speeches are redeemed by the 'gravity, the gown, and the fortune of him that speaks'. Philosophers, similarly, are no less affected by the power of others' presence. He quotes Socrates on the electric charge felt at the graze of a beloved's arm: With my shoulder touching his shoulder, and my head close to his, as we were reading together in a book, I suddenly felt a p.r.i.c.king in the shoulder, if you will believe me, like the bite of an insect; and for more than five days it tingled, and a continual itching crept into my heart.

'What!' exclaims Montaigne, 'Socrates! of all souls the most chastened, and at the mere touch of a shoulder!' But why not, he adds: 'Socrates was a man, and didn't want be or be seen as anything else.'

And Montaigne goes on to speak of knowledge, not in purely abstract terms, but as a form of meeting. He says his brain is slow and muddied, 'but what it once grasps it...embraces very closely', and describes 'grasping the forms, the features, the bearing and the face of truth'. He says that places and books revisited 'smile at me with a fresh novelty'. And he quotes Socrates' comparison of himself to a midwife, a.s.sisting others in their intellectual labour: opening their organs, anointing their channels, facilitating their birth, pa.s.sing judgement on the child, baptizing it, nursing it, strengthening it, swathing and circ.u.mcising it, exercising and employing his skill in the perils and fortunes of others.

The Greek philosopher Zeno similarly saw the hand as embodying thinking, and communicated, by gestures his conception of the division of the faculties of the mind: the hand spread out and open signified appearance; the hand half shut and the fingers slightly bent, consent; the fist closed, comprehension; when with the left hand he closed that fist more tightly, knowledge.

The best minds, Montaigne says, 'are those which are far-reaching, open and ready to embrace everything'.

And adding to the 'Apology for Raymond Sebond' in the years up to his death, Montaigne puts his finger on what it is that he wishes to defend about Sebond's conception of faith: The divine majesty has thus to some extent allowed itself to be circ.u.mscribed in corporeal limits for our own benefits. His supernatural and celestial sacraments have the signs of our earthly condition; his worship is expressed by means of rituals and words aimed at the senses; for it is man that believes and prays...it would be difficult to make me believe that the sight of our crucifixes and the paintings of that piteous agony, the ornaments and ceremonious movements of our churches, that the voices attuned to the devotion of our thoughts, and all that pa.s.sion of the senses did not warm the souls of the people with a religious emotion of very beneficial effect.

One wonders whether Montaigne's rather complex conception of religion doesn't amount to seeing it as something like an extension of our proxemic senses, akin to the sociological idea of religion as 'the extension of social relations beyond the social'. For Montaigne, objects and locations thus gain an almost sacramental function, as stepping-stones to a long-lost physical propinquity. In the Vatican library he admires an ancient Greek Acts of the Apostles, the ma.s.sive gold letters so lavishly applied 'that as you pa.s.s your hand over it you can feel the thickness...a kind of writing we have since lost'. Caesar's gown excited Rome almost as much as his actual presence, and even buildings and locations have the capacity to move us: Is it by nature or by an error of the fancy that the sight of places, which we know have been haunted and inhabited by persons of whom the memory is esteemed, moves us, more than to hear a recital of their acts or to read their writings?...I like to think of their faces, their bearing, and their clothing. I ruminate on those great names between my teeth, and make them resound in my ears...I wish I could see them talk, walk and sup!

And of his own dead, he says, more movingly: How satisfying it would be to hear somebody describe the manners, the face, the countenance, the common words the face, the countenance, the common words, and the fortunes of my ancestors. How attentively I would listen! Truly, it would be the sign of an evil nature to despise so much as the pictures of our friends and predecessors, the fashion of their clothes and of their arms. I preserve the handwriting, the seal, the breviary, and a particular sword which they used, and I have not banished from my study some long sticks which my father normally carried in his hand the fashion of their clothes and of their arms. I preserve the handwriting, the seal, the breviary, and a particular sword which they used, and I have not banished from my study some long sticks which my father normally carried in his hand.

