Cicero says to study philosophy is to prepare yourself to die. Montaigne agrees: contemplation withdraws the soul from the body like a rehearsal of death, and every philosophy ends by teaching us not to fear the end. He will not deny that pleasure is our aim, yet virtue's deepest fruit is contempt of death, which gives life a calm taste. Because death alone is inevitable and can end every lesser trouble, all rules of wisdom converge there.
If death frightens you, the fright is perpetual, for it can meet you anywhere. Romans softened the syllable with periphrasis; we still flinch at the name. Montaigne, thirty-nine as he writes, piles absurd sudden ends: a duke crushed in a crowd, Henry II at a tilt, Aeschylus killed by a falling tortoise, men ended by grape-stones and combings, his brother Captain Martin dead within hours from a tennis ball he ignored after a feast. Condemned men ride past fine houses that cannot sweeten the journey. Making a will waits until the doctor has passed sentence, leaving little wit for the task. Those who only fear poverty or exile often suffer more than the poor or exiled who actually live there.
He rejects the vulgar remedy of never thinking on death until physicians have given up. Better picture it at a stumble, a tile, a pinprick, and set our frailty before our eyes amid feasting, as the Egyptians did with skeletons. Premeditation of death is premeditation of liberty. He keeps mortality in his mouth, writes instructions for after his death though merry a league from home, and tells the Macedonian prisoner to beg mercy of himself. Even in company and at games he entertains thoughts of friends struck dead after feasts, without letting it wrinkle his brow for long.
Nature's long speech insists we enter and leave by the same pass; every day nibbles at life; length of days matters less than use of time. Finish no plan that requires outliving fortune. Die planting cabbages if you must, indifferent to unfinished gardens. War and home alike surround death with theatrical terror, mourning costume, and divines at the bed; happy is the death that leaves no leisure for that theatre.
Coming Up in Chapter 20
Montaigne turns from dying well to the mind's power while we live. He will trace how imagination gives fevers, grows horns, fools bridegrooms, and spreads symptoms from one body to another The schoolmen say strong imagination begets the event itself, and Montaigne is painfully susceptible: another's cough tickles his lungs, and he usurps their sensations. He could live on jolly company alone..
