Post #20: The Writer and the Meditator

20 May 2023

“I have no intention of concealing my absurdities, any more than I would a bald and graying portrait of myself in which the painter had drawn not a perfect face, but mine. For these are my humors and opinions: I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed. I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new that changes me.”

—Michel de Montaigne, Essays, I.26

Montaigne is often credited with inventing the essay. If so, I am deeply indebted to him because it is the writing that is most congenial to me and that I enjoy most. (On touching up portraits I would take a more lenient line.)

What Montaigne really introduced was perhaps more the label (literally “attempts” in French) and a certain spirit, rather than the argumentative and persuasive genre that one thinks of first when one hears the term today—the kind of exercise that calls for a clear “thesis statement” and in its cruder manifestations comes down to a mechanical tic about topic sentences and the like simplifications, often enough a mere pedant’s rack on which students find themselves tormented rather than tutored, and a Procrustean bed on which good writing is reduced to vulgar formulae that do not, alas, yield anything very appetizing, let alone compelling, and least of all refined or elegant.

The wider idea of using structured writing to make the world a little more intelligible and tolerable—to “banish the dragon of chaos for a while,” as Golo Mann wrote about Schiller, by forming words into rhythms and telling a tale beautifully—cannot be traced to any particular innovator of methods, but is probably a natural expression of the logos, in which the word and the ordering human mind become practically synonymous. (“In the beginning was the Word,” proclaims the opening of the Book of John in this spirit; cosmologically inaccurate, perhaps, but still expressive of a deeper truth about human meaning and culture in the higher sense the term once carried.)

Sorting things by means of words also involves a division of unities into dualities that may do violence to their true nature, granted; but if it had not served our human program of survival and procreation it would hardly have evolved so much, so let that stand as its defense if nothing else. The word raised above the level of mere grunts and calls of warning or mating is a big part of what has allowed us to rise above the animals, even if that is a mixed blessing and not something on which our species should pride itself quite as smugly and complacently as we have usually done; still it is nothing to be scoffed at either.

The Montaignian tradition is so distinctive because of how it focuses not on the argument, and even less on the persuasion, but how it turns the old vehicle of organized writing towards the explorative, the contemplative and reflective—the meditative in its older and more intellectual signification. In this too, it is hardly without precedent: most obviously what we know as Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations in English, more precisely his “Self-Reflections” (as the Germans commonly translate it), or more literally still, his writings “To Himself.”

To put the modern writer in this tradition may seem awkward. Our writers are a funny lot (I mean in the sense of peculiar, not in the sense of reliably amusing, though even that is not unheard-of) not generally known for their great expertise in the art of living. A particular degree of self-centeredness and habitual withdrawal, and a tendency towards melancholy, not to say outright depression, seems to characterize them so regularly as to amount almost to a professional malady. “Happiness writes white” may sound like a jest to the reader; to the writer is it is a fundamental, often bitter truth of existence. “You want to become a real writer?” as a friend of mine was once told by an old-school German literary editor: “Then go and suffer some more. Or do you know any better way?”

Whether the pen-wielding set become writers because they are so self-centered already, or whether the writing makes them so, would be hard to answer definitively; it probably goes both ways, starting with an inclination that is then deepened ever further by habit and continual reinforcement. It’s a dangerous constellation that has produced a bit of timeless literature and a great deal of abject misery and human wretchedness of every sort; what it has not often done is to raise before the eye of the world models of skillful living that others might wish to emulate.

Most writers’ lives, nay practically all of them from what I know, offer very little by way of examples that I would want to follow, and yet I must also admit that my dispositions line up with theirs so dependably that I found, in the course of a writers’ series at a college where I taught some time ago, that it didn’t really matter whether I liked a visitor’s work, or his person (or hers); I could always connect very easily—much more so, in fact, than with most academic colleagues with whom I might seem to have more in common, temperament aside, which is a crucial qualification. On the bigger picture, in other words, I am very much with the writers, and be it ever so dark. My ambition is not to look away from that shadow world, but to keep the little flame flickering, to give the sublime opening to the Book of John its due once again.

When I reflect on all that makes me fall short of being a “good” meditator on the mat, I cannot help noticing the overlap with what makes me a much more natural and effortless meditator at the keyboard. Or to put it a little differently, when I put myself in the company of other writers, practically all of whom are afflicted with ailments of the spirit kindred to mine (and perhaps corresponding powers too), my peculiarities do not seem so very peculiar anymore, and my quirks as much those of a type as those of an isolated character.

Plato thought that we writerly types (he said poets, but the meaning was much broader than what we would understand by the term, including tragedians and comedians and other artists of the word) dealt in inspiration, whose real power and beauty (perhaps its divine origin even) he freely acknowledged; unfortunately he also believed, via his teacher Socrates, that we do not often know what we are taking about (in the sense of being able to give a creditable account of it), though that doesn’t set us apart as much as it may seem: nobody else knows either, Socrates claims to have discovered in Athens, not politicos or professionals either, and what he would have said about our modern academics is anyone’s guess.

More dolefully still, but not without cause, he would have banned us from his ideal city on account of our power to mislead with the seductive but often meretricious charms of our creations. What is so remarkable about the miseries that writers evoke so potently (and that often enough have such deep roots in their own lives) is that they can draw others in so effectively, quite irrespective of the wisdom, or lack thereof, in what is being communicated. Caveat emptor, let the reader, like the buyer, check the wares carefully before he brings them home to his heart and hearth. Or as Nietzsche put it in his Zarathustra, be sure to pluck at the wreaths of your idols, the literary ones especially, since they may be deceiving you even without meaning to do so. Beware lest a statue slay you.

(This one goes to my former students at the National University of Singapore, who in an unforgettable seminar covered the entire collection of Montaigne’s Essays with me, and who really did read them, hundred-page indexes and all. Never has a group of students impressed me quite so much, and not only in the Montaigne class either. Here’s to Team Pelly!)