The memory 'of a farewell, an action, a particular charm' is affecting to us, as is the mere sound of a name 'as it rings in our ears: "My poor master!", or "My great friend!", "Alas, my dear father!", or "My sweet daughter!"'.

Montaigne's awareness of others' bodies is thus very different from our modern Western, post-Cartesian perspective, where we see selves as distinct from and more important than the bodies in which they are housed. The clearest echoes of Montaigne's view thus comes from outside the Western tradition, in the work of the twentieth-century j.a.panese philosopher Watsuji Tetsur. Watsuji describes the nature of the self using the notion of 'betweenness' (aidagara): our instinctive sense of our relation to other bodies in s.p.a.ce. This language of 'betweenness' might seem rather touchy-feely, but we only have to look around our homes and workplaces to see how intrinsic it is to our sense of everyday life how we are instinctively aware of the difference between public and private s.p.a.ces, how we reserve our personal s.p.a.ce for lovers and family, and how transgressions of these borders are felt in a way of which we cannot help but be aware. And it is this 'betweenness', according to Watsuji, that provides the ineluctable gravity to human relations, like that of the magnetic 'pull' that draws a mother back to her unattended child. But as well as mother and child, husband and wife, it is also felt between friends: our instinctive sense of our relation to other bodies in s.p.a.ce. This language of 'betweenness' might seem rather touchy-feely, but we only have to look around our homes and workplaces to see how intrinsic it is to our sense of everyday life how we are instinctively aware of the difference between public and private s.p.a.ces, how we reserve our personal s.p.a.ce for lovers and family, and how transgressions of these borders are felt in a way of which we cannot help but be aware. And it is this 'betweenness', according to Watsuji, that provides the ineluctable gravity to human relations, like that of the magnetic 'pull' that draws a mother back to her unattended child. But as well as mother and child, husband and wife, it is also felt between friends: To feel like seeing a friend is to tend to go physically near them...It is therefore clearly a mistake to regard this relationship as a psychological relationship without the interconnection between physical bodies. However its psychological moment may be contained, the physical bodies still draw themselves to each other and are interconnected. It is neither simply a physical relationship nor a psychological nor the simple conjunction of the two.

And here, of course, one is reminded of La Boetie's final plea: 'do you refuse me a place'? For no matter what we might think think about friendship in terms of its spiritual or philosophical meaning its basic manifestation is in a desire for physical proximity a sense of about friendship in terms of its spiritual or philosophical meaning its basic manifestation is in a desire for physical proximity a sense of betweenness betweenness. Friends, to put it simply, are people that you go and see. Despite the discourse of stoical humanism, it is a relationship founded on presence, not by absence.

At the most basic level, therefore, Holbein's Amba.s.sadors Amba.s.sadors ( (this page) is a painting about friendship as it shows two men standing next to each other. And if we look again at Montaigne's letter describing La Boetie's death (this page), we see that its otherworldly pose is continually undercut by his awareness of his friend's physical being, a consciousness of the movements and gestures of his friend. He is due to dine with him, then urges La Boetie to leave Bordeaux but not to travel too far. He visits him, goes away, and then returns and remains constantly at his side. He takes his pulse and then, in an attempt to rea.s.sure him, asks him to take his. He rather selfishly emphasizes his own closeness compared to La Boetie's wife, who stays for most of the time in an adjoining room. And he finally records La Boetie's call to him, 'My brother...stay close to me,' followed by his delirious ramblings about being denied 'a place' a final moving reminder that we cannot help but see life as the experience of being near to other people, and death as a last dislocation, the final seat-stealing in a game of irredeemable musical chairs.

And when Montaigne returns to La Boetie in his essay 'Of Friendship', written ten years after his death, he recalls, not simply the philosophical bond between them, nor the nature of La Boetie's character, but more specifically the moment of their first meeting, where they found each other, and became: 'so bound together, that from that moment on nothing could be as close as we were to one another'.

In this sense the special nature of friendship is not to do with the fact that it comes with no obligations, but because friendship necessarily activates and invigorates our proxemic senses: it arises when two bodies that had once been unknown to each other meet; as Montaigne says: they 'embraced' each other 'by our names', seeking each other out amidst the throng of a civic feast. Montaigne's writing about friendship thus shows a man profoundly impressed by the stoical composure of his dead friend, yet also drawn to friendship as const.i.tuted by physical proximity, an unspoken, invisible but nourishing force.

