The Consolations of Philosophy

One beautiful characteristic of their marriages is worth noting: just as our wives are zealous in thwarting our love and tenderness for other women, theirs are equally zealous in obtaining them for them. Being more concerned for their husband’s reputation than for anything else, they take care and trouble to have as many fellow-wives as possible, since that is a testimony to their husband’s valour.

It was all undeniably peculiar. Montaigne did not find any of it abnormal.

He was in a minority. Soon after Columbus’s discovery, Spanish and Portuguese colonists arrived from Europe to exploit the new lands and decided that the natives were little better than animals. The Catholic knight Villegagnon spoke of them as ‘beasts with a human face’ (‘ce sont des bêtes portant figure humaine’); the Calvinist minister Richer argued they had no moral sense (‘l’hébétude crasse de leur esprit ne distingue pas le bien du mal’); and the doctor Laurent Joubert, after examining five Brazilian women, asserted that they had no periods and therefore categorically did not belong to the human race.

Having stripped them of their humanity, the Spanish began to slaughter them like animals. By 1534, forty-two years after Columbus’s arrival, the Aztec and Inca empires had been destroyed, and their peoples enslaved or murdered. Montaigne read of the barbarism in Bartolomeo Las Casas’s Brevissima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias (printed in Seville in 1552, translated into French in 1580 by Jacques de Miggrode as Tyrannies et cruautés des Espagnols perpétrées es Indes occidentales qu’on dit le Nouveau Monde). The Indians were undermined by their own hospitality and by the weakness of their arms. They opened their villages and cities to the Spanish, to find their guests turning on them when they were least prepared. Their primitive weapons were no match for Spanish cannons and swords, and the conquistadores showed no mercy towards their victims. They killed children, slit open the bellies of pregnant women, gouged out eyes, roasted whole families alive and set fire to villages in the night.

(Ill. 17.4)

They trained dogs to go into the jungles where the Indians had fled and to tear them to pieces.

Men were sent to work in gold- and silver-mines, chained together by iron collars. When a man died, his body was cut from the chain, while his companions on either side continued working. Most Indians did not last more than three weeks in the mines. Women were raped and disfigured in front of their husbands.

(Ill. 17.5)

The favoured form of mutilation was to slice chins and noses. Las Casas told how one woman, seeing the Spanish armies advancing with their dogs, hanged herself with her child. A soldier arrived, cut the child in two with his sword, gave one half to his dogs, then asked a friar to administer last rites so that the infant would be assured a place in Christ’s heaven.

With men and women separated from each other, desolate and anxious, the Indians committed suicide in large numbers. Between Montaigne’s birth in 1533 and the publication of the third book of his Essays in 1588, the native population of the New World is estimated to have dropped from 80 to 10 million inhabitants.

The Spanish had butchered the Indians with a clean conscience because they were confident that they knew what a normal human being was. Their reason told them it was someone who wore breeches, had one wife, didn’t eat spiders and slept in a bed:

We could understand nothing of their language; their manners and even their features and clothing were far different from ours. Which of us did not take them for brutes and savages? Which of us did not attribute their silence to dullness and brutish ignorance?

After all, they … were unaware of our hand-kissings and our low and complex bows.

They might have seemed like human beings: ‘Ah! But they wear no breeches …’

Behind the butchery lay messy reasoning. Separating the normal from the abnormal typically proceeds through a form of inductive logic, whereby we infer a general law from particular instances (as logicians would put it, from observing that A1 is ø, A2 is ø and A3 is ø, we come to the view that ‘All As are ø’). Seeking to judge whether someone is intelligent, we look for features common to everyone intelligent we have met hitherto. If we met an intelligent person who looked like 1, another who looked like 2, and a third like 3, we are likely to decide that intelligent people read a lot, dress in black and look rather solemn. There is a danger we will dismiss as stupid, and perhaps later kill, someone who looks like 4.

(Ill. 17.6)

(Ill. 17.7)

(Ill. 17.8)

(Ill. 17.9)

French travellers who reacted in horror to German stoves in their bedrooms would have known a number of good fireplaces in their country before arriving in Germany. One would perhaps have looked like 1, another like 2, a third like 3, and from this they would have concluded that the essence of a good heating system was an open hearth.

1.

(Ill. 17.10)

2.

3.

(Ill. 17.11)

Montaigne bemoaned the intellectual arrogance at play. There were savages in South America; they were not the ones eating spiders:

Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!

He was not attempting to do away with the distinction between barbarous and civilized; there were differences in value between the customs of countries (cultural relativism being as crude as nationalism). He was correcting the way we made the distinction. Our country might have many virtues, but these did not depend on it being our country. A foreign land might have many faults, but these could not be identified through the mere fact that its customs were unusual. Nationality and familiarity were absurd criteria by which to decide on the good.

French custom had decreed that if one had an impediment in the nasal passage, one should blow it into a handkerchief. But Montaigne had a friend who, having reflected on the matter, had come to the view that it might be better to blow one’s nose straight into one’s fingers:

Defending his action … he asked me why that filthy mucus should be so privileged that we should prepare fine linen to receive it and then should wrap it up and carry it carefully about on our persons … I considered that what he said was not totally unreasonable, but habit had prevented me from noticing just that strangeness which we find so hideous in similar customs in another country.

Careful reasoning rather than prejudice was to be the means of evaluating behaviour, Montaigne’s frustration caused by those who blithely equated the unfamiliar with the inadequate and so ignored the most basic lesson in intellectual humility offered by the greatest of the ancient philosophers:

The wisest man that ever was, when asked what he knew, replied that the one thing he did know was that he knew nothing.

What, then, should we do if we find ourselves facing a veiled suggestion of abnormality manifested in a quizzical, slightly alarmed ‘Really? How weird!’, accompanied by a raised eyebrow, amounting in its own small way to a denial of legitimacy and humanity – a reaction which Montaigne’s friend had encountered in Gascony when he blew his nose into his fingers, and which had, in its most extreme form, led to the devastation of the South American tribes?

Perhaps we should remember the degree to which accusations of abnormality are regionally and historically founded. To loosen their hold on us, we need only expose ourselves to the diversity of customs across time and space. What is considered abnormal in one group at one moment may not, and will not always be deemed so. We may cross borders in our minds.

WHAT IS CONSIDERED ABNORMAL WHERE

Montaigne had filled his library with books that helped him cross the borders of prejudice. There were history books, travel journals, the reports of missionaries and sea captains, the literatures of other lands and illustrated volumes with pictures of strangely clad tribes eating fish of unknown names. Through these books, Montaigne could gain legitimacy for parts of himself of which there was no evidence in the vicinity – the Roman parts, the Greek parts, the sides of himself that were more Mexican and Tupi than Gascon, the parts that would have liked to have six wives or have a shaved back or wash twelve times a day; he could feel less alone with these by turning to copies of Tacitus’s Annals, Gonçalez de Mendoza’s history of China, Goulart’s history of Portugal, Lebelski’s history of Persia, Leo Africanus’s travels around Africa, Lusignano’s history of Cyprus, Postel’s collection of Turkish and oriental histories and Muenster’s universal cosmography (which promised pictures of ‘animaulx estranges’).

If he felt oppressed by the claims made by others to universal truth, he could in a similar way line up the theories of the universe held by all the great ancient philosophers and then witness, despite the confidence of each thinker that he was in possession of the whole truth, the ludicrous divergence that resulted. After such comparative study, Montaigne sarcastically confessed to having no clue whether to accept:

the ‘Ideas’ of Plato, the atoms of Epicurus, the plenum and vacuum of Leucippus and Democritus, the water of Thales, the infinity of Nature of Anaximander, or the aether of Diogenes, the numbers and symmetry of Pythagoras, the infinity of Parmenides, the Unity of Musaeus, the fire and water of Apollodorus, the homogeneous particles of Anaxagoras, the discord and concord of Empedocles, the fire of Heraclitus, or any other opinion drawn from the boundless confusion of judgement and doctrines produced by our fine human reason, with all its certainty and perspicuity.

The discoveries of new worlds and ancient texts powerfully undermined what Montaigne described as ‘that distressing and combative arrogance which has complete faith and trust in itself’:

Anyone who made an intelligent collection of the asinine stupidities of human wisdom would have a wondrous tale to tell … We can judge what we should think of Man, of his sense and of his reason, when we find such obvious and gross errors even in these important characters who have raised human intelligence to great heights.

It also helped to have spent seventeen months journeying around Europe on horseback. Testimony of other countries and ways of life alleviated the oppressive atmosphere of Montaigne’s own region. What one society judged to be strange, another might more sensibly welcome as normal.

Other lands may return to us a sense of possibility stamped out by provincial arrogance; they encourage us to grow more acceptable to ourselves. The conception of the normal proposed by any particular province – Athens, Augsburg, Cuzco, Mexico, Rome, Seville, Gascony – has room for only a few aspects of our nature, and unfairly consigns the rest to the barbaric and bizarre. Every man may bear the whole form of the human condition, but it seems that no single country can tolerate the complexity of this condition.

