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<TITLE>Reading Revolutions -- Montaigne</TITLE>
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    <font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1"><b><a href="lectures.html">INDEX</a></b><br><br><font size="+1"><center><i>Reading Revolutions:  Intellectual History</i><br><br>
	Montaigne's Challenge:<br>
	To Dare to Say All That One Dares to Do</font><font size="+1">
	<br><br>
	<font size="+0" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">Gretchen Legler</font><font size="+0"><font size="+1"><font size="+0"></center>

<font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
<br><br>The following is based on the lecture and notes of Gretchen Legler.</font></font><p>
	<font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
	Lopate, Mairs, Harrison, Slater&#8212;These are some of the personal essayists of our time, baring their souls, revealing 
	for you their most intimate secrets, desires, fears, confessing 
	themselves&#8212;daring to write all that they dare to think or do.</font></p>
	<p><font size="+1" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica"><img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne2114ws.jpg" width="400" height="300" align="right"></font><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">Who cares?&nbsp; Well, we all care, because as much as this intimate 
	discourse might make us squirm, we want to see ourselves, don&#8217;t we?&nbsp; We 
	hunger for meaning, we thirst for details of other peoples lives, 
	gratefully, so we can hope to find ourselves&#8212;so we can say, yes, life is 
	like that, that&#8217;s how it is, that&#8217;s the way it feels.</font></p>
	<p><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
	Has 
	it gone too far? Well, some will always say &quot;yes&quot;. That our hunger for 
	honesty and truth telling has become mere confessionalism, narcissism, 
	exhibitionism, sensationalism. We have live web cams in people's bedrooms 
	and bathrooms.&nbsp; We have multiple reality TV shows, including Survivor.&nbsp; 
	Today we are in the midst of a babble of voices, maybe even a roar, of 
	people who are writing about their lives, revealing things we&#8217;d rather not 
	think about&#8212;their armpits and bowel movements, their incest stories, their 
	sexual desires, their lives in faraway lands, their coming of age stories, 
	their families&#8212;coming in from the margins where they&#8217;ve been silently 
	waiting.&nbsp; It&#8217;s as if the personal essay and the memoir today are taking 
	the pulse of the culture at large, not just a little slice of it&#8212;the rich, 
	the famous, the educated, the important. </font></p>
	<p><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
	What is it with all this soul barring&#8212;this lack of artifice.&nbsp; It&#8217;s so 
	real it can get ugly, can&#8217;t it?&nbsp; And it can be disturbing.</font></p>
	<p><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
			<a href="pictures/Montaigne/Michel_de_Montaigne_1.jpg">
			<img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne_1ws.jpg" width="275" height="300" align="left"></a>My seventy-five year old, mother, for example, is disturbed by even the 
	relatively conservative personal revelations I share in my own nonfiction: 
	&#8220;I think you should stick to journalism,&quot; she said. &quot;Why would anyone want 
	to write about THAT?&#8221;</p>
	<p>How did we get here to this place in the early 21st century, where it 
	seems that everyone has a personal, intimate, revealing, sensational, 
	scandalous, poignant, important story to tell, and is telling it?&nbsp; Some 
	say it all started with St. Augustine, the fourth century Catholic bishop 
	who wrote <i>The Confessions</i>, what some regard as the first real 
	autobiography.&nbsp; In it he writes of his youthful transgressions, his 
	theft of fruit from a neighbor's orchard, his lusts and his intemperance.&nbsp; 
	His goal was spiritual growth&#8212;to know himself as a way of getting closer to 
	God.