What makes Montaigne's proxemic awareness all the more pressing, however, is that he sees it as a sense that is being progressively anaesthetized by the political and religious violence of his time 'not a change in the entire ma.s.s, but its dissipation and rending asunder'. In wartime ident.i.ties become obscured; friends might possibly be foes. But the other person's body can also become a thing of hatred rather than knowledge; an object of a perverted, voyeuristic desire. Montaigne speaks of people murdering for the sake of murdering, hacking off men's limbs and thinking of new forms of torture 'for no other end but to enjoy the delightful spectacle of the piteous gestures and motions'. He speaks of how 'the common rabble become inured to war and show their bravery by staining themselves up to the elbows in blood and by ripping up bodies that lie prostrate at their feet'. In civil war these cruelties attain an almost inverted sacramental function in what the historian Natalie Zemon-Davies describes as 'rites of violence', where the annulling of people's empathetic, proxemic awareness is effected by the ritual mutilation of the other, where one's enemies are rendered unrecognizable unrecognizable, and one's sense of guilt becomes anaesthetized and dulled.

During the height of the violence Montaigne thus writes of how: some countrymen came to inform me in great haste that they had just left, in a wood that belongs to me, a man injured with a hundred wounds, still breathing, who asked them for pity's sake to give him water and help him up. They said they did not dare to go near him, and ran off for fear the officers of justice might catch them there...

Such callousness, moreover, is exacerbated by the cold Stoicism of the age, where pity or sympathy is seen as weakness, and where even the closest relationships are estranged and cut off as the ruthless Royalist general Marshal de Monluc confesses to Montaigne following the death of his son, rebuking himself for his habitual 'paternal gravity and stiffness': 'And that poor boy,' he said, 'never saw in me anything other than a scowling and disdainful countenance, and took away with him a belief that I knew not how to love him or esteem him according to his deserts. For whom was I reserving the discovery of that singular affection I had for him in my soul? Was it not him that should have had all the pleasure of it and all the grat.i.tude? I constrained and tortured myself to maintain this vain mask and thereby have lost the pleasure of his conversation, and of his affection along with it, for he could not be anything but cool towards me, having never received from me anything but harshness, nor experienced anything other than a tyrannical bearing.'

And adding to this sense of divisiveness is the increasing economic sophistication of sixteenth-century life. Montaigne writes an essay on how 'One Man's Profit is another Man's Loss' and recalls a period when, as a result of the success of his estate, he h.o.a.rded his money, a process which seemed, however, to bring about only a sense of his own isolation: I made it a secret, and I, who dare talk so openly of myself, never spoke of my money but falsely, as do others, who being rich, pretend to be poor, and being poor, pretend to be rich, dispensing their consciences from ever saying sincerely what they have: a ridiculous and shameful prudence.

As a result he found himself plagued with anxieties, doubts, suspicions 'moreover, incommunicable ones!'

Montaigne's sense of this divisiveness, and the growing alienation of sixteenth-century life, is encapsulated in his essay 'Of Coaches', which he adds to the Essays Essays in 1588. Here he gives vent to his dislike of coaches, which firstly make him travel-sick, but also for the way coaches represent a separation from others, economically and proxemically, and hence epitomize the individualistic, acquisitive estrangement of his age an age ruled by 'treason, luxury, avarice', where people are supplanted by things. And this he sees exemplified in the sacking of the New World, where 'under colour of friendship and good faith' millions were 'put to the edge of the sword...for the traffic in pearls and in pepper!' in 1588. Here he gives vent to his dislike of coaches, which firstly make him travel-sick, but also for the way coaches represent a separation from others, economically and proxemically, and hence epitomize the individualistic, acquisitive estrangement of his age an age ruled by 'treason, luxury, avarice', where people are supplanted by things. And this he sees exemplified in the sacking of the New World, where 'under colour of friendship and good faith' millions were 'put to the edge of the sword...for the traffic in pearls and in pepper!'

