This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series. From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

On Friendship
by Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Memorable Line
“Every day I am warned and counselled by the stupid deportment of someone.”

The Skinny
This abridgment of The Complete Essays , I must note, was translated by M.A. Screech, a name which would not be out of place in one of my novels. I must also note that Montaigne opens with an anecdote about something I love: Grotesques, those fantastical flourishes that often constitute a cryptozoological bestiary in the margins of decorated manuscripts. Digression and lolly-gagging often ensues within On Friendship, much as in this skinny.

Relevance? Argument?
As a child, I remember someone (my grandfather? uncle?) standing in front of me, putting his index fingers together, telling me to watch them as he moved them in a circle–and then quickly drawing them apart with a huffing chuckle. “Did I make you dizzy?” he asked as my eyes tried to go in both directions. (I now do this to my cats.)

I had a similar feeling of dislocation upon opening On Friendship and finding that it contained not one but seven different essays, making a coherent, single response difficult. Therefore, with apologies, let me deal with them as if seven index fingers had suddenly appeared before your eyes–and just as suddenly fled…

“On Friendship” gets off to a lurching start, almost as if we’re encountering the writer in mid-conversation about something else–the tape spliced at the wrong place–and then slowly comes into synch with its subject, and is harmless enough. There is nothing here to which one would pound one’s fist upon a sturdy table, desk, or bar stool, and shout, “I object, sir!”

“That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities” reads like a prescient but unnecessary repudiation of a dimly perceived Charles Fort.

The slight “On idleness” has a wispy quality shackled to a sledgehammer of a first sentence that reads in part, “just as women left alone may sometimes be seen to produce shapeless lumps of flesh.”

In the affable “On the affection of fathers for their children,” Montaigne warms up by addressing a Madame d’ Estissac with a kind of gently wilting wit: “Finding myself quite empty, with nothing to write about, I offered myself to myself as theme and subject matter.” And the reader begins to realize that–just as jump cuts in movies have translated into fiction that readers would never now allow to contain the entrenched pastoral wanderings of, for example, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring–the art of the essay has changed in a way that now frowns on the kind of noodling opening digression that would, in a musician, be the equivalent of tuning an instrument.

“On moderation” explains Montaigne’s approach throughout the book, in that almost nothing except untoward conversation (see below) overly upsets him, even when he insists it does, because he is just too agreeable for anything approaching rage or unfettered passion.

“That we should not be deemed happy till after our death” continues in this mode, with sensible suggestions for immortality. (“I say old chap, mind if I expire in the corner over there? I’m feeling awfully tired. If it’s no inconvenience, that is.”)

This brings me to the best and longest essay in On Friendship, “On the art of conversation,” which evokes a welcome physicality: “We ought to toughen and fortify our ears against being seduced by the sound of polite words. I like a strong, intimate, manly fellowship, the kind of friendship which rejoices in sharp vigorous exchanges just as love rejoices in bites and scratches which draw blood.” I was also drawn into the essay by direct quotes from Seneca (still my first love on this journey) and shadows of Seneca: “Just as our mind is strengthened in contact with vigorous and well-ordered minds, so too it is impossible to overstate how much it loses and deteriorates by the continuous commerce and contact we have with mean and ailing ones.” Also, very good advice: “When I am contradicted it arouses my attention not my wrath: he is instructing me.” This essay is well-reasoned–and well-clothed in extended metaphor and purposeful quotation of ancient wise men. While under its spell, I came to see how the moderation and politeness in Montaigne, even the digressions, might be of value. I thought much better of him after reading it, with the kind of fondness one feels for a valued colleague destined to be neither close friend nor mortal enemy. Someone who would never cause dizziness in a child.

Conclusion
Dylan Thomas and Montaigne would not have been drinking buddies.

Question for Readers
What do you value in friendship? Loyalty? Honesty? Some other quality? And: Am I your friend?

Next up, Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub…