I read this book after giving up on Robert
Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers,
which I found intolerable. Heilbroner’s leading idea seems to be that you spin
out a noisy yarn about your subject of the moment (I got no farther than Adam
Smith – absent minded, he was, did I already tell you that? Well, he was absent
minded. D’you know what he did one day? No? Well, I’ll tell you …) and then, when the reader is open-mouthed
with amazement, you shove a spoonful of disgusting Economic Theory down their
throat. Not painful at
all, you see, give it a Human Interest and, see, you’re away.
So Sarah Bakewell’s book was something of a welcome
contrast. It is not technical or difficult and it provides a Life of Montaigne.
At the same time it seeks to engage us with his writings in an organised and
developed manner. I think it works very well. You get a strong sense of how
writings celebrated for their digressiveness are held together by a fairly coherent
body of thought.
I’ve never read Montaigne’s Essais, but I now know that I owe to Montaigne an idea I have liked
and deployed on several occasions – but drawing on a version of Montaigne’s
thought found in Malebranche. It’s the idea that paying attention – being able
to pay attention, being in the habit of doing so, valuing the time it takes –
expresses a natural piety of the soul.
It’s a way of acknowledging the importance of the world and our own
unimportance in face of it. It may be a phenomenon of nature or a work of art
or simply another person – but if we can’t or don’t stop, look, listen - then
we are not only letting down the object which invites our attention but
ourselves. Maybe you could say: we don’t live our lives unless we pay attention
to our situation at this or that moment in time.
I always think of very young children, capable of
extraordinary absorption in tasks they have set themselves and at which they
persist until disturbed, usually by some adult in a hurry.
Then I am reminded of something in my life which
provided me pleasure but which now, in retrospect, makes me feel a bit proud. I
once had a lover who after showering in the mornings, plumped herself down on
the bed to dry her hair. She had lots of hair and drying it was a
serious business. I always sat and watched, at a distance and without speaking.
I never tidied away the breakfast things, read the newspaper or
otherwise distracted myself. It was such a pleasure just to sit and watch, her
and all the intricate work involved in drying that hair. I was very happy.
I digress from Sarah Bakewell’s book. It runs to
over 300 pages, has a fine Apparatus of Notes and References but isn’t written
by an academic – the outside funding to assist the work’s completion came from
literary Funds. You may take that as a recommendation.
