Montaigne says we must not rivet ourselves to one humour: life is unequal and multiform, and the bravest souls show variety and pliancy, as Cato's versatile ingenium proved in every task he took up.
His soul amuses itself only in narrow ranges with total force, which makes idleness painful; books debauch it from self-study, while meditation fashions the soul rather than furnishing it. Most men need foreign matter to exercise their minds; his needs quiet to sit still and study itself. He is cold in ordinary friendships after one perfect friendship spoiled the herd, yet can contract rare friendships with violence of liking.
Socrates' motto was according to what a man can; wisdom limits desires to nearest powers. He must let himself down to those with whom he converses, sometimes affect ignorance, and not speak in print before people who are nothing of the sort. Learned men strew Plato and Aquinas where the first man met could decide as well; ladies should set out their natural graces, not borrowed lustre from rhetoric and law.
His second commerce is with women: he scalded himself in youth by loving without order, learned to flee the Euboean rocks, and insists a man must desire in earnest what he expects to enjoy, not play comedy without Cupid. Feigned love recoils; Venus without issue is as absurd as mother without child. Friendships and love depend on others and wither with age; books are the third commerce, constant and his own, going side by side through his course.
Books comfort old age, blunt griefs, and receive him with the same kindness when he runs to them from troublesome fancies; he enjoys them as misers do money, knowing he may read when he pleases. His round tower library overlooks garden and court; there he dictates these whimsies, walks to think, and rules one corner absolutely while ambition plagues men who cannot be private even in the watercloset. He lives from day to day, for himself alone, studies now for diversion not profit, and names women, books, and thought his three favourite and particular occupations, apart from civil offices he owes the world.
Coming Up in Chapter 97
After naming his three commerces, Montaigne turns to diversion. He will palliate a lady's grief by imperceptible gradation, then show how armies, suitors, and even kidney stones are turned aside by a little thing Montaigne once consoled a truly afflicted lady and learned that opposing grief head-on irritates it; a physician should first favour sorrow, then by facile gradation lead the mind to solider.
