Montaigne says argument and instruction cannot lead a person to action unless experience also forms the soul for the course it is designed. Philosophers who wanted a greater excellence would not wait for fortune in retirement. They sallied out to meet her: some abandoned riches, some sought labour and austerity, some even deprived themselves of sight or generation so pleasure would not soften them. Death is the one work practice cannot assist. Custom may fortify a man against pain, shame, and necessity, but death can be tried only once, and all arrive as apprentices. Julius Canus, condemned by Caligula, keeps his mind settled at the executioner's stroke to see whether the soul has any sentiment at the separation, so he may come again if he can and tell his friends. Montaigne cannot overtake death, but he can approach the avenues. Sleep resembles it; a swoon comes nearer still. The approaches are what we fear, and those can fall within experience.
He has spent much of his life in sprightly health, and sickness looked formidable until he felt it and found the attacks faint beside the fear. A warm room in a storm makes him pity those in the fields; once he is out himself, he does not wish to be elsewhere. During the civil wars, about a league from his house, a lusty fellow on a strong German horse, playing the brave, thunders into Montaigne's easy but weak mount and turns them both over, heels in the air. Companions conclude him dead and carry him home. After more than two hours he throws off a bucket of clotted blood, and his first sentiments are nearer death than life. He shuts his eyes to help thrust life out, and finds in that languishing the sweetness of gliding into slumber. He has always believed, contrary to La Boetie, that the dying we pity, groaning and twitching, have body and soul benumbed, and are not much to be pitied.
In the swoon his nails rip at his doublet and his hands go to his oppressed stomach without a commission from reason. Near the house he even orders a horse for his wife on the hilly road, yet he knows not what he said or did. Put to bed, he refuses remedies, certain he is mortally wounded in the head, and the glide feels so soft that few actions seem less troublesome. Two or three hours later the senses return and terrible pain arrives; he is so ill for two or three nights that he thinks he is dying again, this time painfully. The manner of the fall is concealed to favour the rider. When memory returns, the horse at his heels is a flash of lightning that pierced his soul, as if he had come from the other world.
The long story of so light an accident would be vain if it had not taught him that to get acquainted with death a man need only approach it. This is his study, not another man's lesson. Custom makes speaking of oneself vicious, in hatred of boasting; Montaigne says the remedy of cutting off the child's nose is worse than the disease. Forbidding him to speak from his own experience is like enjoining an architect not to speak of building. He does not write his own acts, but himself and his essence. Pride dwells in the thought; the tongue has little share. Whoever looks only downward should turn the eye toward Scipio and Epaminondas and put his weak parts in the other scale. Socrates alone digested the precept to know himself and arrived at setting himself at nought. Whoever shall so know himself may boldly speak it out.
Coming Up in Chapter 64
Writers of Augustus Caesar's life note that he was wonderfully liberal of gifts to men of merit, yet sparing with true recompenses of honour. His uncle had already given him all the military honours before he had ever been in the field. Nations invent crowns of laurel, oak, and myrtle that cost a prince nothing.
