Book 1, Chapter 22: Of Custom, And That We Should Not Easily Change A Law Received (1 of 3).

In this essay Montaigne points out the absurdity of things we do that we consider absolutely normal. 

A story to illustrate the power of custom: a country-woman grew used to playing with and carrying a young calf in her arms, and continued to do so daily so that, even when it was grown to be a big ox, she found she could still lift it.

Custom is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress who, little by little, slyly and unperceived, imposes her authority. She begins gently and humbly and, with the benefit of time, fixes and establishes herself. Then she unmasks a furious and tyrannical face, against which we no longer have the courage or the power to even lift up our eyes. We see her, at every turn, forcing and violating the rules of nature.

Think of how much custom stupefies our senses. My perfumed doublet gratifies my own senses at first, but after I have worn it for three days running, it is only pleasing to bystanders. The ability of custom to effect our impressions is also evident in those who live near steeples and noisy bells. I myself live in a tower where a great bell rings every morning and evening; the noise shakes my very tower, and was at first unbearable to me. Now, I am so used to it, that I hear it with indifference, and often don’t awaken at it.

When Plato reprehended a man for playing dice, he said, "you chide me for a very little thing." "Custom," replied Plato, "is no little thing."

I find that our greatest vices develop in infancy, and the people who nurse us at this time play a crucial role. Mothers are often amused when their children are cruel to animals, and fathers are pleased when they hear their son being rude or domineering to a poor peasant, seeing this as a sign of strength, and when they see him cheat his playfellows by treachery or deceit, they think this witty. Yet these are the roots of cruelty, tyranny, and treason, that afterwards grow to prodigious bulk, cultivated by custom. It is a very dangerous mistake to ignore these vile inclinations due to the the tenderness of their age, and the triviality of the subject. In fact, nature speaks more sincerely at this age, as inward thoughts are more undisguised. Also, the ugliness of deception does not consist nor depend upon the difference between pounds and pennies. If they only play with marbles, would they not do the same with money? Children should carefully be instructed to abhor vices for the natural deformity of the vice itself. ,This way, they may not only avoid them in their actions, but abominate them in their hearts.

I was brought up to deal with everything in a plain and straightforward way of dealing, and have always had an aversion to all trickery and foul play, even in childish sports and recreations (and, indeed, it is to be noted, that the plays of children are not performed in play, but are taken very seriously by them).

The other day, I saw someone, born without arms, who has taught his feet to perform the services his hands should have done him so well that it seemed his feet had forgotten their natural role. Indeed, the fellow calls them his hands; with them he cuts anything, charges and discharges a pistol, threads a needle, sews, writes, takes off his hat, combs his hair, plays cards and dice, and all this with as much dexterity as any other could do with his hands. The money I gave him—for he gains his living by showing these feats—he took in his foot, as we do in our hand. I have also seen a little boy flourish a two-handed sword, handle a spear with great skill, and crack a whip as well as any coachman in France.

Even more amazing is the effect that custom has on our mind, for she has the power to establish our judgments and beliefs. She can plant any opinion, no matter how crazy, to any part of the world she wants, and it becomes established as law.  That’s why Cicero said that it is a shame for the philosopher to seek testimony of the truth from minds prepossessed by custom.

All kinds of absurd and ridiculous fancies can enter into human imagination, and become public practice. There are people, amongst whom it is the fashion to turn their backs upon him they salute, and never look upon the man they intend to honour. There is a place, where, whenever the king spits, the greatest ladies of his court put out their hands to receive it; and another nation, where the most respectable people stoop about the king and take up his excrement in a linen cloth. Let us here steal room to insert a story.

A French gentleman I knew always blew his nose with his fingers (a thing very much against our fashion), and he justified himself for so doing by asking me what privilege this filthy excrement had, that we must carry about us a fine handkerchief to receive it, and, what was more, afterwards wrap it up carefully, and carry it all day in our pockets, which, he said, could not be much more nauseous and offensive, than to see it thrown away, as we did all other evacuations. I found that what he said was not altogether without reason, and by being frequently in his company, that slovenly action which we make a face at, when we hear it reported of another country of his grew familiar to me. 