Among the fifty-seven inscriptions that Montaigne had painted on the beams of his library ceiling, was a line from Terence:

Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto

.

I am a man, nothing human is foreign to me.

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to exchange local prejudices and the self-division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

Another consolation for accusations of abnormality is friendship, a friend being, among other things, someone kind enough to consider more of us normal than most people do. We may share judgements with friends that would in ordinary company be censured for being too caustic, sexual, despairing, daft, clever or vulnerable – friendship a minor conspiracy against what other people think of as reasonable.

Like Epicurus, Montaigne believed friendship to be an essential component of happiness:

In my judgement the sweetness of well-matched and compatible fellowship can never cost too dear. O! a friend! How true is that ancient judgement, that the frequenting of one is more sweet than the element water, more necessary than the element fire.

For a time, he was fortunate enough to know such fellowship. At the age of twenty-five, he was introduced to a twenty-eight-year-old writer and member of the Bordeaux Parlement, Étienne de La Boétie. It was friendship at first sight:

We were seeking each other before we set eyes on each other because of the reports we had heard … we embraced each other by our names. And at our first meeting, which chanced to be at a great crowded town-festival, we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together, that from that time on nothing was so close to us as each other.

The friendship was of a kind, Montaigne believed, that only occurred once every 300 years; it had nothing in common with the tepid alliances frequently denoted by the term:

What we normally call friends and friendships are no more than acquaintances and familiar relationships bound by some chance or some suitability, by means of which our souls support each other. In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found.

The friendship would not have been so valuable if most people had not been so disappointing – if Montaigne had not had to hide so much of himself from them. The depth of his attachment to La Boétie signalled the extent to which, in his interactions with others, he had been forced to present only an edited image of himself to avoid suspicion and raised eyebrows. Many years later, Montaigne analysed the source of his affections for La Boétie:

Luy seul jouyssoit de ma vraye image

.

He alone had the privilege of my true portrait.

That is, La Boétie – uniquely among Montaigne’s acquaintances – understood him properly. He allowed him to be himself; through his psychological acuity, he enabled him to be so. He offered scope for valuable and yet until then neglected dimensions of Montaigne’s character – which suggests that we pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.

The idyll was painfully brief. Four years after the first meeting, in August 1563, La Boétie fell ill with stomach cramps and died a few days later. The loss was to haunt Montaigne for ever:

In truth if I compare the rest of my life … to those four years which I was granted to enjoy the sweet companionship and fellowship of a man like that, it is but smoke and ashes, a night dark and dreary. Since that day when I lost him … I merely drag wearily on.

Throughout the Essays, there were expressions of longing for a soul mate comparable to the dead companion. Eighteen years after La Boétie’s death, Montaigne was still visited by periods of grief. In May 1581, in La Villa near Lucca, where he had gone to take the waters, he wrote in his travel journal that he had spent an entire day beset by ‘painful thoughts about Monsieur de La Boétie. I was in this mood so long, without recovering, that it did me much harm.’

He was never to be blessed again in his friendships, but he discovered the finest form of compensation. In the Essays, he recreated in another medium the true portrait of himself that La Boétie had recognized. He became himself on the page as he had been himself in the company of his friend.

Authorship was prompted by disappointment with those in the vicinity, and yet it was infused with the hope that someone elsewhere would understand; his book an address to everyone and no one in particular. He was aware of the paradox of expressing his deepest self to strangers in bookshops:

Many things that I would not care to tell any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts, I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller’s stall.

And yet we should be grateful for the paradox. Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.

(Ill. 17.12)

Montaigne might have begun writing to alleviate a personal sense of loneliness, but his book may serve in a small way to alleviate our own. One man’s honest, unguarded portrait of himself – in which he mentions impotence and farting, in which he writes of his dead friend and explains that he needs quiet when sitting on the toilet – enables us to feel less singular about sides of ourselves that have gone unmentioned in normal company and normal portraits, but which, it seems, are no less a part of our reality.

4

On Intellectual Inadequacy

There are some leading assumptions about what it takes to be a clever person:

What clever people should know

One of them, reflected in what is taught in many schools and universities, is that clever people should know how to answer questions like:

1. Find the lengths or angles marked

x

in the following triangles.

2. What are the subject term, predicate term, copula and quantifiers (if any) in the following sentences: Dogs are man’s best friend; Lucilius is wicked; All bats are members of the class of rodents; Nothing green is in the room?

3. What is Thomas Aquinas’s First Cause argument?

4. Translate:

(Aristotle,

Nicomachean Ethics

, I i–iv)

5. Translate:

In capitis mei levitatem iocatus est et in oculorum valitudinem et in crurum gracilitatem et in staturam. Quae contumelia est quod apparet audire? Coram uno aliquid dictum ridemus, coram pluribus indignamur, et eorum aliis libertatem non relinquimus, quae ipsi in nos dicere adsuevimus; iocis temperatis delectamur, immodicis irascimur

.

(Seneca,

De Constantia

, XVI. 4)

Montaigne had faced many such questions and answered them well. He was sent to one of France’s best educational establishments, the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, founded in 1533 to replace the city’s old and inadequate Collège des Arts. By the time Michel started attending classes there at the age of six, the school had developed a national reputation as a centre of learning. The staff included an enlightened principal, André de Gouvéa, a renowned Greek scholar, Nicolas de Grouchy, an Aristotelian scholar, Guillaume Guerente, and the Scottish poet George Buchanan.

If one tries to define the philosophy of education underpinning the Collège de Guyenne, or indeed that of most schools and universities before and after it, one might loosely suggest it to be based on the idea that the more a student learns about the world (history, science, literature), the better. But Montaigne, after following the curriculum at the Collège dutifully until graduation, added an important proviso:

If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.

Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding.

Two great thinkers of antiquity were likely to have featured prominently in the curriculum at the Collège de Guyenne and been held up as exemplars of intelligence. Students would have been introduced to Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics, in which the Greek philosopher pioneered logic, and stated that if A is predicated of every B, and B of every C, necessarily A is predicated of every C. Aristotle argued that if a proposition says or denies P of S, then S and P are its terms, with P being the predicate term and S the subject term, and added that all propositions are either universal or particular, affirming or denying P of every S or part of S. Then there was the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, who assembled a library for Julius Caesar and wrote six hundred books, including an encyclopedia on the liberal arts and twenty-five books on etymology and linguistics.

Montaigne was not unmoved. It is a feat to write a shelf of books on the origins of words and to discover universal affirmatives. And yet if we were to find that those who did so were no happier or were indeed a little more unhappy than those who had never heard of philosophical logic, we might wonder. Montaigne considered the lives of Aristotle and Varro, and raised a question:

What good did their great erudition do for Varro and Aristotle? Did it free them from human ills? Did it relieve them of misfortunes such as befall a common porter? Could logic console them for the gout …?

To understand why the two men could have been both so erudite and so unhappy, Montaigne distinguished between two categories of knowledge: learning and wisdom. In the category of learning he placed, among other subjects, logic, etymology, grammar, Latin and Greek. And in the category of wisdom, he placed a far broader, more elusive and more valuable kind of knowledge, everything that could help a person to live well, by which Montaigne meant, help them to live happily and morally.

The problem with the Collège de Guyenne, despite its professional staff and principal, was that it excelled at imparting learning but failed entirely at imparting wisdom – repeating at an institutional level the errors that had marred the personal lives of Varro and Aristotle:

I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology …

We readily inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin?’ ‘Can he write poetry and prose?’ But what matters most is what we put last: ‘Has he become better and wiser?’ We ought to find out not who understands

most

but who understands

best

. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty.

He had never been good at sport: ‘At dancing, tennis and wrestling I have not been able to acquire more than a slight, vulgar skill; and at swimming, fencing, vaulting and jumping, no skill at all.’ Nevertheless, so strong was Montaigne’s objection to the lack of wisdom imparted by most schoolteachers, that he did not shrink from suggesting a drastic alternative to the classroom for the youth of France.

If our souls do not move with a better motion and if we do not have a healthier judgement, then I would just as soon that a pupil spend his time playing tennis. (Ill. 18.1)

He would of course have preferred students to go to school, but schools that taught them wisdom rather than the etymology of the word and could correct the long-standing intellectual bias towards abstract questions. Thales from Miletus in Asia Minor was an early example of the bias, celebrated throughout the ages for having in the sixth century BC tried to measure the heavens and for having determined the height of the Great Pyramid of Egypt according to the theorem of similar triangles – a complicated and dazzling achievement, no doubt, but not what Montaigne wished to see dominate his curriculum. He had greater sympathy with the implicit educational philosophy of one of Thales’s impudent young acquaintances:

I have always felt grateful to that girl from Miletus who, seeing the local philosopher … with his eyes staring upwards, constantly occupied in contemplating the vault of heaven, tripped him up, to warn him that there was time enough to occupy his thoughts with things above the clouds when he had accounted for everything lying before his feet … You can make exactly the same reproach as that woman made against Thales against anyone concerned with philosophy: he fails to see what lies before his feet.

