I’ve put a lot of thought this week into what I want my Montaigne book to look like. Originally I thought that I would just bring to market all 107 essays in whichever form I liked best. But going through each of my pieces again, it’s become clear that many of Montaigne’s essays aren’t worth highlighting and would just become lulls in my own work.
I’ve settled on a structure built around explaining Montaigne and explaining me ... pull together the Montaigne essays that are most essential for understanding his worldview and keep the focus on my explanation, analysis and modern contextualization of them. This is the easy part of the process, I have plenty of strong pieces to draw from.
The “me” part is much harder. Working through my project about “Drive My Car,” I was struck by Kafuku’s line that Chekhov is terrifying and has a way bringing out your rawest feelings in the moment. I feel that Montaigne does it as well sometimes, even if he never expressed such raw feelings himself.
The more raw the emotion expressed, the less attached I am to the essays I write over time. In fact, that “over time” can be just a matter of hours. Expressing emotion honestly and fully is something I’ve wanted to work on every time I’ve returned to this project. But what I’ve discovered is that the expression really isn’t the problem, it’s the fleeting nature of emotions.
Elliot Smith has a song called “I Didn’t Understand” that includes the lyric:
But my feelings never change a bit
I always feel like shit
I don’t know why, I guess I
Just do
I find the song very moving, but I honestly don’t relate to this Elliot Smith sentiment at all. I rarely hold onto moods for very long. For me an extended dark period might last a week or two at the most, and even those are quite rare -- nothing approaching the clinical definition of depression.
Usually my sentiments have a shelf life of 24-48 hours. So even if I express accurately how I’m feeling in a moment, I’ll almost certainly not feel that way within a couple days and will want to disown the piece in question.
So then, given that Montaigne often sparks a desire to express whatever it is I’m feeling, how do I capture the moment while still making clear that these are just snapshots of my feelings particular to that day and time?
I don’t have an answer to that yet. Maybe I need to take the essays that expressed the rawest feelings and then rewrite them at a time when I can be completely dispassionate about the topics raised. Perhaps then I can learn something about my own feelings and expressions over time.
(I should note that, reading some of my old essays, I seem to reveal my deepest feelings when I’m trying hardest to hide them. Going over some that I recently edited, I wanted to go back and give that version of me a hug, because I know exactly what he was trying to avoid saying.)
I’ll close with my favorite quote from Montaigne that I believe expresses his own view of this phenomenon, and perhaps gives a hint at how he dealt with emotional inconsistency himself:
We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.