Things appear to us to be miracles because of our ignorance of nature. When we become accustomed to something, no matter what it is, our judgment of it is blinded. Barbarians are no more a wonder to us, than we are to them;  nor with any more reason.

We pretend that our consciences come from nature, but in fact they come from custom. Everyone has more respect for those opinions and behaviours that come from his own people, and can only depart from them with great reluctance. Long ago, the people of Crete, if they wanted to curse someone, prayed that they become involved in bad customs. Custom seizes and traps us in such a way that we can’t even think objectively about what it asks of us. We suck it in with our milk, it seems. We were born conditioned to follow it. The thoughts and ideas that we find everywhere around us appear to us to be universal and genuine, and therefore based on reason. God knows how unreasonable it actually is.

When we hear a good sentence, we should immediately consider how it touches our own concerns. If we did this, we would find that it was not so much a good saying, but in fact a severe lash to the ordinary stupidity of our own judgment. But men never question what they are told, and only do what they are directed to do. Instead of applying these sentences to their own lives, they very ignorantly and unprofitably commit them to memory.

There are peoples, where, his wife and children excepted, no one speaks to the king but through a tube. There are places where brothels of young men are kept for the pleasure of women; where the wives go to war as well as the husbands, and not only share in the dangers of battle, but, moreover, in the honours of command. Others, where they wear rings not only through their noses, lips, cheeks, and on their toes, but also through their paps and buttocks; where, in eating, they wipe their fingers upon their thighs, genitories, and the soles of their feet: where children are excluded, and brothers and nephews only inherit.

There are places where they lament the death of children, and feast at the decease of old men: where they lie ten or twelve in a bed, where women, whose husbands come to violent ends, may marry again, and others not: where the condition of women is looked upon with such contempt, that they kill all the native females, and buy wives of their neighbours to supply their use; where husbands may repudiate their wives, without showing any cause, but wives cannot part from their husbands, for what cause soever; where husbands may sell their wives in case of sterility; where they boil the bodies of their dead, and afterward pound them to a pulp, which they mix with their wine, and drink it; where they believe the souls of the blessed live in all manner of liberty, in delightful fields, furnished with all sorts of delicacies, and that it is these souls, repeating the words we utter, which we call Echo; where they fight in the water, and shoot their arrows with the most mortal aim, swimming; where, for a sign of subjection, they lift up their shoulders, and hang down their heads; where they put off their shoes when they enter the king's palace; where the eunuchs, who take charge of the sacred women, have, moreover, their lips and noses cut off, that they may not be loved; where the priests put out their own eyes, to be better acquainted with their demons, and the better to receive their oracles; where every one makes to himself a deity of what he likes best; the hunter of a lion or a fox, the fisher of some fish; idols of every human action or passion; in which place, the sun, the moon, and the earth are the 'principal deities, and the form of taking an oath is, to touch the earth, looking up to heaven; where both flesh and fish is eaten raw; where the greatest oath they take is, to swear by the name of some dead person of reputation, laying their hand upon his tomb; For we know entire nations, where death was not only despised, but entertained with the greatest triumph …

(This list of strange customs goes on for pages and pages)

Book 1, Chapter 19: That To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die (Part 2 of 3)

In this part of the essay, Montaigne offers some ways of dealing with death. He shares his own (one may find, extreme) strategies of preparing himself for the end

'Let us disarm death of all novelty and strangeness. Let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts'

 Man laughs and plays and gallops and dances without thinking at all of death. Nonetheless, when it comes to them by surprise, or to their wives, children, or friends, what torment and outcries, what madness and despair! Have you ever seen anyone so changed, confused, and subdued? Therefore, man must prepare in advance for it. If it were an enemy that could be avoided then I would advise to borrow arms, even from cowardice if need be, but it is not, and it will catch you whether you are hiding away or fleeing like a coward, or whether you face it bravely. No kind of weapon can secure us against it.

Nonetheless there is a strategy.

Let us learn bravely to stand our ground and fight him. To deprive him of the greatest advantage that he has over us, we have to take a route that is not common. Let us disarm him of all novelty and strangeness. Let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death.