Montaigne noted in other areas a similar tendency to privilege extraordinary activities over humbler but no less important ones – and just like the girl from Miletus, tried to bring us back to earth:

Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and as tense as those of other lives.

So what would Montaigne have wished pupils to learn at school? What kind of examinations could have tested for the wise intelligence he had in mind, one so far removed from the mental skills of the unhappy Aristotle and Varro?

The examinations would have raised questions about the challenges of quotidian life: love, sex, illness, death, children, money and ambition.

An examination in Montaignean wisdom

1. About seven or eight years ago, some two leagues from here, there was a villager, who is still alive; his brain had long been battered by his wife’s jealousy; one day he came home from work to be welcomed by her usual nagging; it made him so mad that, taking the sickle he still had in his hand he suddenly lopped off the members which put her into such a fever and chucked them in her face. (

Essays

, II.29)

a) How should one settle domestic disputes?

b) Was the wife nagging or expressing affection?

2. Consider these two quotations:

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening. (

Essays

, I.20)

I can scarcely tell my cabbages from my lettuces. (

Essays

, II.17)

What is a wise approach to death?

3. It is perhaps a more chaste and fruitful practice to bring women to learn early what the living reality [of penis size] is rather than to allow them to make conjectures according to the licence of a heated imagination: instead of our organs as they are, their hopes and desires lead them to substitute extravagant ones three times as big … What great harm is done by those graffiti of enormous genitals which boys scatter over the corridors and staircases of our royal palaces! From them arises a cruel misunderstanding of our natural capacities. (

Essays

, III.5)

How should a man with a small ‘living reality’ bring up the subject?

4. I know of a squire who had entertained a goodly company in his hall and then, four or five days later, boasted as a joke (for there was no truth in it) that he had made them eat cat pie; one of the young ladies in the party was struck with such a horror at this that she collapsed with a serious stomach disorder and a fever: it was impossible to save her. (

Essays

, I.21)

Analyse the distribution of moral responsibility.

5. If only talking to oneself did not look mad, no day would go by without my being heard growling to myself, against myself, ‘You silly shit!’ (

Essays

, I.38)

The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being. (

Essays

, III.13)

How much love should one have for oneself?

Setting people examination papers measuring wisdom rather than learning would probably result in an immediate realignment of the hierarchy of intelligence – and a surprising new élite. Montaigne delighted in the prospect of the incongruous people who would now be recognized as cleverer than the lauded but often unworthy traditional candidates.

I have seen in my time hundreds of craftsmen and ploughmen wiser and happier than university rectors. (Ill. 18.2)

What clever people should sound and look like

It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it. Profound ideas cannot, after all, be explained in the language of children. Yet the association between difficulty and profundity might less generously be described as a manifestation in the literary sphere of a perversity familiar from emotional life, where people who are mysterious and elusive can inspire a respect in modest minds that reliable and clear ones do not.

Montaigne had no qualms bluntly admitting his problem with mysterious books. ‘I cannot have lengthy commerce with [them],’ he wrote, ‘I only like pleasurable, easy [ones] which tickle my interest.’

I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even for learning’s sake, however precious it may be. From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime … If I come across difficult passages in my reading I never bite my nails over them: after making a charge or two I let them be … If one book wearies me I take up another.

Which was nonsense, or rather playful posturing on the part of a man with a thousand volumes on his shelf and an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Latin philosophy. If Montaigne enjoyed presenting himself as a dim gentleman prone to somnolence during philosophical expositions, it was disingenuousness with a purpose. The repeated declarations of laziness and slowness were tactical ways to undermine a corrupt understanding of intelligence and good writing.

There are, so Montaigne implied, no legitimate reasons why books in the humanities should be difficult or boring; wisdom does not require a specialized vocabulary or syntax, nor does an audience benefit from being wearied. Carefully used, boredom can be a valuable indicator of the merit of books. Though it can never be a sufficient judge (and in its more degenerate forms, slips into wilful indifference and impatience), taking our levels of boredom into account can temper an otherwise excessive tolerance for balderdash. Those who do not listen to their boredom when reading, like those who pay no attention to pain, may be increasing their suffering unnecessarily. Whatever the dangers of being wrongly bored, there are as many pitfalls in never allowing ourselves to lose patience with our reading matter.

Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is going on. Montaigne encouraged us to blame the author. An incomprehensible prose-style is likely to have resulted more from laziness than cleverness; what reads easily is rarely so written. Or else such prose masks an absence of content; being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say:

Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.

There is no reason for philosophers to use words that would sound out of place in a street or market:

Just as in dress it is the sign of a petty mind to seek to draw attention by some personal or unusual fashion, so too in speech; the search for new expressions and little-known words derives from an adolescent schoolmasterish ambition. If only I could limit myself to words used in Les Halles in Paris.

But writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence. So strong is this bias, Montaigne wondered whether the majority of university scholars would have appreciated Socrates, a man they professed to revere above all others, if he had approached them in their own towns, devoid of the prestige of Plato’s dialogues, in his dirty cloak, speaking in plain language:

The portrait of the conversations of Socrates which his friends have bequeathed to us receives our approbation only because we are overawed by the general approval of them. It is not from our own knowledge; since they do not follow our practices: if something like them were to be produced nowadays there are few who would rate them highly. We can appreciate no graces which are not pointed, inflated and magnified by artifice. Such graces as flow on under the name of naivety and simplicity readily go unseen by so coarse an insight as ours … For us, is not naivety close kin to simplemindedness and a quality worthy of reproach? Socrates makes his soul move with the natural motion of the common people: thus speaks a peasant; thus speaks a woman … His inductions and comparisons are drawn from the most ordinary and best-known of men’s activities; anyone can understand him. Under so common a form we today would never have discerned the nobility and splendour of his astonishing concepts; we who judge any which are not swollen up by erudition to be base and commonplace and who are never aware of riches except when pompously paraded.

It is a plea to take books seriously, even when their language is unintimidating and their ideas clear – and, by extension, to refrain from considering ourselves as fools if, because of a hole in our budget or our education, our cloaks are simple and our vocabulary no larger than that of a stallholder in Les Halles.

What clever people should know

They should know the facts, and if they do not and if they have in addition been so foolish as to get these wrong in a book, they should expect no mercy from scholars, who will be justified in slapping them down, and pointing out, with supercilious civility, that a date is wrong or a word misquoted, a passage is out of context or an important source forgotten.

Yet in Montaigne’s schema of intelligence, what matters in a book is usefulness and appropriateness to life; it is less valuable to convey with precision what Plato wrote or Epicurus meant than to judge whether what they have said is interesting and could in the early hours help us over anxiety or loneliness. The responsibility of authors in the humanities is not to quasi-scientific accuracy, but to happiness and health. Montaigne vented his irritation with those who refused the point:

The scholars whose concern it is to pass judgement on books recognize no worth but that of learning and allow no intellectual activity other than that of scholarship and erudition. Mistake one Scipio for the other, and you have nothing left worth saying, have you! According to them, fail to know your Aristotle and you fail to know yourself.

The Essays were themselves marked by frequent misquotations, misattributions, illogical swerves of argument and a failure to define terms. The author wasn’t bothered:

I do my writing at home, deep in the country, where nobody can help or correct me and where I normally never frequent anybody who knows even the Latin of the Lord’s prayer let alone proper French.

Naturally there were errors in the book (‘I am full of them,’ he boasted), but they weren’t enough to doom the Essays, just as accuracy could not ensure their worth. It was a greater sin to write something which did not attempt to be wise than to confuse Scipio Aemilianus (c. 185–129 BC) with Scipio Africanus (236–183 BC).

Where clever people should get their ideas from

From people even cleverer than they are. They should spend their time quoting and producing commentaries about great authorities who occupy the upper rungs of the tree of knowledge. They should write treatises on the moral thought of Plato or the ethics of Cicero.

Montaigne owed much to the idea. There were frequent passages of commentary in the Essays, and hundreds of quotations from authors who Montaigne felt had captured points more elegantly and more acutely than he was able to. He quoted Plato 128 times, Lucretius 149 and Seneca 130.

It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them, our pencil lines and annotations in the margins of their books and our borrowings from them indicating where we find a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of which our own minds are made – a congruence all the more striking if the work was written in an age of togas and animal sacrifices. We invite these words into our books as a homage for reminding us of who we are.

But rather than illuminating our experiences and goading us on to our own discoveries, great books may come to cast a problematic shadow. They may lead us to dismiss aspects of our lives of which there is no printed testimony. Far from expanding our horizons, they may unjustly come to mark their limits. Montaigne knew one man who seemed to have bought his bibliophilia too dearly:

Whenever I ask [this] acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of

scab

and

arse

.