			</p>
	<p>Others, however, say it all started with our man here&#8212;Michel de 
	Montaigne&#8212;a French nobleman of the 16th century who is regarded by many as 
	the inventor of the personal essay&#8212; a philosopher, politician and writer who 
	some say is the greatest essayist who ever lived.</p>
	<p>Montaigne lived a long time ago&#8212;four and a half centuries ago.&nbsp; Yet, 
	his influence on the personal essay and the memoir&#8212;on personal 
	writing&#8212;follows us right up through the early and English essayists of the 
	17th, 18th and 19th centuries&#8212;Addison &amp; Steele, Samual Johnson, Hazlitt, 
	Lamb, Orwell and Woolf, until today.&nbsp; Montaigne never said this, but I 
	believe he could have: &quot;The personal is political.&quot;&nbsp; It became the 
	mantra of the 70&#8217;s
	<a href="http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/pisp.html">feminist 
	movement</a>&#8212;what you do in your personal life&#8212;in private&#8212;has repercussions 
	in the larger social and economic world.</p>
	<p>
	<font size="+0" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">
		<img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/Michel-eyquem-de-montaigne_1.jpg" width="226" height="347" align="right"></font>Montaigne is political.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; He chose to write, for one 
	thing, not in Latin or in the formal French of his time, but in regular 
	language.&nbsp; There is a democracy in this.&nbsp; And he chose to attempt 
	what no one before him, he claimed, had attempted&#8212;truly honest and intimate 
	explorations of the self&#8212;with no masks.&nbsp; We know ourselves so little, 
	Montaigne felt.&nbsp; We pretend so much.&nbsp; His enemies were ceremony 
	and convention.</p>
	<p>
	One of the fundamental principles woven throughout the essays is a belief in 
	our humanity.&nbsp;
	We 
	are all human.&nbsp; We are all average human beings.&nbsp; Although a 
	French nobleman, he farted when he ate 
	beans, he loved sauce, he scratched his ears, prefers glasses to metal 
	cups&#8230;and he made fun of himself.&nbsp; </p>
	<p>In his writings about education, he stressed that we should know that 
	position and wealth does not make us different from anyone else.&nbsp; We 
	still have the same frailties and weakness of others.&nbsp; He wanted men to 
	strive to know themselves and to live well.</p>
	<p>&nbsp;</p>
	<p>&nbsp;</p>
	<p><font size="+1">
	<img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/DSCN2128ws.jpg" width="316" height="350" align="left"></font>Many words are used to describe Montaigne: common sense; down to earth 
	view of human nature; humorous; skeptical; irreverent; aware of human 
	limitations.&nbsp; He created four and a half centuries ago a flexible, 
	informal, highly personal, introspective and free roaming kind of writing 
	whose goal and purpose was to explore the continent of the human&#8212;roaming 
	over multitudes of subjects from loyalty to friendship to education to sleep 
	to smells and even cannibals.&nbsp; His motto was not &#8220;This I know,&#8221; 
	but&#8212;&#8220;What do I know.&#8221; Que scais-je?<br>
	<br>
	He was born in Bordeaux France in 1533, at the beginning of the Renaissance, 
	to a very rich family. Educated formally in Latin, he studied law, became a 
	lawyer and member of the Bordeaux parliament. He ran in the high crowds with 
	kings and queens&#8212;and even served as a sort of ambassador during wars and 
	arguments between Catholic and Protestant forces in the later part of the 
	century.&nbsp; He was also a philosopher (a skeptic and humanist) and a 
	writer. I will be talking about him mostly as a writer.</p>
	<p>He began his essays in about 1570 and by his death in 1592 had written 
	three volumes.&nbsp; They were first published in 1580.&nbsp; The editions 
	that we have here for you to look at were translated into English by Charles 
	Cotton and were printed in 1685.</p>
	<p>The Renaissance of the 16th century found Europe in the midst of a 
	cultural movement that brought a period of revolution in science, art, 
	philosophy, religious thinking.&nbsp; The 16th century is regarded as the 
	transition between the middle ages and the modern era&#8212;a period of rebirth in 
	learning and knowledge.&nbsp; Other Renaissance figures who may or may not 
	have been contemporaries of Montaigne:&nbsp; Writers: Shakespeare, 
	Christopher Marlow, John Milton, Rabelais, Miguel Cervantes, John Donne.&nbsp; 
	Painters: Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Dürer, Michelangelo, Raphael, da Vinci.&nbsp; 
	Science: Copernicus (1543&#8212;his idea that earth is not center of universe), 
	Galileo, Kepler.&nbsp; Philosophers/Religious leaders: Machiavelli, Martin 
	Luther.</p>
	<p><font size="+1">
	<a href="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne2279wl.jpg">
	<img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/Montaigne2279ws.jpg" width="338" height="450" align="right"></a></font>This is the time when explorations were being undertaken all over the 
	world, as ships sailed out from Europe, fueled by a new wealth of a growing 
	merchant class in Europe, in search of money and goods. At the beginning of 
	the century Cortez was off to mess around in South American with other 
	conquistadores. Columbus was &#8220;discovering&#8221; the New World, Magellan was 
	sailing around out there.&nbsp; Montaigne was part of this milieu. Humanism 
	was in the air.&nbsp; And the doors were opening to freer, more speculative 
	and more open ways of thinking.</p>
	<p>Montaigne 
	has a license, as it were, to write about the body, about pleasure, about 
	the individual mind.&nbsp; He too was sailing off, in a way, into another 
	country.&nbsp; He delved into an enormous range of topics from vanity to 
	Virgil, from cripples to coaches and from truth to cannibals.&nbsp; He was exploratory, undogmatic, and curious about other 
	cultures that he was learning about though explorations (e.g. of Cannibals).</p>
	<p>He was a revolutionary in more than one way&#8212;it wasn't just subject 
	matter&#8212;the writing about the personal life&#8212;it was also in form.&nbsp; For 
	one, he wanted to write these essays in a form of writing that would be free 
	of the formal and elaborate<span style="background-color: #FFFFFF"> 
	structures </span>that were common in scholarly works of the time.&nbsp; He wanted to write on 
	a variety of subjects.&nbsp; He wanted to explore his own thoughts and 
	explore human beings.&nbsp; He wanted to put his ideas in a tentative 
	form&#8212;not pretend they were absolute truth. Scholars say his favorite terms 
	were &quot;Perhaps,&quot; &quot;Maybe,&quot; &quot;I think,&quot; &quot;It could be.&quot; rather than &quot;You should,&quot; 
	&quot;It is true that,&quot; etc. </p>
	<p>He devised a term for his writing: essay&#8212;from the French essayuer, to try 
	or attempt, to make an effort, to set out on a journey. The root meaning of 
	the word is to travel, to try things out, to explore, to journey. 
