I’m blogging Montaigne’s essay On Pedantry, mining it for clues on how to read a book. It’s a pleasure to find a writer finding their footing in an early work. If you described writing as a kind of walking, it’s as if it’s easier for the reader to keep up before the writer hits their stride and leaves you racing to keep up, eating their dust.
So I’m thinking of the good M in his tower study room with his two or three hundred books, a very large number in the 16th century for a private gentleman, and wondering how he used them. I would love to read like Montaigne.
Montaigne mentions that a royal princess he knew referred to a well read guy as being so stuffed up with all the texts he had covered that she doubted that there was any room for himself in his own head.
First off, I loved how Montaigne named-dropped that he knew the princess. Of course, he did know her. He was very well connected. But, in all seriousness, dropping distinguished names as M does here and there in his essays can’t hurt book sales. And the Essays were a bestseller from the time they were first published. I imagine his reader, a country gentleman at home, starting up from his candlelight perusal of the page and exclaiming: “By gosh, he knew the princess!”
It’s not easy to read by candlelight anyway. I was reading Murakami by candlelight during the recent ice storm. I never would have gotten through the 900+ pages of 1Q84 if the power hadn’t come back on. But you read slower by candlelight, parsing out every word, and maybe that’s a good thing.
After quoting the princess, M contradicts her. But so graciously that you are not aware of any friction on the page. Montaigne says the character of the mind is such that it will expand as much as it needs to take in extra wisdom. And he also says that we shouldn’t ask how much someone has learned but how well they have learned. How well do you read? Not how much, how well?
M cites a law student who is an expert on hitting their texts but when confronted with an actual case doesn’t know how to judge it. And for all sorts of positions of responsibility, Montaigne recommends letting the candidate show how they would handle test situations to prove their competence.
His analogy is that of a bird carrying grain in its mouth for the fledglings. The bird doesn’t taste the grain. So lots of readers hold what they’ve read in their heads until they are ready to drop it off, like in casual book launch conversations, scattering it to the winds. The book has made no personal impact on them.
Montaigne berates himself for cadging other people’s writings. If you know his stuff, especially in the early pieces, he is always citing some authority, usually a classical writer because that’s all they had in those days, and giving a quote. Or quote after quote.
I like to imagine this process as brutally physical. Like M has to get up out of his carved 16th century chair and pull the book down from its shelf. I say to myself: “Oh there he goes again, he must have pulled down the Lucretius.” And I imagine him doing it.
How did he know where to find all those apt quotations? I figure it was like a mental version of Google. Montaigne says to himself: “I bet Cicero said something about that.” Then he pulls down his Cicero and pours through it until he finds a line or two that’s relevant to what he wants to say. This practice can make you seem very bright. But, of course, he was. And there’s something about knowing that you can only own a few books that makes you more carefully consider what those books are. If you decide that Suzanne Somers is your thing, that’s great. But that means you can only quote Someranian kinds of thoughts.
One fun thing about quoting someone else is that you can keep some distance from their opinion if you want. That also draws the reader in. As if you were saying: “Let’s see what we think about this!” That makes Montaigne’s essays seem like conversations with the reader and conveys the impression that you and the writer are friends. Many readers who love Montaigne feel that he is their personal friend. I feel that way. And my friend, Sarah Bakewell, has mentioned this feeling of it being personal in her book on Montaigne. So there, I have dropped a name also, since Montaigne was doing it.
I love the part about the professor who can explicate all the trials of long-suffering Odysseus but doesn’t know how to articulate his own.
Tell me how you read and I’ll tell you who you are. It’s the most common type of readership that we want to avoid. But we are all guilty of engorging an enormous hunk of text into our brains and letting nothing come out.
It’s like sitting down to a gourmet meal at a friend’s house and then when it comes time to clean up, refusing to join in.
So all due credit to readers who join book clubs, or write an Amazon review, or participate in an internet book site like Good Reads. Or talk about it to a friend. Hell, just read excerpts to yourself. That’s cool.
When you read a book, it’s like you are taking a walk with the writer in the woods. While you walk, the writer is talking to you. You should be saying something back.