Such reluctance to trust our own, extra-literary, experiences might not be grievous if books could be relied upon to express all our potentialities, if they knew all our scabs. But as Montaigne recognized, the great books are silent on too many themes, so that if we allow them to define the boundaries of our curiosity, they will hold back the development of our minds. A meeting in Italy crystallized the issue:

In Pisa I met a decent man who is such an Aristotelian that the most basic of his doctrines is that the touchstone and the measuring-scale of all sound ideas and of each and every truth must lie in conformity with the teachings of Aristotle, outside of which all is inane and chimerical: Aristotle has seen everything, done everything.

He had, of course, done and seen a lot. Of all the thinkers of antiquity, Aristotle was perhaps the most comprehensive, his works ranging over the landscape of knowledge (On Generation and Corruption, On the Heavens, Meteorology, On the Soul, Parts of Animals, Movements of Animals, Sophistical Refutations, Nicomachean Ethics, Physics, Politics).

But the very scale of Aristotle’s achievement bequeathed a problematic legacy. There are authors too clever for our own good. Having said so much, they appear to have had the last word. Their genius inhibits the sense of irreverence vital to creative work in their successors. Aristotle may, paradoxically, prevent those who most respect him from behaving like him. He rose to greatness only by doubting much of the knowledge that had been built up before him, not by refusing to read Plato or Heraclitus, but by mounting a salient critique of some of their weaknesses based on an appreciation of their strengths. To act in a truly Aristotelian spirit, as Montaigne realized and the man from Pisa did not, may mean allowing for some intelligent departures from even the most accomplished authorities.

Yet it is understandable to prefer to quote and write commentaries rather than speak and think for ourselves. A commentary on a book written by someone else, though technically laborious to produce, requiring hours of research and exegesis, is immune from the most cruel attacks that can befall original works. Commentators may be criticized for failing to do justice to the ideas of great thinkers; they cannot be held responsible for the ideas themselves – which was a reason why Montaigne included so many quotations and passages of commentary in the Essays:

I sometimes get others to say what I cannot put so well myself because of the weakness of my language, and sometimes because of the weakness of my intellect …

[and] sometimes … to rein in the temerity of those hasty criticisms which leap to attack writings of every kind, especially recent writings by men still alive … I have to hide my weaknesses beneath those great reputations

.

It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries. Statements which might be acceptable when they issue from the quills of ancient authors are likely to attract ridicule when expressed by contemporaries. Critics are not inclined to bow before the grander pronouncements of those with whom they attended university. It is not these individuals who will be allowed to speak as though they were ancient philosophers. ‘No man has escaped paying the penalty for being born,’ wrote Seneca, but a man struck by a similar sentiment in later ages would not be advised to speak like this unless he manifested a particular appetite for humiliation. Montaigne, who did not, took shelter, and at the end of the Essays, made a confession, touching for its vulnerability:

If I had had confidence to do what I really wanted, I would have spoken utterly alone, come what may.

If he lacked confidence, it was because the closer one came to him in time and place, the less his thoughts were likely to be treated as though they might be as valid as those of Seneca and Plato:

In my own climate of Gascony, they find it funny to see me in print.

I am valued the more the farther from home knowledge of me has spread.

In the behaviour of his family and staff, those who heard him snoring or changed the bedlinen, there was none of the reverence of his Parisian reception, let alone his posthumous one:

A man may appear to the world as a marvel: yet his wife and his manservant see nothing remarkable about him. Few men have been wonders to their families.

We may take this in two ways: that no one is genuinely marvellous, but that only families and staff are close enough to discern the disappointing truth. Or that many people are interesting, but that if they are too close to us in age and place, we are likely not to take them too seriously, on account of a curious bias against what is at hand.

Montaigne was not pitying himself; rather, he was using the criticism of more ambitious contemporary works as a symptom of a deleterious impulse to think that the truth always has to lie far from us, in another climate, in an ancient library, in the books of people who lived long ago. It is a question of whether access to genuinely valuable things is limited to a handful of geniuses born between the construction of the Parthenon and the sack of Rome, or whether, as Montaigne daringly proposed, they may be open to you and me as well.

A highly peculiar source of wisdom was being pointed out, more peculiar still than Pyrrho’s seafaring pig, a Tupi Indian or a Gascon ploughman: the reader. If we attend properly to our experiences and learn to consider ourselves plausible candidates for an intellectual life, it is, implied Montaigne, open to all of us to arrive at insights no less profound than those in the great ancient books.

The thought is not easy. We are educated to associate virtue with submission to textual authorities, rather than with an exploration of the volumes daily transcribed within ourselves by our perceptual mechanisms. Montaigne tried to return us to ourselves:

We know how to say, ‘This is what Cicero said’; ‘This is morality for Plato’; ‘These are the

ipsissima verba

of Aristotle.’ But what have we got to say? What judgements do we make? What are we doing? A parrot could talk as well as we do.

Parroting wouldn’t be the scholar’s way of describing what it takes to write a commentary. A range of arguments could show the value of producing an exegesis on the moral thought of Plato or the ethics of Cicero. Montaigne emphasized the cowardice and tedium in the activity instead. There is little skill in secondary works (‘Invention takes incomparably higher precedence over quotation’), the difficulty is technical, a matter of patience and a quiet library. Furthermore, many of the books which academic tradition encourages us to parrot are not fascinating in themselves. They are accorded a central place in the syllabus because they are the work of prestigious authors, while many equally or far more valid themes languish because no grand intellectual authority ever elucidated them. The relation of art to reality has long been considered a serious philosophical topic, in part because Plato first raised it; the relation of shyness to personal appearance has not, in part because it did not attract the attention of any ancient philosopher.

In light of this unnatural respect for tradition, Montaigne thought it worth while to admit to his readers that, in truth, he thought Plato could be limited and dull:

Will the licence of our age excuse my audacious sacrilege in thinking that [his]

Dialogues

drag slowly along stifling his matter, and in lamenting the time spent on those long useless preparatory discussions by a man who had so many better things to say?

(A relief to come upon this thought in Montaigne, one prestigious writer lending credence to timid, silent suspicions of another.) As for Cicero, there was no need even to apologize before attacking:

His introductory passages, his definitions, his sub-divisions and his etymologies eat up most of his work … If I spend an hour reading him (which is a lot for me) and then recall what pith and substance I have got out of him, most of the time I find nothing but wind.

If scholars paid such attention to the classics, it was, suggested Montaigne, from a vainglorious wish to be thought intelligent through association with prestigious names. The result for the reading public was a mountain of very learned, very unwise books:

There are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other. All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.

But interesting ideas are, Montaigne insisted, to be found in every life. However modest our stories, we can derive greater insights from ourselves than from all the books of old:

Were I a good scholar, I would find enough in my own experience to make me wise. Whoever recalls to mind his last bout of anger … sees the ugliness of this passion better than in Aristotle. Anyone who recalls the ills he has undergone, those which have threatened him and the trivial incidents which have moved him from one condition to another, makes himself thereby ready for future mutations and the exploring of his condition. Even the life of Caesar is less exemplary for us than our own; a life whether imperial or plebeian is always a life affected by everything that can happen to a man.

Only an intimidating scholarly culture makes us think otherwise:

We are richer than we think, each one of us.

We may all arrive at wise ideas if we cease to think of ourselves as so unsuited to the task because we aren’t 2,000 years old, aren’t interested in Plato’s dialogues and live quietly in the country:

You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as well as to one of richer stuff.

It was perhaps to bring the point home that Montaigne offered so much information on exactly how commonplace and private his own life had been – why he wanted to tell us:

That he didn’t like apples

:

I am not overfond … of any fruit except melons.

That he had a complex relationship with radishes

:

I first of all found that radishes agreed with me; then they did not; now they do again.

That he practised the most advanced dental hygiene

:

My teeth … have always been exceedingly good … Since boyhood I learned to rub them on my napkin, both on waking up and before and after meals.

That he ate too fast

:

In my haste I often bite my tongue and occasionally my fingers.

And liked wiping his mouth

:

I could dine easily enough without a tablecloth, but I feel very uncomfortable dining without a clean napkin … I regret that we have not continued along the lines of the fashion started by our kings, changing napkins likes plates with each course.

Trivia, perhaps, but symbolic reminders that there was a thinking ‘I’ behind his book, that a moral philosophy had issued – and so could issue again – from an ordinary, fruit-resistant soul.

There is no need to be discouraged if, from the outside, we look nothing like those who have ruminated in the past.