	Montaigne's essay is an excursion&#8212;a kind of mental journeying that takes the 
	writer and the reader into new country.</p>
	<p>He had deep convictions about the instability of things, the diversity of 
	humankind, and flux in the world. <br>
	He even felt that the human form itself&#8212;the self&#8212;was a mutable thing that 
	one could write into existence&#8212;one created the self, in a sense, by writing 
	about it. </p>
	<p><font size="+0" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">
			<a href="pictures/Montaigne/montaigne.jpg">
			<img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/montaignews.jpg" width="251" height="300" align="left"></a></font></p>
	<p>
	He 
	had a freewheeling sense of exploration that pushed boundaries of content 
	and style&#8212;reaching into the dark places of human experience.&nbsp; Such an 
	attitude flew in the face of the medieval scholastic, smug in his 
	intellectual arrogance, who believed that, armed with the Scriptures and the 
	masters of theology, he possessed the sum total of necessary knowledge 
	(salvation).</p>
	<p>We can see the hallmarks of today's personal essay in much of Montaigne's 
	work.&nbsp; </p>
	<p><i>Intimacy</i>: &#8220;I dare to write all that I dare to think.&#8221; </p>
	<p><i>Self revelation. Personal details. A confidential manner. Candor. Self 
	disclosure</i>. &#8220;We must remove the mask,&#8221; he wrote. A certain kind of 
	nakedness. &#8220;How the world comes at another person&#8212;the irritations, the 
	jubilations, aches, pains and humorous flashes&#8230;.&#8221; This is the stuff of the 
	personal essay.</p>
	<p>Montaigne had the idea that there is a certain <i>unity</i> to human 
	experience: &#8220;In every one of us is the entire human condition.&#8221;&nbsp; When a 
	writer is telling about herself, she is telling, to some degree, about all 
	of us.</p>
	<p><i>Honesty</i>: &#8220;The struggle for honest is central to the ethos of the 
	personal essay.&#8221;&nbsp; &#8220;The impulse of the essayist to scrape away 
	illusions&#8221;
	</p>
	<p>
	<font size="+0" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">
	<img border="0" src="pictures/Montaigne/DSCN2254ws.jpg" width="350" height="263" align="right"></font><i>Humility</i>: What do I know? Idea of &#8220;true intellectual humility.&#8221;</p>
	<p>Of all his practices, some say, was his propensity, to follow his 
	thoughts no matter where they led him.&nbsp; This created a spontaneity of 
	mental discovery and a challenge to formal structures.&nbsp; He wanted to 
	know what he really thought, not what he was supposed to think.&nbsp; His 
	conviction that we should look to ourselves and know ourselves in order to 
	write about ourselves, others and the world around us, has been a powerful 
	model for other writers, including me&#8212;I&#8217;ve come to him, in many ways, 
	through Virginia Wolf, but that, is another lecture&#8230;.<br>
	<br>
&nbsp;</p>
	
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	<center>
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	<p align="left"><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1">
	Following the presentation the audience was invited to examine the three 
	volumes of essays.</font></p>
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	<p align="left"><br><font size=-2 face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica">Montaigne 
	portraits from 
			<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montaigne">Wikipedia</a> and </font>
	<font size="-2" face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica"> 
			<a href="http://utopia.utexas.edu/project/portraits/montaigne.jpg">University of Texas collection</a></font></p>


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          <td width="100%"><blockquote><font face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size="-1"><br>Citation:<br><br>"Montaigne's Challenge:&nbsp; 
To Dare to Say All That One Dares to Do."&nbsp;  Summary of a lecture by 
Gretchen Legler.&nbsp;  University of Maine at Farmington, October 12, 2005.&nbsp;   Retrieved _______.&nbsp; &lt;http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Reading_Revolutions/MontaigneT.html&gt;.<br><br>URL:  <a href="http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Reading_Revolutions/index.html">http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Reading_Revolutions/index.html</a>  <br><br>Marilyn Shea, 2005<br><br>

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