E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten
Montaigne What Do I Know?
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78227-882-5
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Essential Essays
E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-882-5
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was born on his family estate in Aquitaine, not far from Bordeaux. Raised speaking Greek and Latin, he studied law before embarking on a career of public service, first as a counselor of court in Périgueux and Bordeaux, then as a courtier to Charles IX. Following the death of his father, Montaigne retired from public life to the Tower of his château to read and write. He published the first two volumes of his landmark Essays in 1580, with a third following in 1588; the complete Essays appeared posthumously in 1595.
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There is not a man alive less well equipped to speak of memory than I, for I scarce have any at all and firmly believe that there is not another in the whole world that is more distorting and defective than my own. The other usual faculties I have in middling, ordinary measures. But as far as Memory goes, I do believe I must be unusual, rare even, and worthy to be known—famous, even—for it.
In addition to the natural embarrassment it causes me (given how important memory is to us, Plato was surely right to call it a great and powerful goddess), it is a fact that when in my country they say that a man has no memory, what they really mean is that he is a cretin. When I complain of my poor memory, they lecture me and refuse to believe me, as they would if I were trying to make out that I was stupid. They fail to see the difference between memory and understanding, and that makes things harder for me.
But they do me wrong, for experience shows on the contrary that an excellent memory is frequently associated with poor judgement. They further wrong me in this: I do nothing so well as friendship and the words they use to admit my infirmity make me out to be ungrateful. They question my affections by attacking my memory and turn a natural defect into a deliberate fault. They say: ‘He forgot this request or that promise’ or ‘He does not remember his friends’, or ‘He has completely forgotten to do or say or not say such or such a thing as I, as a friend, had particularly asked of him.’ Of course, I admit to being forgetful, but neglecting to carry out a thing my friend has asked of me, that is something I never do. They should tolerate my wretched affliction and not turn it into a form of malice of a kind that is entirely at odds with my natural temper.
Yet I do take some comfort from my forgetfulness. Firstly, because it is a flaw which provided the main reason that allowed me to correct a greater evil that might well have overtaken me, namely ambition: a poor memory does not serve anyone well who has to do with public affairs. Secondly, as is shown by various comparable examples in nature’s compensatory manner of proceeding, she has strengthened other faculties of mine to make up for my dismal memory. Yet had I had the benefit of memory, I should have walked in the steps of others as most people do and, like them, picked up new ideas and novel opinions as and when they came my way. But I should not then have trained up my own mind and judgement. And thirdly, by this means, my speech is more direct and uncluttered, for the storehouse of memory is inevitably better stocked than the powerhouse of invention. Had my memory been good, I would have deafened all my friends with my chatter, the topics themselves as they arose encouraging whatever innate ability I possess to handle and expatiate on them, thus making me wax warm and at ever greater length. This would have been a pity, as I know only too well by observing the way some of my closest friends speak. Memory serves them up with their subject full and entire, but they nevertheless start their tale so far back and lard it with such irrelevances that if what they say is good, they stifle what is good in it; and if it is not good, you are left cursing the excellence of their memory or the weakness of their judgement. It is a very ticklish business either to try to interrupt or stop people talking once they are launched: there is no moment when the power of a horse is more clearly felt than when you are bringing it up short, to a dead stop. I see even those who stick to their theme unwilling and sometimes incapable of halting in their headlong discourse. Even as they cast around for a suitable point at which they might conclude, they carry on wittering and dragging matters out like men who are ready to drop from exhaustion. It is the old who are most dangerous in this respect for time long past remains fresh in their minds and they forget how often they repeat themselves. I have known tales which were once very entertaining which became utterly boring in the mouth of a great lord, each of his listeners having heard them all a hundred times before.
Secondly, I am also, as one ancient author once said, less likely to remember times when I have been wronged. I need a list of them to remind me, like Darius who, so that he would not forget a certain offence done him by the Athenians, kept a page who every time he sat down at table would come and repeat three times in his ear: ‘Sire, remember the Athenians!’.
Another thing: the places I see again and books I reread smile on me by seeming fresh and new.
There is every reason why people who do not feel sufficiently confident of their memory should not become liars. I realize that the grammarians make a distinction between ‘an untruth’ and ‘a lie’, arguing that an untruth means saying something that is false but which we believe to be true; while the definition of a lie in Latin, from which our French language is derived, designated a statement that we know in our hearts to be untrue, and that therefore it is perpetrated only by those who deliberately say something that is contrary to what they know to be true. It is of this second category I will now speak.
Now this sort of people either invent and make things up or they disguise and embroider the facts. What they change and disguise, they often alter again as they re-tell their story. But it is hard for them to avoid departing from what they said at the outset because the original facts, being the first to register in their memory, are indelibly imprinted on it, both by their grasp of them and the workings of their mind. So it is difficult for the truth not to crop up in their imagination, in which false versions put down roots which are implanted neither securely nor solidly enough and are easily dislodged, with the result that the facts of the original case continue to be permanently present in their minds and blot out memories of their later false and distorted accretions.
They have a great deal less to fear from tripping themselves up when what they say is a complete fabrication, since there is no true version that can be used to challenge and expose their mendacity. Even so, given that their invention is tenuous and difficult to fix in the mind, it may all too readily elude the control of a memory which is not entirely reliable. I have seen and been amused by many examples of this, often at the expense of men who claim that they tailor their words to fit whatever business they have in hand and to be agreeable to the great personages they are talking to. The plain fact is that cases are regularly altered by circumstances (to which they are prepared to sacrifice their honesty and good faith) and consequently their language must change accordingly, with the result that what moments before they said was grey suddenly becomes yellow; one man is told this and another that; and if by some chance those men should walk away, confer and compare their conflicting dealings, what does their fine art of negotiation amount to? Moreover, they are very careless and frequently give themselves away, for what a stupendous memory they would need to be able to remember so many variations which they have composed on the same theme! In my lifetime, I have seen many who had the ambition of acquiring this much-prized, lofty skill, but they failed to see that, though it may be highly regarded, the very fact of having a reputation for it renders it ineffective.
Lying is truly an accursed vice. We are men and have only our word to bind us together. If we fully understood the barbarity and gravity of lying, we should rightly see that it is more deserving of the stake than any other crime. I find that in the ordinary way of things people waste much time misguidedly punishing children for innocent peccadilloes and disciplining them harshly for naughty deeds which are relatively harmless and leave no trace. Lying, and one rung below it, obstinacy, seem to me to be the faults whose beginnings and development stand in greatest need of correction, for they grow as the child grows. And once the tongue has been started on this false tack, it is impossibly hard to set it to rights again. It is why we see otherwise honest men turn out to be enslaved by it. I have a tailor who is a good and decent man, yet I never once heard him say anything that was true, no, not even when it was in his interest to do so.
If, like truth, falsehood had only one face, we might be on better terms with it, because then we could simply take as true the opposite of what a liar says. But the inverse of truth has a thousand faces and an unlimited field of operations.
The Pythagoreans reckon what is good to be certain and finite and what is evil infinite and uncertain. Arrows follow a thousand paths that miss the mark: only one trajectory will lead to the bull’s eye. Certainly, I could not swear in all conscience that I could ever bring myself, not even to avoid some imminent, extreme danger, to tell a brazen, bare-faced lie.
An early Church Father once said that a dog we know makes a better companion than a man whose language we do not understand—
just as one stranger to another stranger is not a man
—Pliny, Historia Naturalis, VII, I
—so how much less congenial is a lying tongue than silence?
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