Cicero 106–43 BC (Ill. 18.3)

In Montaigne’s redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one’s mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient philosophers and mistake Scipios.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

(Ill. 18.4)

V

Consolation for a Broken Heart

1

For the griefs of love, he may be the finest among philosophers:

The Life, 1788–1860 (Ill. 19.1)

1788 Arthur Schopenhauer is born in Danzig. In later years, he looks back on the event with regret: ‘We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.’ ‘Human existence must be a kind of error,’ he specifies, ‘it may be said of it, “It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.” ’ Schopenhauer’s father Heinrich, a wealthy merchant, and his mother Johanna, a dizzy socialite twenty years her husband’s junior, take little interest in their son, who grows into one of the greatest pessimists in the history of philosophy: ‘Even as a child of six, my parents, returning from a walk one evening, found me in deep despair.’

Heinrich Schopenhauer (Ill. 19.2)

Johanna Schopenhauer

1803–5 After the apparent suicide of his father (discovered floating in a canal beside the family warehouse), the seventeen-year-old Schopenhauer is left with a fortune that ensures he will never have to work. The thought affords no comfort. He later recalls: ‘In my seventeenth year, without any learned school education, I was gripped by the misery of life as Buddha was in his youth when he saw sickness, old age, pain and death. The truth … was that this world could not have been the work of an all-loving Being, but rather that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings; to this the data pointed, and the belief that it is so won the upper hand.’

Schopenhauer is sent to London to learn English at a boarding-school, Eagle House in Wimbledon. After receiving a letter from him, his friend Lorenz Meyer replies, ‘I am sorry that your stay in England has induced you to hate the entire nation.’ Despite the hatred, he acquires an almost perfect command of the language, and is often mistaken for an Englishman in conversation.

Eagle House School, Wimbledon (Ill. 19.3)

Schopenhauer travels through France, he visits the city of Nîmes, to which, 1,800 or so years before, Roman engineers had piped water across the majestic Pont du Gard to ensure that citizens would always have enough water to bathe in. Schopenhauer is unimpressed by what he sees of the Roman remains: ‘These traces soon lead one’s thoughts to the thousands of long-decomposed humans.’

(Ill. 19.4)

Schopenhauer’s mother complains of her son’s passion for ‘pondering on human misery’.

1809–1811 Schopenhauer studies at the university of Göttingen and decides to become a philosopher: ‘Life is a sorry business, I have resolved to spend it reflecting upon it.’

On an excursion to the countryside, a male friend suggests they should attempt to meet women. Schopenhauer quashes the plan, arguing that ‘life is so short, questionable and evanescent that it is not worth the trouble of major effort.’

Schopenhauer as a young man (Ill. 19.5)

1813 He visits his mother in Weimar. Johanna Schopenhauer has befriended the town’s most famous resident, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who visits her regularly (and likes talking with Sophie, Johanna’s housemaid, and Adele, Arthur’s younger sister). After an initial meeting, Schopenhauer describes Goethe as ‘serene, sociable, obliging, friendly: praised be his name for ever and ever!’ Goethe reports, ‘Young Schopenhauer appeared to me to be a strange and interesting young man.’ Arthur’s feelings for the writer are never wholly reciprocated. When the philosopher leaves Weimar, Goethe composes a couplet for him:

Willst du dich des Lebens freuen

,

So musst der Welt du Werth verleihen

.

If you wish to draw pleasure out of life,

You must attach value to the world.

Schopenhauer is unimpressed, and in his notebook beside Goethe’s tip, appends a quotation from Chamfort: ‘Il vaut mieux laisser les hommes pour ce qu’ils sont, que les prendre pour ce qu’ils ne sont pas.’ (Better to accept men for what they are, than to take them to be what they are not.)

1814–15 Schopenhauer moves to Dresden and writes a thesis (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason). He has few friends and enters into conversations with reduced expectations: ‘Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a pleasant and conscious self-deception.’ He becomes a regular in an Italian tavern, which serves his favourite meats – Venetian salami, truffled sausage and Parma ham.

1818 He finishes The World as Will and Representation, which he knows to be a masterpiece. It explains his lack of friends: ‘A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?’

1818–19 To celebrate the completion of his book, Schopenhauer travels to Italy. He delights in art, nature and the climate, though his mood remains fragile: ‘We should always be mindful of the fact that no man is ever very far from the state in which he would readily want to seize a sword or poison in order to bring his existence to an end; and those who are far from believing this could easily be convinced of the opposite by an accident, an illness, a violent change of fortune – or of the weather.’ He visits Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice and meets a number of attractive women at receptions: ‘I was very fond of them – if only they would have had me.’ Rejection helps to inspire a view that: ‘Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex.’

1819 The World as Will and Representation is published. It sells 230 copies. ‘Every life history is a history of suffering’; ‘If only I could get rid of the illusion of regarding the generation of vipers and toads as my equals, it would be a great help to me.’

1820 Schopenhauer attempts to gain a university post in philosophy in Berlin. He offers lectures on ‘The whole of philosophy, i.e. the theory of the essence of the world and of the human mind.’ Five students attend. In a nearby building, his rival, Hegel, can be heard lecturing to an audience of 300. Schopenhauer assesses Hegel’s philosophy: ‘[I]ts fundamental ideas are the absurdest fancy, a world turned upside down, a philosophical buffoonery … its contents being the hollowest and most senseless display of words ever lapped up by blockheads, and its presentation … being the most repulsive and nonsensical gibberish, recalling the rantings of a bedlamite.’ The beginnings of disenchantment with academia: ‘That one can be serious about philosophy has as a rule not occurred to anyone, least of all to a lecturer on philosophy, just as no one as a rule believes less in Christianity than does the Pope.’

1821 Schopenhauer falls in love with Caroline Medon, a nineteen-year-old singer. The relationship lasts intermittently for ten years, but Schopenhauer has no wish to formalize the arrangement: ‘To marry means to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other.’ He nevertheless has fond thoughts of polygamy: ‘Of the many advantages of polygamy, one is that the husband would not come into such close contact with his in-laws, the fear of which at present prevents innumerable marriages. Ten mothers-in-law instead of one!’

1822 Travels to Italy for a second time (Milan, Florence, Venice). Before setting out, he asks his friend Friedrich Osann to look out for ‘any mention of me in books, journals, literary periodicals and such like.’ Osann does not find the task time-consuming.

1825 Having failed as an academic, Schopenhauer attempts to become a translator. But his offers to turn Kant into English and Tristram Shandy into German are rejected by publishers. He confides in a letter a melancholy wish to have ‘a position in bourgeois society’, though will never attain one. ‘If a God has made this world, then I would not like to be the God; its misery and distress would break my heart.’ Fortunately, he can rely on a comfortable sense of his own worth in darker moments: ‘How often must I learn … that in the affairs of everyday life … my spirit and mind are what a telescope is in an opera-house or a cannon at a hare-hunt?’

1828 Turns forty. ‘After his fortieth year,’ he consoles himself, ‘any man of merit … will hardly be free from a certain touch of misanthropy.’

1831 Now forty-three, living in Berlin, Schopenhauer thinks once again of getting married. He turns his attentions to Flora Weiss, a beautiful, spirited girl who has just turned seventeen. During a boating party, in an attempt to charm her, he smiles and offers her a bunch of white grapes. Flora later confides in her diary: ‘I didn’t want them. I felt revolted because old Schopenhauer had touched them, and so I let them slide, quite gently, into the water behind me.’ Schopenhauer leaves Berlin in a hurry: ‘Life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion.’

1833 He settles in a modest apartment in Frankfurt am Main, a town of some 50,000 inhabitants. He describes the city, the banking centre of continental Europe, as ‘a small, stiff, internally crude, municipally puffed-up, peasant-proud nation of Abderites, whom I do not like to approach’.

His closest relationships are now with a succession of poodles, who he feels have a gentleness and humility humans lack: ‘The sight of any animal immediately gives me pleasure and gladdens my heart.’ He lavishes affection on these poodles, addressing them as ‘Sir’, and takes a keen interest in animal welfare: ‘The highly intelligent dog, man’s truest and most faithful friend, is put on a chain by him! Never do I see such a dog without feelings of the deepest sympathy for him and of profound indignation against his master. I think with satisfaction of a case, reported some years ago in The Times, where Lord X kept a large dog on a chain. One day as he was walking through the yard, he took it into his head to go and pat the dog, whereupon the animal tore his arm open from top to bottom, and quite right, too! What he meant by this was: “You are not my master, but my devil who makes a hell of my brief existence!” May this happen to all who chain up dogs.’

The philosopher adopts a rigid daily routine. He writes for three hours in the morning, plays the flute (Rossini) for an hour, then dresses in white tie for lunch in the Englischer Hof on the Rossmarkt. He has an enormous appetite, and tucks a large white napkin into his collar. He refuses to acknowledge other diners when eating, but occasionally enters into conversation over coffee. One of them describes him as ‘comically disgruntled, but in fact harmless and good-naturedly gruff’.

(Ill. 19.6)

Another reports that Schopenhauer frequently boasts of the excellent condition of his teeth as evidence that he is superior to other people, or as he puts it, superior to the ‘common biped’.