Against this avaricious duplicity, he contrasts what he sees as the greatest feat of any civilization to date: the highway to be seen in Peru, built by the kings of the country, from the city of Quito as far as Cuzco (a distance of three hundred leagues), straight, even, twenty-five paces wide, paved...Where they came across mountains and rocks they carved through and levelled them, and filled in the holes with stone and chalk. At the end of each stretch are beautiful palaces, furnished with provisions, clothing and arms, all for the benefit of travellers...

In contrast to the conquistadors' treachery, the road literally connects people, welcoming strangers with food and clothing. And this is emphasized by the fact that it was built not only by the collaboration of two kings, but also by a common effort on the part of the people, from stones that were ten feet square, using earthen ramps instead of scaffolding, and 'no other means of transport than the strength of their arms' a joint bodily effort that symbolizes the physical cohesion of the people themselves. However, this is tragically ineffective against the Spaniards' superior technology, as Montaigne signals, getting back to his main topic: Let us return to our coaches. Instead of these, or any other vehicle, [the Peruvians] had themselves carried on the shoulders of men. That last King of Peru, on the day that he was taken, was thus carried on golden poles and seated in a golden chair in the midst of his army. As many of these chair-bearers as were slain...so many others emulated them, taking the place of the dead, in such a way that they could never cut him down, however great a slaughter they made of those people, until a horseman seized him by the body and dragged him to the ground.

The image of the toppled Atahualpa, his human cordon savagely slaughtered beneath him, himself dragged downward by the alien treachery of an individual horseman, seems to represent a sort of nadir for Montaigne.

What Europeans have lost, therefore, is their proxemic literacy: religious obstinacy, mercantilist materialism and our own self-love having obscured it from view. But Montaigne goes on to suggest that this is a literacy that can be relearned.

Hence the frequency and emotional appeal of motifs of meeting in Montaigne's writing: the Siamese twins in the essay 'A Monstrous Child', one seeking to embrace the other; and his description of the execution of the Egnatii by the triumvirs of Rome, who ran onto each other's swords and clasped 'each other with so tight an embrace that the executioners cut off both their heads at one stroke, leaving the bodies still linked'. He writes of how marriage is reinvigorated by 'the pleasure of meeting and parting at intervals', filling him with 'a fresh affection for my family and making the enjoyment of my house sweeter'. On his journey through Bavaria, Montaigne describes seeing a monument on the Brenner Pa.s.s, built to commemorate the meeting of Emperor Charles V and his brother in 1530 'seeking each other after having been eight years without seeing one another' with a plaque showing them 'embracing each other'.

He likes bridges: he admires Basel's fine, wide wooden one over the Rhine and laments the fact that the new bridge in Paris (the Pont Neuf) would not be finished before his death (it was completed in 1604). And in his essay 'Of a Lack in Our Polity' he recalls his father's idea for a sort of labour exchange/lonely-hearts column, where a master might seek a servant, or 'company on a journey to Paris' or some suchlike thing. He regrets the deaths in poverty and neglect of the scholars Lilius Giraldus and Sebastien Castellio, when 'a thousand men would have welcomed them into their families...had they known'.

Montaigne's natural disposition is therefore naturally gregarious: 'born for society and friendship'. He says pleasure has no flavour for him 'unless I can communicate it', and cites the view of the Greek philosopher Archytas, that heaven itself would be unbearable if experienced alone: 'to wander among those great and divine celestial bodies without a companion at one's side'.

And in his essays Montaigne uses the privilege of authorship to advertise for a companion, another La Boetie, to repeat his original meeting with his friend: Other than the benefit I draw from writing about myself, I hope for this other, that if there happens to be any worthy man who approves and is pleased by my humours before I die, he will try and meet with me...If I knew for sure of a man who was well-suited to me, truly, I would go a very long distance to find him. For we cannot, I think, pay too much for the sweetness of a sympathetic and agreement companion Oh a friend!

a call that was perhaps answered, although possibly not in the way he antic.i.p.ated, in the devotion of Marie de Gournay.