We should imagine him constantly, in all kinds of shapes. At the stumbling of a horse, the falling of a tile, the prick of a pin, we should stop and ask ourselves, ‘Well, and what if it had been death itself?’ This way, we can encourage and fortify ourselves. Even when we are happy and feasting, we should remember how frail our condition is, and never get carried away with our delights. We should stop and reflect how our happiness tends to death, and think of all the dangers that death threatens us with. The Egyptians followed this advice seriously: in the middle of their feasting and joy, they had a dried human skeleton brought to the room, for the guests to be reminded.

Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has learned to un-serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who understands that the end of life has no evil. To learn how to die releases us from all subjection and constraint.

In everything in life, art and industry cannot perform anything useful without the help of nature. In my own nature, I am not melancholic, but I am meditative, and there is nothing I have entertained myself with more continually than imaginations of death, even when I have been happiest and healthiest, when, as Catullus said, ‘my florid age rejoiced in pleasant spring.’

Recently I was in the company of ladies and at games, and people must have thought I was possessed with jealousy or some kind of uncertain hope. In truth I was thinking of some one who, a few days before, had died with a burning fever. He had been returning from a party like this one, with his head full of idle fantasies of love and jollity, as mine was then, and for all I knew, the same destiny awaited me.

Every minute I think I am escaping, and what may be done tomorrow must be done today.

A friend of mine was going through my notes the other day, and he found a memo where I had written of something I would have done had I not died. I told him, as was true, that the thought came to me when I was not far from my house, and I was happy and healthy. Yet, I wrote it down there, because I was not certain that I would live to come home. I am eternally brooding over my own thoughts, and confine them to my own particular concerns. At all hours, I am well-prepared for death, so that whenever he comes, he can bring nothing along with him that I did not expect long before. We should always, as near as we can be, be booted and spurred, and ready to go.

And we should have no business with us but our own, because we shall find enough work to do without any need of addition. One man complains that death will prevent him a glorious victory, another that he must die before his daughter has married, or his children finished school, a third seems only troubled to be losing his wife’s company, a fourth the conversation of his son. For my part, I am at this instant in such a condition that I am ready to dislodge, whenever it shall please God, without regret for anything whatsoever. I disengage myself from all worldly relations and take leave from all but myself. Never did anyone prepare to say goodbye to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and shake hands with all manners of interest in it, than I expect to do. The deadest deaths are the best.

As the Egyptians, after their feasts where they presented their guests with the image of death, said, ‘Drink and be merry, for such shalt thou be when thou art dead’, so it is my custom to have death not only in my imagination but continually in my mouth. There is nothing I am more curious about and delighted to hear of than the manner of men’s deaths: their words, looks, behaviour etc. There are also no places in history I am more interested in than those associated with the subject. If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register with a comment on the various deaths of men. He who should teach men how to die would at the same time teach them how to live. Dicarchus made one, to which he gave that title, but it was designed for another and less profitable goal.

Some may object that the actual pain and terror of dying so infinitely exceeds what we can imagine, that to guard against it this way is useless. Let them say what they will; to premeditate it is doubtlessly a great advantage. Nature herself encourages and assists us: if our death is sudden and violent, we have no time to fear; if otherwise, then as my disease worsens, I naturally enter into a certain loathing and disdain of life. I find it is more strenuous to digest this idea of death when I am healthy than when I am languishing in fever. In fever, I have less to do with the commodities of life, and I lose the use and pleasure of them, and I begin to look upon death with less terror. This makes me hope that the more I remove myself from the first and the nearer I approach the latter, the more easy it will be to exchange the one for the other. 

Book 1, Chapter 14: That Men Are Justly Punished For Being Obstinate In The Defence Of A Fort That Is Not In Reason To Be Defended

This essay, competing in length with an astonishingly long title, is about the foolishness of defending a fort that will clearly fall

'a man might look contemptuously at two guns, but only a madman would ignore 30 cannons'

Bravery has its virtues, but it also has its limits, and when those limits are crossed, one steps into ‘the territories of vice’. Having too much bravery, unless the holder of the bravery maintains the ideal limits (when one is near the limits, they are hard to discern), may easily cause one to run into stubbornness, foolishness, and arrogance. For this reason we have the custom of punishing men (even with death) who are stubborn enough, during wartime, to defend a place that is clearly unable to be held on to. If  this custom did not exist, every chicken-coop would try to resist invading armies.