After lunch, Schopenhauer retires to the library of his club, the nearby Casino Society, where he reads The Times – the newspaper which he feels will best inform him of the miseries of the world. In mid-afternoon, he takes a two-hour walk with his dog along the banks of the Main, muttering under his breath. In the evening, he visits the opera or the theatre, where he is often enraged by the noise of late-comers, shufflers and coughers – and writes to the authorities urging strict measures against them. Though he has read and much admires Seneca, he does not agree with the Roman philosopher’s verdict on noise: ‘I have for a long time been of the opinion that the quantity of noise anyone can comfortably endure is in inverse proportion to his mental powers … The man who habitually slams doors instead of shutting them with the hand … is not merely ill-mannered, but also coarse and narrow-minded … We shall be quite civilized only when … it is no longer anyone’s right to cut through the consciousness of every thinking being … by means of whistling, howling, bellowing, hammering, whip-cracking … and so on.’

1840 He acquires a new white poodle and names her Atma, after the world-soul of the Brahmins. He is attracted to Eastern religions in general and Brahmanism in particular (he reads a few pages of the Upanishads every night). He describes Brahmins as, ‘the noblest and oldest of people’, and threatens to sack his cleaning lady, Margaretha Schnepp, when she disregards orders not to dust the Buddha in his study.

He spends increasing amounts of time alone. His mother worries about him: ‘Two months in your room without seeing a single person, that is not good, my son, and saddens me, a man cannot and should not isolate himself in that manner.’ He takes to sleeping for extended periods during the day: ‘If life and existence were an enjoyable state, then everyone would reluctantly approach the unconscious state of sleep and would gladly rise from it again. But the very opposite is the case, for everyone very willingly goes to sleep and unwillingly gets up again.’ He justifies his appetite for sleep by comparing himself to two of his favourite thinkers: ‘Human beings require more sleep the more developed … and the more active their brain is. Montaigne relates of himself that he had always been a heavy sleeper; that he had spent a large part of his life in sleeping; and that at an advanced age he still slept from eight to nine hours at a stretch. It is also reported of Descartes that he slept a great deal.’

1843 Schopenhauer moves to a new house in Frankfurt, number 17 Schöne Aussicht, near the river Main in the centre of town (English translation: Pretty view). He is to live in the street for the rest of his life, though in 1859, he moves to number 16 after a quarrel with his landlord over his dog.

1844 He publishes a second edition and a further volume of The World as Will and Representation. He remarks in the preface: ‘Not to my contemporaries or my compatriots, but to mankind I consign my now complete work, confident that it will not be without value to humanity, even if this value should be recognized only tardily, as is the inevitable fate of the good in whatever form.’ The work sells under 300 copies: ‘Our greatest pleasure consists in being admired; but the admirers, even if there is every cause, are not very keen to express their admiration. And so the happiest man is he who has managed sincerely to admire himself, no matter how.’

1850 Atma dies. He buys a brown poodle called Butz, who becomes his favourite poodle. When a regimental band passes his house, Schopenhauer is known to stand up in the middle of conversations and put a seat by the window from which Butz can look out. The creature is referred to by the children of the neighbourhood as ‘young Schopenhauer’.

1851 He publishes a selection of essays and aphorisms, Parerga and Paralipomena. Much to the author’s surprise, the book becomes a bestseller.

1853 His fame spreads across Europe (‘the comedy of fame’, as he puts it). Lectures on his philosophy are offered at the universities of Bonn, Breslau and Jena. He receives fan mail. A woman from Silesia sends him a long, suggestive poem. A man from Bohemia writes to tell him he places a wreath on his portrait every day. ‘After one has spent a long life in insignificance and disregard, they come at the end with drums and trumpets and think that is something’ is the response, but there is also satisfaction: ‘Would anyone with a great mind ever have been able to attain his goal and create a permanent and perennial work, if he had taken as his guiding star the bobbing will-o’-the-wisp of public opinion, that is to say the opinion of small minds?’ Philosophically minded Frankfurters buy poodles in homage.

1859 As fame brings more attention from women, his views on them soften. From having thought them ‘suited to being the nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word, big-children, their whole lives long’, he now judges that they are capable of selflessness and insight. An attractive sculptress and an admirer of his philosophy, Elizabeth Ney (a descendant of Napoleon’s Maréchal), comes to Frankfurt in October and stays in his apartment for a month making a bust of him.

‘She works all day at my place. When I get back from luncheon we have coffee together, we sit together on the sofa and I feel as if I were married.’

(Ill. 19.7)

1860 Increasing ill-health suggests the end is near: ‘I can bear the thought that in a short time worms will eat away my body; but the idea of philosophy professors nibbling at my philosophy makes me shudder.’ At the end of September, after a walk by the banks of the Main, he returns home, complains of breathlessness and dies, still convinced that ‘human existence must be a kind of error.’

Such was the life of a philosopher who may offer the heart unparalleled assistance.

2

A contemporary love story

WITH SCHOPENHAUERIAN NOTES

A man is attempting to work on a train between Edinburgh and London. It is early in the afternoon on a warm spring day.

(Ill. 20.1)

Papers and a diary are on the table before him, and a book is open on the armrest. But the man has been unable to hold a coherent thought since Newcastle, when a woman entered the carriage and seated herself across the aisle. After looking impassively out of the window for a few moments, she turned her attention to a pile of magazines. She has been reading Vogue since Darlington. She reminds the man of a portrait by Christen Købke of Mrs Høegh-Guldberg (though he cannot recall either of these names), which he saw, and felt strangely moved and saddened by, in a museum in Denmark a few years before.

(Ill. 20.2)

But unlike Mrs Høegh-Guldberg, she has short brown hair and wears jeans, a pair of trainers and a canary-yellow V-neck sweater over a T-shirt. He notices an incongruously large digital sports-watch on her pale, freckle-dotted wrist. He imagines running his hand through her chestnut hair, caressing the back of her neck, sliding his hand inside the sleeve of her pullover, watching her fall asleep beside him, her lips slightly agape. He imagines living with her in a house in south London, in a cherry-tree-lined street. He speculates that she may be a cellist or a graphic designer, or a doctor specializing in genetic research. His mind turns over strategies for conversation. He considers asking her for the time, for a pencil, for directions to the bathroom, for reflections on the weather, for a look at one of her magazines. He longs for a train crash, in which their carriage would be thrown into one of the vast barley-fields through which they are passing. In the chaos, he would guide her safely outside, and repair with her to a nearby tent set up by the ambulance service, where they would be offered lukewarm tea and stare into each other’s eyes. Years later, they would attract interest by revealing that they had met in the tragic Edinburgh Express collision. But because the train seems disinclined to derail, and though he knows it to be louche and absurd, the man cannot help clearing his throat and leaning over to ask the angel if she might have a spare ballpoint. It feels like jumping off the side of a very high bridge.

1. Philosophers have not traditionally been impressed: the tribulations of love have appeared too childish to warrant investigation, the subject better left to poets and hysterics. It is not for philosophers to speculate on hand-holding and scented letters. Schopenhauer was puzzled by the indifference:

We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part in the life of man has hitherto been almost entirely disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material.

The neglect seemed the result of a pompous denial of a side of life which violated man’s rational self-image. Schopenhauer insisted on the awkward reality:

Love … interrupts at every hour the most serious occupations, and sometimes perplexes for a while even the greatest minds. It does not hesitate … to interfere with the negotiations of statesmen and the investigations of the learned. It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts … It sometimes demands the sacrifice of … health, sometimes of wealth, position and happiness.

2. Like the Gascon essayist born 255 years before him, Schopenhauer was concerned with what made man – supposedly the most rational of all creatures – less than reasonable. There was a set of Montaigne’s works in the library of the apartment at Schöne Aussicht. Schopenhauer had read how reason could be dethroned by a fart, a big lunch or an ingrowing toenail, and concurred with Montaigne’s view that our minds were subservient to our bodies, despite our arrogant faith in the contrary.

3. But Schopenhauer went further. Rather than alighting on loose examples of the dethronement of reason, he gave a name to a force within us which he felt invariably had precedence over reason, a force powerful enough to distort all of reason’s plans and judgements, and which he termed the will-to-life (

Wille zum

Leben

) – defined as an inherent drive within human beings to stay alive and reproduce. The will-to-life led even committed depressives to fight for survival when they were threatened by a shipwreck or grave illness. It ensured that the most cerebral, career-minded individuals would be seduced by the sight of gurgling infants, or if they remained unmoved, that they were likely to conceive a child anyway, and love it fiercely on arrival. And it was the will-to-life that drove people to lose their reason over comely passengers encountered across the aisles of long-distance trains.