But probably the best-known instance of Montaigne's interest in meeting and the power of proxemics comes in his essay 'Of the Art of Conversation'. Here speech serves as not simply a manifestation of thought, but an extension of the human body in which Montaigne celebrates the cut-and-thrust, the grappling and wrestling of joshing among friends. He says he disdains civility and art in his conversations, and prefers 'a strong and manly a.s.sociation and familiarity...like love that bites and scratches till the blood comes'. And in 'Of Experience' he elaborates on the fact that it is not what is being said, but how and why: There is a voice for instructing, a voice for flattering, or to scold. I want my voice not only to reach him, but perhaps that it should hit him and pierce him. When I berate my lackey in a sharp and pointed tone, it would be fine of him to say: My master, speak more softly, I hear you well...A speech half belongs to him that speaks and half to him that hears. The latter must prepare to receive it according to the movement it takes. As with those who play tennis, the receiver moves around and takes up position according to the movements of the server and according to the stroke.

And linked to this is the idea that feelings and emotions are necessarily shared between ourselves. What Montaigne recognizes, 400 years before their discovery by scientists in 1996, is the existence of 'mirror neurons', or 'empathy neurons': neurons that fire when we watch another person performing an action or undergoing an experience. Moreover, this research suggests that verbal communication is built around this more ancient communicative system, based around the recognition of facial and physical gestures i.e. that Montaigne's description of it as 'the true language of human nature' may not be far wrong. Montaigne thus says that he has an 'aping and imitative character'; 'whatever I contemplate, I adopt a foolish expression, a disagreeable grimace, a ridiculous way of speaking'; 'I often usurp the sensations of another person'. Writing about s.e.x, he confesses that 'the pleasure I give tickles my imagination more sweetly than that I feel', and yet says, equally, that the sight of another's pain 'materially pains me'. He speaks of the power of poetry to transmit emotion: the pa.s.sion that inspires the poet 'also strikes a third person when he hears him discuss and recite it, like a magnet that not only attracts a needle, but also conveys into it the power to attract others'. And in the theatre, anger, sorrow, hatred, pa.s.s in a similar way through poet, actor and audience: like a chain of magnetized needles, 'suspended one from the other'. And this reminds us of Montaigne's talent as a boy actor, his 'great a.s.surance of countenance and flexibility of voice and gesture in adapting myself to any part'.

And yet, such is the power of this imitative faculty that it can also work both ways: Simon Thomas was a great physician of his time. I remember that I met him one day at the house of a rich old consumptive, and whilst talking with his patient about the method of treatment, he told him that one way was to give him the pleasure of my company, and so that by fixing his eyes on the freshness of my face, and his thought on the overflowing liveliness and vigour of my youth, and filling all his senses with my flourishing youthfulness, his condition might be improved. But he forgot to say that at the same time mine might get worse.

Despite civil war and the divisiveness of his time, Montaigne thus sees human beings as still possessing a capacity for sympathy and reciprocity; we cannot help but see and experience the similarities and likenesses between others and ourselves, and our sense of life is intimately linked to this 'betweenness' between us. What obstructs our recognition of this fact, however, lies not simply within others, but within our own selves. At the heart of Montaigne's work is therefore an attempt to 'get away from the vulgar qualities that are within us...and recover possession of ourselves'. Here Montaigne attempts to reboot the self and clear out its cluttered memory; to reintroduce ourselves to ourselves and hence to our fellow man. But such a reconciliation is a much more difficult undertaking, something that is far more slippery and difficult to observe. How do you go about 'meeting' with yourself; how do you draw near? Montaigne's answer is to make use of a new ingredient, something far removed from traditional philosophy, something drawn from his estate and the land around him, something more home grown.

11.

A Dog, a Horse, a Book, a Gla.s.s

(ill.u.s.trations credit 11.1)

Finding myself in this plight, I wondered by how many slight causes and objects my imagination nourished in me the regret of losing my life. Out of what atoms the weight and difficulty of this dislodging from life was built up in my soul; and how many frivolous thoughts we give room to in so great an affair. A dog, a horse, a book, a gla.s.s, and what not, counted for something in my loss.

