The Vanity of Writing About Vanity — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne opens with the joke that structures the whole essay: there is, peradventure, no more manifest vanity than to write of vanity so vainly. He cannot give account of his life by actions because fortune placed them too low; he must do it by his fancies, and he asks what prating should produce when even grammar spawned thousands of volumes. Scribbling, he says, is a symptom of a disordered age; we write most when troubles multiply.

From that confession he ranges through foolish laws he would gladly invoke against impertinent authors, the gentleman who communicated life only by basins in his study, and the difference between living and writing about living. He loves a gay and civil wisdom, not sour austerity, and he defends his wandering style: he must march his pen as he marches his feet, reporting common life rather than performing doctrine. Chronology may transpose because he values truth to his impressions over archival neatness.

Travel, Rome, and friendship occupy the long middle. He will never, he thinks, become so decrepid or so habituated to his own country that he scorns elsewhere, yet he carries necessities with him and distrusts wretched lodgings without relief. Books, letters, and conversation with a worthy man of sound judgment are among life's rarest comforts; he values a friend who can contradict without tyranny and whose manners conform to his own. Rome teaches him ceremony and ruin at once; foreign custom loosens prejudice without abolishing home.

He turns to public things with the same personal lens: war, office, reputation, succession, and the cost of being readable. Princes and peoples imitate show; we write because trouble multiplies speech, not because speech reduces trouble. He keeps returning to the same admission: his essay is excrement of an old mind, sometimes thick, sometimes thin, always indigested, yet honest about its own ridiculous diligence. He is responsible at home for whatever goes amiss, even when the page sounds careless.

Old age, gout, and the approach of death sharpen the comedy rather than ending it. He has long preached sticking to his own concerns yet still turns his eyes aside at a bow or kind look from a great person. Vanity is not only pride but the endless narration of a self that cannot stop inspecting itself. He envies neither the celestial lives he esteems from afar nor the ambition that would make every sentence a monument.

Near the close he insists common life ought to relate to other lives, and that virtue in retirement must still speak to the human community. He compares himself to writers who march their pens beside their feet, refusing the fiction that wisdom requires sour withdrawal from the ordinary. He does not renounce writing; he exposes why he cannot renounce it.

The essay ends where it began: ink and paper guarantee he will proceed incessantly, and the true subject is a man who knows he is vain yet keeps confessing anyway. He would banish half the scribblers if law allowed, yet he remains the most persistent among them because self-study is his only rank high enough to record.