4. Schopenhauer might have resented the disruption of love (it isn’t easy to proffer grapes to schoolgirls); but he refused to conceive of it as either disproportionate or accidental. It was entirely commensurate with love’s function:

Why all this noise and fuss? Why all the urgency, uproar, anguish and exertion?… Why should such a trifle play so important a role …? It is no trifle that is here in question; on the contrary, the importance of the matter is perfectly in keeping with the earnestness and ardour of the effort. The ultimate aim of all love-affairs … is actually more important than all other aims in man’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it.

And what is the aim? Neither communion nor sexual release, understanding nor entertainment. The romantic dominates life because:

What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation … the existence and special constitution of the human race in times to come.

It is because love directs us with such force towards the second of the will-to-life’s two great commands that Schopenhauer judged it the most inevitable and understandable of our obsessions.

(Ill. 20.3)

5. The fact that the continuation of the species is seldom in our minds when we ask for a phone number is no objection to the theory. We are, suggested Schopenhauer, split into conscious and unconscious selves, the unconscious governed by the will-to-life, the conscious subservient to it and unable to learn of all its plans. Rather than a sovereign entity, the conscious mind is a partially sighted servant of a dominant, child-obsessed will-to-life:

[The intellect] does not penetrate into the secret workshop of the will’s decisions. It is, of course, a confidant of the will, yet a confidant that does not get to know everything.

The intellect understands only so much as is necessary to promote reproduction – which may mean understanding very little:

[It] remains … much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will.

An exclusion which explains how we may consciously feel nothing more than an intense desire to see someone again, while unconsciously being driven by a force aiming at the reproduction of the next generation.

Why should such deception even be necessary? Because, for Schopenhauer, we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.

6. The analysis surely violates a rational self-image, but at least it counters suggestions that romantic love is an avoidable departure from more serious tasks, that it is forgivable for youngsters with too much time on their hands to swoon by moonlight and

sob beneath bedclothes, but that it is unnecessary and demented for their seniors to neglect their work

because they have glimpsed a face on a train

. By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer’s theory of the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject.

The man and woman are seated at a window-table in a Greek restaurant in north London. A bowl of olives lies between them, but neither can think of a way to remove the stones with requisite dignity and so they are left untouched.

(Ill. 20.4)

She had not been carrying a ballpoint on her, but had offered him a pencil. After a pause, she said how much she hated long train-journeys, a superfluous remark which had given him the slender encouragement he needed. She was not a cellist, nor a graphic designer, rather a lawyer specializing in corporate finance in a city firm. She was originally from Newcastle, but had been living in London for the past eight years. By the time the train pulled into Euston, he had obtained a phone number and an assent to a suggestion of dinner.

A waiter arrives to take their order. She asks for a salad and the sword-fish. She has come directly from work, and is wearing a light-grey suit and the same watch as before.

(Ill. 20.5)

They begin to talk. She explains that at weekends, her favourite activity is rock-climbing. She started at school, and has since been on expeditions to France, Spain and Canada. She describes the thrill of hanging hundreds of feet above a valley floor, and camping in the high mountains, where in the morning, icicles have formed inside the tent. Her dinner companion feels dizzy on the second floor of apartment buildings. Her other passion is dancing, she loves the energy and sense of freedom. When she can, she stays up all night. He favours proximity to a bed by eleven thirty. They talk of work. She has been involved in a patent case. A kettle designer from Frankfurt has alleged copyright infringement against a British company. The company is liable under section 60,1,a of the Patents Act of 1977.

He does not follow the lengthy account of a forthcoming case, but is convinced of her high intelligence and their superlative compatibility.

1. One of the most profound mysteries of love is ‘Why him?’, and ‘Why her?’ Why, of all the possible candidates, did our desire settle so strongly on this creature, why did we come to treasure them above all others when their dinner conversation was not always the most enlightening, nor their habits the most suitable? And why, despite good intentions, were we unable to develop a sexual interest in certain others, who were perhaps objectively as attractive and might have been more convenient to live with?

2. The choosiness did not surprise Schopenhauer. We are not free to fall in love with everyone because we cannot produce healthy children with everyone. Our will-to-life drives us towards people who will raise our chances of producing beautiful and intelligent offspring, and repulses us away from those who lower these same chances. Love is nothing but the conscious manifestation of the will-to-life’s discovery of an ideal co-parent:

The moment when [two people] begin to love each other –

to fancy each other

, as the very apposite English expression has it – is actually to be regarded as the very first formation of a new individual.

In initial meetings, beneath the quotidian patter, the unconscious of both parties will assess whether a healthy child could one day result from intercourse:

There is something quite peculiar to be found in the deep, unconscious seriousness with which two young people of the opposite sex regard each other when they meet for the first time, the searching and penetrating glance they cast at each other, the careful inspection all the features and parts of their respective persons have to undergo. This scrutiny and examination is the meditation of the genius of the species concerning the individual possible through these two.

3. And what is the will-to-life seeking through such examination? Evidence of healthy children. The will-to-life must ensure that the next generation will be psychologically and physiologically fit enough to survive in a hazardous world, and so it seeks that children be well-proportioned in limb (neither too short nor too tall, too fat nor too thin), and stable of mind (neither too timid nor too reckless, neither too cold nor too emotional, etc.).

(Ill. 20.6)

Since our parents made errors in their courtships, we are unlikely to be ideally balanced ourselves. We have typically come out too tall, too masculine, too feminine; our noses are large, our chins small. If such imbalances were allowed to persist, or were aggravated, the human race would, within a short time, founder in oddity. The will-to-life must therefore push us towards people who can, on account of their imperfections, cancel out our own (a large nose combined with a button nose promises a perfect nose), and hence help us restore physical and psychological balance in the next generation:

Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or even grow into complete abnormalities in the child which will be produced.

The theory of neutralization gave Schopenhauer confidence in predicting pathways of attraction. Short women will fall in love with tall men, but rarely tall men with tall women (their unconscious fearing the production of giants). Feminine men who don’t like sport will often be drawn to boyish women who have short hair (and wear sturdy watches):

The neutralization of the two individualities … requires that the particular degree of

his

manliness shall correspond exactly to the particular degree of

her

womanliness, so that the one-sidedness of each exactly cancels that of the other.

4. Unfortunately, the theory of attraction led Schopenhauer to a conclusion so bleak, it may be best if readers about to be married left the next few paragraphs unread in order not to have to rethink their plans; namely, that a person who is highly suitable for our child is almost never (though we cannot realize it at the time because we have been blindfolded by the will-to-life) very suitable for us.

‘That convenience and passionate love should go hand in hand is the rarest stroke of good fortune,’ observed Schopenhauer. The lover who saves our child from having an enormous

chin or an effeminate temperament is seldom the person who will make us happy over a lifetime. The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends:

Love … casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him, overlooks everything, misjudges everything, and binds himself for ever to the object of his passion. He is thus completely infatuated by that delusion, which vanishes as soon as the will of the species is satisfied, and leaves behind a detested partner for life. Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends, and cannot conceive how they could have made such a choice … A man in love may even clearly recognize and bitterly feel in his bride the intolerable faults of temperament and character which promise him a life of misery, and yet not be frightened away … for ultimately he seeks not

his

interest, but that of a third person who has yet to come into existence, although he is involved in the delusion that what he seeks is his own interest.

The will-to-life’s ability to further its own ends rather than our happiness may, Schopenhauer’s theory implies, be sensed with particular clarity in the lassitude and tristesse that frequently befall couples immediately after love-making:

Has it not been observed how

illico post coitum cachinnus auditur Diaboli?

(Directly after copulation the devil’s laughter is heard.)

So one day, a boyish woman and a girlish man will approach the altar with motives neither they, nor anyone (save a smattering of Schopenhauerians at the reception), will have fathomed.

Only later, when the will’s demands are assuaged and a robust boy is kicking a ball around a suburban garden, will the ruse be discovered. The couple will part or pass dinners in hostile silence. Schopenhauer offered us a choice –

It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly

– though he left us in little doubt as to the superior capacity of the species to guarantee its interests:

The coming generation is provided for at the expense of the present.

The man pays for dinner and asks, with studied casualness, if it might be an idea to repair to his flat for a drink. She smiles and stares at the floor. Under the table, she is folding a paper napkin into ever smaller squares. ‘That would be lovely, it really would,’ she says, ‘but I have to get up very early to catch a flight to Frankfurt for this meeting. Five thirty or, like, even earlier. Maybe another time though. It would be lovely. Really, it would.’ Another smile. The napkin disintegrates under pressure.

Despair is alleviated by a promise that she will call from Germany, and that they must meet again soon, perhaps on the very day of her return. But there is no call until late on the appointed day, when she rings from a booth at Frankfurt airport. In the background are crowds and metallic voices announcing the departure of flights to the Orient. She tells him she can see huge planes out of the window and that this place is like hell.

(Ill. 20.7)

She says that the fucking Lufthansa flight has been delayed, that she will try to get a seat on another airline but that he shouldn’t wait. There follows a pause before the worst is confirmed. Things are a little complicated in her life right now really, she goes on, she doesn’t quite know what she wants, but she knows she needs space and some time, and if it is all right with him, she will be the one to call once her head is a little clearer.

