(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Montaigne was a French philosopher and essayist.
He read for amusement, but mainly to learn how to live and die well (Montaigne 1980, 297, 300). He read for knowledge of himself, not things (p. 296). To this end, he was also curious about the “the soul and the natural judgements of [his] authors” and sought knowledge of mankind in general but tended to bring this understanding back to reflecting on himself (pp. 302–3, 821–2):
I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.
He read only when bored: one hour spent on a particular book was a lot for him (p. 301). He approached books with gaiety, valuing knowledge but thinking it not worth the cost to strenuously rack his brain over (p. 297). When encountering difficulties in comprehension, he did not doggedly persevere at the task—persistence would rob him of his gaiety—but made one or two attempts, took a break, then perhaps returned to it at another time. He analogised his approach: “just as in order to judge the lustre of a scarlet fabric, they tell us to pass our eyes over it several times, catching it in various quickly renewed and repeated glimpses” (ibid.). If one book wearied him, he took up another (ibid.). If he persisted, he knew that he’d see less, losing both time and himself: “continuation and too strong contention dazes, depresses, and wearies my judgment” (ibid.).
Montaigne’s desire for gaiety and a pleasant life, to avoid significant mental labour, also affected the kind of books he read (ibid.). Feeling himself incapable of protracted study, he preferred works where “the knowledge I seek is…treated in detached pieces”, such as stand-alone essays, collections of maxims, aphorisms, and the like—books he could dip into (p. 300). He asked “only to become wiser, not more learned or eloquent”, so wanted the author “to begin with the conclusion” (p. 301). He sought books which would give him raw insight on which he could reflect: the waffle and preparatory remarks, the preliminaries and throat-clearing of verbose books, wearied him (ibid.). Considering his life short, he wished to focus only on that material that would grant him the wisdom he desired.
He developed a habit of “adding at the end of each book (I mean of those that I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it” (pp. 296, 305). In doing this he spoke to his books in his language, regardless of the language they spoke (p. 305). This habit was ostensibly compensation for his poor memory.
It’s unclear whether Montaigne’s memory was particularly bad, but behaving as if it was may have been to his advantage as it led him to focus on thinking through what he read, rather than memorising or excerpting it. He used books to arouse his reason by “offering it various subjects to set my judgment to work, not my memory” (p. 622). In this way his writing couldn’t help but be original because it could only reflect his reasoned reflection applied to himself. He went about (p. 100):
cadging from books here and there the sayings that please me, not to keep them, for I have no storehouses, but to transport them into this one, in which, to tell the truth, they are no more mine than in their original place
The wise reader transforms and blends pieces borrowed from others and transforms them into something uniquely personal. Montaigne illustrated this process as (p. 111):
The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram
This honey constitutes the reader’s judgement, their wisdom, which should be understand as the true aim of their education, work, and study (ibid.). When we embrace the opinions of others with our own reasoning, these opinions will no longer be theirs; they will be ours because “[t]ruth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later” (pp. 26, 111). It mattered not to him whether he heard or read these truths. “What shall we do with this people”, he asked, “that admits none but printed evidence, that does not believe men unless they are in a book, or truth unless it is of competent age” (p. 828)? He would quote a friend just as he would a classical author, because “truth is no wiser for being older” and “people write just as injudiciously as they speak” (ibid.).
We don’t become wise, then, by remembering and reciting the opinions and sayings of others—who didn’t own them in any case—but we must understand them to the extent that we possess them (p. 101). He asked: “What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not make us bigger and stronger” (ibid.)? Education is only worthwhile if it improves us (p. 103). There is not merit in trying to “attach learning to the mind, we must incorporate it; we must not sprinkle, but dye” (ibid.). Learning, for Montaigne, has lower value than judgement, because judgement can do without learning, but learning can’t do without judgement (ibid.). We can’t be wise “except by our own wisdom” (p. 101).
Montaigne’s approach to reading is characterised by intellectual humility. What he has learned “bears no other fruit than to make me realize how much I still have to learn”, and more generally his experience leads him to the certainty that human ignorance is an eternal fact: “we must learn that we are nothing but fools” (pp. 822–4). He owes his inclination to (p. 823):
modesty, obedience to the beliefs that are prescribed me, a constant coolness and moderation in my opinions, and my hatred for that aggressive and quarrelsome arrogance that believes and trusts wholly in itself, a mortal enemy of discipline and truth
In books he tended to discover meanings and insights deeper than the author intended or perceived, presumably because he read so much of his own wisdom into the text (p. 93). He explained (p. 298):
Most of Aesop’s Fables have many meanings and interpretations. Those who take them allegorically choose some aspect that squares with the fable, but for the most part this is only the first and superficial aspect; there are others more living, more essential and internal, to which they have not known how to penetrate; this is how I read them.
He had less interest in secondary literature, interpreting interpretations of others (p. 818). “[T]here are more books about books than about any other subject”, he noted: “we do nothing but write glosses about each other” (ibid.). These commentaries “increase doubts and ignorance, since there is no book to be found, whether human or divine, with which the world busies itself, whose difficulties are cleared up by interpretation” (p. 817).
Montaigne reflected that his use of books (p. 628):
consoles me in old age and in solitude. It relieves me of the weight of a tedious idleness, and releases me at any time from disagreeable company. It dulls the pangs of sorrow, unless they are extreme and overpowering. To be diverted from a troublesome idea, I need only have recourse to books: they easily turn my thoughts to themselves and steal away the others. And yet they do not rebel at seeing that I seek them out only for want of those other pleasures, that are more real, lively, and natural; they always receive me with the same expression.