I’m in a mood these days to make a brief return to Montaigne and to reconsider his thoughts on solitude, both for the ways I agree and disagree with him. Instead of diving into his full, sprawling essay on solitude, I’m going to unpack this paragraph:

“Seek no longer that the world should speak of you, but how you should speak to yourself. Retire into yourself, but first prepare to receive yourself there; it would be madness to trust in yourself if you do not know how to govern yourself. There are ways to fail in solitude as well as in company. Until you have made yourself such that you dare not trip up in your own presence, and until you feel both shame and respect for yourself, let true ideals be kept before your mind Cicero, Keep ever in your mind Cato, Phocion, and Aristides, in whose presence even fools would hide their faults; make them controllers of all your intentions; if these intentions get off the track, your reverence for those men will set them right again. They will keep you in a fair way to be content with yourself, to borrow nothing except from yourself, to arrest your mind and fix it on definite and limited thoughts in which it may take pleasure; and, after understanding the true blessings, which we enjoy in so far as we understand them, to rest content with them, without any desire to prolong life and reputation.”

Let me take this a piece at a time. Montaigne had lots of thoughts about how to manage “old age,” which in his time seemed to be anyone over the age of 40. He seemed to approve of a slow glide path towards death built on ease. I am in opposition to Montaigne on this point — my life has become an endless series of exercise: physical, mental and spiritual. I’m constantly challenging myself with difficulty — strenuous exercise, difficult books and movies, long and challenging writing projects.

I believe that Montaigne’s thoughts about speaking to yourself are off base because they are too easy an excuse to ease up in life, to not only enjoy simple pleasures in life, but also to make the easy divine. As one who finds greatest joys in accomplishment, looking within will never work for me. So I will continue to listen to the world and try to learn from it.

His next concept — that you must know how to govern yourself — I embrace fully. While I am willing to accept and take on self-imposed challenges, I am loath to take up others. My definition of peace is to be free of interpersonal drama as much as possible. It isn’t that I do not care about the troubles of others; it’s just that I do not wish to carry these burdens as my own. This is what the modern therapeutic culture calls “setting boundaries,” and it has taken a while for me to fully understand and embrace the concept, but I’ve now reached the point of seeing the value of it.

The third idea in this very dense paragraph is that there are ways to fail in solitude as there are in company. But what does this mean? We have to put up with more Montaigne exempla name dropping before he gets to the point: that we need to be content, borrowing nothing, keeping our minds from free floating — keeping them fixed on pleasant subjects — and then accept our place in life, no longer striving for acclaim. (Montaigne also adds longer life to this, but it seems a bit out of place to me. He can never stop writing about death, I suppose.)

So, in other words, his third point just creates a new tree of moral imperatives. To me, this listing of items returns him to the first point I largely disagree with — that at a certain point in life, we should just say “I’ve done enough,” I’m just going to sit on a beach in Florida until I die, rewatching “Breaking Bad” and “The Office” in an endless cycle. In my opinion, this is failing in solitude.

I believe that the ultimate goal in life is peace. We need to find contentment with ourselves to the point that if it is just you, that is enough. In many places Montaigne agrees with this. But while I understand that truly infirm people often have no choice but to make this situation sufficient — and in no way am I arguing against that — it is foolish to push one’s life towards this outcome.

So, to me, peace means continual inner and self challenge and steering clear of controversy and drama however possible. Life inevitably throws enough drama at us, it is foolish to go looking for it.