Montaigne sets aside the long comparison of the active and the solitary life. Ambition and avarice hide behind the saying that we are not born for ourselves but for the public. He asks men in public affairs to lay their hands upon their hearts: they chase titles and tumult to make private advantage at the public expense. If Bias is right that the greatest part is the worse part, the crowd is a contagion. Bias, in a storm, tells the praying men to speak softly, lest the gods notice they are with him. A wise man can be alone in a palace, yet if the choice is free he will fly the crowd. Men think they have left all business when they have only swapped a kingdom for a household. Black care sits behind the horseman and follows into cloisters. Told that travel improved nobody, Socrates answers that the man took himself along with him. Moving a sick man from place to place only sinks the disease deeper. The dog who breaks his chain still drags a long portion of it. True solitude is the mind called home, even in populous cities.
Since they will attempt to live alone, content must depend wholly upon themselves. Stilpo escapes the burning of his town, loses wife, children, and goods, and tells Demetrius that nothing of his was lost. When barbarians ruin Nola, Paulinus, bishop and prisoner, prays that they have yet touched nothing of that which is his. Wives, goods, and health must be had, but happiness must not depend upon them. Montaigne says we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own, and there entertain ourselves with ourselves, so that loss is no new thing. The man scrambling up a ruined wall under shot, and the midnight scholar measuring Plautus, are not there upon their own account. After a flourishing age in the world's service we have lived enough for others. Love this or that, but espouse nothing that cannot be forced away without flaying us. The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own. He who cannot lend must forbid himself to borrow.
Accidental commodities may be used as far as they please, but they are no true foundation. Montaigne would rather, under fortune's favour, prepare himself for her disgrace, as men counterfeit war at jousts in peace. He thinks no less of Arcesilaus for using gold and silver vessels when fortune allowed it. A poor man at his door is often more jocund than he is, so he dresses his mind after that mode. Retirement must not choose a laborious employment, or it is no retirement. The younger Pliny tells Caninius Rufus to leave husbandry to his hinds and extract from letters something entirely his own, by which he means reputation. Cicero would employ solitude to acquire an immortal life by his writings. They retire by halves, still hunting fruit from the world they claim to have left. Devotional solitude, proposing God as an infinite object, has a more rational hope. Neither the end nor the means of Pliny's advice pleases Montaigne. Book-employment is as painful as any other, and as great an enemy to health.
If over-study spoils health and good humour, Montaigne will give books over. Proceed to the limits of pleasure in work, then stop where trouble mixes with it. He cares for no books but such as are pleasant and easy, or those that teach him how to live and die. The glory Pliny and Cicero propose cannot inhabit the same place as repose. They have only their arms and legs out of the crowd; they have retired to take a better leap and a brisker charge back into it. Two philosophers writing to Idomeneus and Lucilius tell them to die in the harbour and quit the fruit of name. A few are enough; never an one is enough. Do like the beasts of chase, who efface the track at the entrance into their den. Concern yourself not with how the world talks of you, but how you are to talk to yourself. Retire into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself: a man may miscarry alone as well as in company. Present Cato, Phocion, and Aristides as controllers of your intentions, and rest satisfied without desire of prolongation of life or name. That, Montaigne says, is true and natural philosophy, not the prating of the two former.
Coming Up in Chapter 39
One word more, Montaigne says, on Cicero and the younger Pliny. Both beg the historians of their time not to forget them, then publish private letters, some never sent, rather than lose the labour. He asks whether that vanity becomes two consuls of Rome, or a schoolmaster whose trade is elegant prose.