In the final years of his life, Montaigne's suffering at the hands of his kidney stones increased. But whilst exiled to what seemed to be the margins of life, he considers the simple things that intrude upon our acceptance of dying. They seem trifling yet somehow command our attention, and in fact seem to grow in meaning the more inconsequential they are: 'A dog, a horse, a book, a gla.s.s ...'

Montaigne was a seigneur, a member of the n.o.blesse d epee n.o.blesse d epee and a provincial gentleman of letters. But he was also a and a provincial gentleman of letters. But he was also a vigneron vigneron, a winemaker. Looking out from his study he could see the frost pinching the vines, January's pruning and tying, the sun warming the grapes and the bustle of the September vendange vendange. He could see the grapes being taken to the presses opposite his tower and the barrels loaded onto carts to be taken down to the river, and from there carried onwards on to the ports upriver and westwards into the sea. Barrels, bottles and gla.s.ses, drunkards, vineyards and vines totter and weave through the lines of his writing. He thinks about the flavour of wine in antiquity, the strange sobriety of drunken German soldiers, and the occult mysteries of fermentation. When he is travelling he feels free from day-to-day worries, but when he is at home he 'suffers like a winemaker'.

Winemaking in Montaigne's region dated back to the centuries after Caesar's conquest of Gaul. The fourth-century poet Ausonius describes seeing the Moselle, and being suddenly transported by its likeness to the area around his native Bordeaux: the 'hills bright green with vines, / and the pleasant stream below'. After the Black Death and the Hundred Years War, the economy declined, but during Montaigne's century it stabilized and began to put down fresh roots. The towns and villages were replenished as peasants poured in from the Ma.s.sif Central; the soil was reawakened and revived.

And wine was central to this rejuvenation. Trade with England, Brittany and later the Dutch, and the growth of urban populations encouraged the planting of new vineyards upstream from Bordeaux, where city n.o.bles and bourgeoisie like the Lestonnacs, Pontacs and Mullets began buying up land from the peasants with handfuls of American silver. And as they consolidated their estates as Montaigne's family was so successful in doing they turned to wine rather than wheat as their main product. Fields were amalgamated, smallholdings disappeared. The peasants increasingly found themselves working for the larger owners as sharecroppers, taking loans for food and clothing throughout the year then settling accounts with the fruits of their own labour.

Nearby, the Dordogne, the Lot and the Garonne provided the arteries for this recuperation, as shallow-hulled gabares nosed their way towards Libourne, Bordeaux and ports on the Gironde, the wine then loaded onto coasters and caravels for the long voyages north. In 1553 Montaigne's schoolmaster, George Buchanan, returned from an unhappy stay in Portugal and greeted France with a Latin eulogy which seems to have been sweetened by the natural and mercantile fertility surrounding Bordeaux: Hail, nurturing mother of the fine arts, Your healthy air and fruitful soils, Hills softly shaded in vines, Cattle-rich glades, well-watered valleys, Green meadows decorated with flowers, Meandering rivers carrying sails, Fish-filled ponds, streams, lakes, and sea, And west and south, sh.o.r.es full of harbours Receiving the world, and sharing with it, In turn, your riches without a hint of greed.

Figures for the region as a whole show it exporting an average of around 30,000 barrels of wine a year during the late sixteenth century. The Dutch being particularly keen on white wine, much of it grown upriver towards Montaigne and Bergerac. To customers in Amsterdam, Bruges, and London it offered an affordable, unpolluted alternative to water which could also ease the stresses and strains of city life.

In this picture, Montaigne might be considered as one of the older cla.s.s of seigneurial owners, but he too turned from wheat to wine as his main crop: exploiting the chalk soils and natural drainage of the south-facing slopes of Montaigne; the vine roots drinking in pota.s.sium and nitrogen, phosphorus and magnesium, resulting in a drink, according to Colette, savouring of 'the taste of the earth'. And it is perhaps the potential in his estate that also helps to explain Montaigne's retirement from his job as a magistrate; he writes how he has 'continued to prosper beyond my expectations and calculations: I seem to get more out than I put in.'