Montaigne says argument and instruction cannot lead us to action unless experience forms the soul for the course we design; philosophers therefore left their studies to meet fortune rather than be surprised raw in combat.
Some abandoned riches, others chose austerity or even mutilation to harden the soul; practice helps against pain, shame, and necessity, but not against death, which we try only once and all enter as apprentices. Canus philosophised in death itself, asking what the soul feels at separation; ancient men tasted death in thought though none returned with news.
Sleep resembles death, swoons approach it, and imagination magnifies sickness until experience shrinks it; Montaigne once pitied the ill more while healthy than he felt pitied when ill.
Montaigne tells at length how a collision during the civil wars left him sprawled, vomiting blood, given over for dead, mistaking the swoon for death's sweetness before bruises returned with waking. He thought himself mortally shot, took pleasure in letting himself go, yet ordered a horse brought for his struggling wife while still half dead, then suffered worse pain when sense returned; the approaches to death frighten more than the instant passage.
We may approach death and view its avenues though we cannot overtake it; sleep accustoms us to the eternal state nature reserves, and violent swoons show the passage need not pain us though the approaches may. From his accident Montaigne gained near acquaintance with dying without completing it, and warns that swooning souls may feel little though spectators pity them; things seem greater by imagination than in effect. He has studied only himself for years, breaking custom that forbids speaking of oneself, and compares the fault to condemning wine because some men get drunk.
He closes on self-knowledge: describing oneself is difficult and often called vain, yet trade and art is to live; Socrates digested know thyself and whosoever shall so know himself may boldly speak it out.
Coming Up in Chapter 64
After practice and the swoon that resembled death, Montaigne weighs cheap honours. Augustus will be liberal with gifts yet sparing with laurel crowns that cost a prince nothing Montaigne opens on Augustus, wonderfully liberal with gifts yet sparing with true recompenses of honour, though he himself had received military honours before ever taking the field. Nations invented valueless distinctions, laurel and oak crowns, torches.
