Why We Want What We Can't Have — The Essays of Montaigne

The wisest philosophers say there is no reason that has not its contrary. Montaigne has just been turning over an ancient saying for the contempt of life: no good can bring pleasure unless we are already prepared to lose it, for the grief of losing a thing and the fear of losing it are equal. He then states the contrary. We hug the good more earnestly the less assured it is. Fire burns with greater fury when cold mixes with it, and the will grows more obstinate by being opposed. If a brazen tower had not held Danae, Ovid says, she would not have been made a mother by Jove. Nothing is so contrary to our taste as satiety that proceeds from facility, and nothing whets it so much as rarity and difficulty.

To keep love in breath, Lycurgus decreed that the married people of Lacedaemon should never enjoy one another but by stealth, and that it should be as great a shame to take them in bed together as committing with others. The difficulty of assignations, the danger of surprise, and the shame of the morning give the piquancy to the sauce. The courtesan Flora never lay with Pompey but she made him wear the prints of her teeth. Cato nauseated his wife whilst she was his and longed for her when she was in the possession of another. Montaigne turned an old horse into the paddock because the animal could not be governed when he smelt a mare: facility sated him toward his own, yet toward strange mares beyond the pale he fell again to furious heats. To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to it; to give it wholly up is to beget contempt. Poppea invented a mask to hide the beauties of her face and so enhance them. Farthingales, veils, and a professed ignorance of what they know better than their teachers all draw the appetite farther off. In Italy, where the finest beauty is sold, it must still use extrinsic arts, and being venal and public it remains feeble. Of two like effects in virtue itself, we look upon that as fairest wherein the most trouble and hazard are set before us.

Montaigne then tests the same lever on larger knots. Divine Providence suffers the Church to be afflicted with storms, to rouse pious souls from the drowsy lethargy of long tranquillity. We have thought to tie the nuptial knot more fast by taking away all means of dissolving it, yet the knot of will and affection slackens as constraint is drawn closer. At Rome, the liberty of divorce kept marriages inviolate for five hundred years and more before any one made use of it. Executions, an ancient said, whet vices rather than dull them; Montaigne does not know if that is true, but he experimentally knows that never civil government was by that means reformed. The Argippians live without rod or stick; whoever can fly thither is safe by their sanctity. A certain nation fences gardens with a string of cotton, firmer than hedges. During the civil wars he left his own house open: defence allures attempt, and defiance provokes an enemy. His gate has no other guard than a porter of ancient custom, and no sentinel but the stars. He never removed plate, deeds, or hangings. Amongst so many garrisoned houses, he alone of his rank in France, so far as he knows, trusted purely to Heaven. There are thirty years that he has thus lived.