Managing Your Will and Energy — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne opens with a measure of his inner economy: few things, in comparison with what commonly affect other men, move or possess him. For the rest he has taken a principal and immoderate affection, yet he repeats his rule that a man should lend himself to others and only give himself to himself. That sentence governs the whole essay on how to keep a will from being seized.

The rule governs friendship, service, and speech. He refuses indiscreet, effeminate friendships and the sort of dependence that makes another's face one's own. Knowledge without judgment is useless to a man who has lost his head, and fortune is unkind when it teaches us only to suffer without teaching us how to use suffering. He distinguishes lending effort from surrendering judgment.

He turns to lawsuits and public quarrels with disgust. Most of our business is farce, he says, and he has always been against assisting even the just side with fraud. Courts, tricks, and pitiful expedients of the law disgust him; he would rather abhor lawsuits than grow skillful in them, and he praises those who yield a little from their right when peace requires it. Victory bought by deceit corrupts the winner as much as the loser.

The essay's middle catalogs what does move him: books, friendship, duty, Stoic maxims, and the strange honour of serving in confusion. He accepted office though he had published his unfitness for it, promised less than he hoped to perform, and found that leaving no hatred behind was itself a kind of success. Civil life around him was a placid sea that hid monsters; he quotes Virgil on trusting the quiet surface while suspecting what calm conceals.

War, faction, and epidemic then test the will he has been describing. Plague emptied his neighbourhood; he guided others while trying to keep his own resolution and patience. He saw peasants die with ordinary firmness while philosophers sweat over death in advance, and he prefers the simplicity that does not prepare misery early. Moderation in public evil still cost him robberies, suspicions, and the burden of leading frightened households.

Through civil war he learned to constrain life for a new state, trusting himself when fortune grew cold. True liberty is to have oneself in one's power; ordinary times prepare us for moderate accidents, but decades of public ruin require stronger provisions. He thanks fortune for an age that does not let indolence masquerade as peace.

He closes by returning to obedience and limits. He is a man of the common sort, avowed to public reason, and he speaks by way of discourse, not advice. Managing the will means knowing what may possess you, lending yourself where duty requires, and keeping the core that no office, fear, or crowd should wholly seize. He would rather be lucky than wise in outcomes, yet he will not pretend to crave offices he privately dislikes.