- The Constable de Montmorenci, after laying siege to Pavia (in Italy), was crossing the river Ticino to go back to his quarters when he was stopped by a tower at the end of the bridge, whose inhabitants, insistent on defending themselves, picked a fight. The constable hanged every man he found within. I have several other examples of similar occurrences.

As much as the strengths and the weaknesses of a fortress are measured by the size and power of the forces that attack it (a man might look contemptuously at two guns, but only a madman would ignore 30 cannons), the greatness of the invading prince and the respect accorded to him are also put into the balance. There is a danger, in fact, that too much emphasis will be laid upon this secondary factor, and a man may think himself so high and powerful that he cannot imagine any place shutting its gates to him. He attacks everyone who opposes him, while his luck lasts. We see this clearly in the fierce and haughty calls-to-war made by the Oriental princes and their successors. And in that part of the world where the Portuguese defeated the Indians, they found that some states had the inviolable and universal law that anyone defeated in the presence of the king or his lieutenant would not be saved, by either ransom (prisoner exchange etc) or mercy. Therefore it was important, above all, to avoid falling into the hands of an enemy who was also a judge, and who was victorious, and armed.  

Book 1, Chapter 13: The Ceremony Of The Interview Of Princes

In this essay, Montaigne discusses the self-proclaimed ‘frivolous’ topic of hospitality. He warns against being enslaved by set codes of conduct, but also says that politeness can be one of the keys to love at first sight

‘I love to follow them (rules of politesse), but not to be so servilely tied to their observation that my whole life should be enslaved to ceremonies ... I have seen some people rude, by being over-civil and troublesome in their courtesy.'

There is no subject so frivolous that it does not merit a place in my essays. According to our social customs, it would be rude (to an equal, and much more so to a superior) to fail being at home when someone has told you he will come to visit. Queen Margaret of Navarre adds further that it would even be rude for a gentleman to go over to someone’s house when he is supposed to be coming over, no matter what high position he may be in. It is more respectful to stay at home and receive him, if only because you could miss him on the way. Personally, I try to reduce the ritual observances of my house as much as I can, and I often commit either one or both of these offences. If someone takes offence ‘I can’t help it; it is much better to offend him once than myself every day, for it would be a perpetual slavery’. What is the point of avoiding the servile ceremonies of the court if we bring the same trouble into our own homes? Another common rule of all assemblies is that ‘those of less quality’ arrive earlier, in order to allow the ‘better sort’ to make the others wait, in expectation.

None of these rules are set in stone. For instance,

- When the Pope Clement came to visit King Francis in Marseilles (France, 1533), the King, after making preparations for the Pope’s entertainment and reception, left town, and he gave the Pope two or three days rest and refreshment time before he met him.

- The Emperor Charles V in 1532 had the Pope visit him first before he visited the Pope. This was an act of deference, following a custom common at princely meetings, where the greater person should be present first in the appointed place of meeting. This is especially important when the meeting is in the country of the other person  because it is more proper for the less to seem out the great than vice versa.

Not just every country, but every city and every society has its own customs. I was educated well in the formalities of our own nation; I could even give lessons in it. ‘I love to follow them, but not to be so servilely tied to their observation that my whole life should be enslaved to ceremonies’. Some are so troublesome that it would be better to avoid them, provided that this is done with good judgment and not just uncouthness. I have seen some people rude, by being over-civil and troublesome in their courtesy.

But besides these exceptions, the knowledge of politeness and good manners is a ‘very necessary study’.  Like grace and beauty, it gives rise to ‘liking and an inclination to love one another at the first sight, and in the very beginning of acquaintance.’ It opens the door to us learning from the example of others, and allows us to set examples ourselves, if we have any, that is, worth taking notice of and communicating.