1. The philosopher might have offered unflattering explanations of why we fall in love, but there was consolation for rejection – the consolation of knowing that our pain is normal. We should not feel confused by the enormity of the upset that can ensue from only a few days of hope. It would be unreasonable if a force powerful enough to push us towards child-rearing could – if it failed in its aim – vanish without devastation. Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could imagine. To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn’t.

2. What is more, we are not inherently unlovable. There is nothing wrong with us

per se

. Our characters are not repellent, nor our faces abhorrent. The union collapsed because we were unfit to produce a balanced child

with one particular person

. There is no need to hate ourselves. One day we will come across someone who can find us wonderful and who will feel exceptionally natural and open with us (because our chin and their chin make a desirable combination from the will-to-life’s point of view).

3. We should in time learn to forgive our rejectors. The break-up was not their choice. In every clumsy attempt by one person to inform another that they need more space or time, that they are reluctant to commit or are afraid of intimacy, the rejector is striving to intellectualize an essentially unconscious negative

verdict formulated by the will-to-life. Their reason may have had an appreciation of our qualities, their will-to-life did not and told them so in a way that brooked no argument – by draining them of sexual interest in us. If they were seduced away by people less intelligent than we are, we should not condemn them for shallowness. We should remember, as Schopenhauer explains, that:

What is looked for in marriage is not intellectual entertainment, but the procreation of children.

4. We should respect the edict from nature against procreation that every rejection contains, as we might respect a flash of lightning or a lava flow – an event terrible but mightier than ourselves. We should draw consolation from the thought that a lack of love:

between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself.

We might have been happy with our beloved, but nature was not – a greater reason to surrender our grip on love.

For a time, the man is beset by melancholy. At the weekend, he takes a walk in Battersea Park, and sits on a bench overlooking the Thames. He has with him a paperback edition of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, first published in Leipzig in 1774.

(Ill. 20.8)

There are couples pushing prams and leading young children by the hand. A little girl in a blue dress covered in chocolate, points up to a plane descending towards Heathrow. ‘Daddy, is God in there?’ she asks, but Daddy is in a hurry and in a mood, and picks her up and says he doesn’t know, as though he had been asked for directions. A four-year-old boy drives his tricycle into a shrub and wails for his mother, who has just shut her eyes on a rug spread on a tattered patch of grass. She requests that her husband assist the child. He gruffly replies that it is her turn. She snaps that it is his. He says nothing. She says he’s crap and stands up. An elderly couple on an adjacent bench silently share an egg-and-cress sandwich.

1. Schopenhauer asks us not to be surprised by the misery. We should not ask for a point to being alive, in a couple or a parent.

2. There were many works of natural science in Schopenhauer’s library – among them William Kirby and William Spence’s

Introduction to Entomology

, François Huber’s

Des Abeilles

and Cadet de Vaux’s

De la taupe, de ses moeurs, de ses habitudes et des moyens de la détruire

. The philosopher read of ants, beetles, bees, flies, grasshoppers, moles and migratory birds, and observed, with compassion and puzzlement, how all these creatures displayed an ardent, senseless commitment to life. He felt particular sympathy for the mole, a stunted monstrosity dwelling in damp narrow corridors, who rarely saw the light of day and whose offspring looked like gelatinous worms – but who still did everything in its power to survive and perpetuate itself:

To dig strenuously with its enormous shovel-paws is the business of its whole life; permanent night surrounds it; it has its embryo eyes merely to avoid the light … what does it attain by this course of life that is full of trouble and devoid of pleasure?… The cares and troubles of life are out of all proportion to the yield or profit from it.

Every creature on earth seemed to Schopenhauer to be equally committed to an equally meaningless existence:

Contemplate the restless industry of wretched little ants … the life of most insects is nothing but a restless labour for preparing nourishment and dwelling for the future offspring that will come from their eggs. After the offspring have consumed the nourishment and have turned into the chrysalis stage, they enter into life merely to begin the same task again from the beginning … we cannot help but ask what comes of all of this … there is nothing to show but the satisfaction of hunger and sexual passion, and … a little momentary gratification … now and then, between … endless needs and exertions.

(

Ill. 20.9

)

3. The philosopher did not have to spell out the parallels. We pursue love affairs, chat in cafés with prospective partners and have children, with as much choice in the matter as moles and ants – and are rarely any happier.

(

Ill. 20.10

)

(

Ill. 20.11

)

4. He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let

us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan. The darkest thinkers may, paradoxically, be the most cheering:

There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy … So long as we persist in this inborn error … the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence … hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called

disappointment

.

They would never have grown so disappointed if only they had entered love with the correct expectations:

What disturbs and renders unhappy … the age of youth … is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises the constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness of our dreams hover before us in capriciously selected shapes and we search in vain for their original … Much would have been gained if through timely advice and instruction young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

(Ill. 20.12)

3

We do have one advantage over moles. We may have to fight for survival and hunt for partners and have children as they do, but we can in addition go to the theatre, the opera and the concert hall, and in bed in the evenings, we can read novels, philosophy and epic poems – and it is in these activities that Schopenhauer located a supreme source of relief from the demands of the will-to-life. What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognize as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it. We may be obliged to continue burrowing underground, but through creative works, we can at least acquire moments of insight into our woes, which spare us feelings of alarm and isolation (even persecution) at being afflicted by them. In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.

The philosopher admired his mother’s friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe because he had turned so many of the pains of love into knowledge, most famously in the novel he had published at the age of twenty-five, and which had made his name throughout Europe. The Sorrows of Young Werther described the unrequited love felt by a particular young man for a particular young woman (the charming Lotte, who shared Werther’s taste for The Vicar of Wakefield and wore white dresses with pink ribbons at the sleeves), but it simultaneously described the love affairs of thousands of its readers (Napoleon was said to have read the novel nine times). The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing of us. As Schopenhauer put it:

The … poet takes from life that which is quite particular and individual, and describes it accurately in its individuality; but in this way he reveals the whole of human existence … though he appears to be concerned with the particular, he is actually concerned with that which is everywhere and at all times. From this it arises that sentences, especially of the dramatic poets, even without being general apophthegms, find frequent application in real life.

Goethe’s readers not only recognized themselves in The Sorrows of Young Werther, they also understood themselves better as a result, for Goethe had clarified a range of the awkward, evanescent moments of love, moments that his readers would previously have lived through, though would not necessarily have fathomed. He laid bare certain laws of love, what Schopenhauer termed essential ‘Ideas’ of romantic psychology. He had, for example, perfectly captured the apparently kind – yet infinitely cruel – manner with which the person who does not love deals with the one who does. Late in the novel, tortured by his feelings, Werther breaks down in front of Lotte:

‘Lotte’ he cried, ‘I shall never see you again!’ – ‘Why ever not?’ she replied: ‘Werther, you may and must see us again, but do be less agitated in your manner. Oh, why did you have to be born with this intense spirit, this uncontrollable passion for everything you are close to! I implore you,’ she went on, taking his hand, ‘be calmer. Think of the many joys your spirit, your knowledge and your gifts afford you!’

We need not have lived in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century to appreciate what is involved. There are fewer stories than there are people on earth, the plots repeated ceaselessly while the names and backdrops alter. ‘The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,’ knew Schopenhauer.

In turn, there is consolation in realizing that our case is only one of thousands. Schopenhauer made two trips to Florence, in 1818 and again in 1822. He is likely to have visited the Brancacci chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, in which Masaccio had painted a series of frescos between 1425 and 1426.

(Ill. 21.1)

The distress of Adam and Eve at leaving paradise is not theirs alone. In the faces and posture of the two figures, Masaccio has captured the essence of distress, the very Idea of distress, his fresco a universal symbol of our fallibility and fragility. We have all been expelled from the heavenly garden.

But by reading a tragic tale of love, a rejected suitor raises himself above his own situation; he is no longer one man suffering alone, singly and confusedly, he is part of a vast body of human beings who have throughout time fallen in love with other humans in the agonizing drive to propagate the species. His suffering loses a little of its sting, it grows more comprehensible, less of an individual curse. Of a person who can achieve such objectivity, Schopenhauer remarks:

In the course of his own life and in its misfortunes, he will look less at his own individual lot than at the lot of mankind as a whole, and accordingly will conduct himself … more as a

knower

than as a

sufferer

.

We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge.

VI

Consolation for Difficulties

1

Few philosophers have thought highly of feeling wretched. A wise life has traditionally been associated with an attempt to reduce suffering: anxiety, despair, anger, self-contempt and heartache.

2

Then again, pointed out Friedrich Nietzsche, the majority of philosophers have always been ‘cabbage-heads’. ‘It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being,’ he recognized with a degree of embarrassment in the autumn of 1888. ‘I have a terrible fear that I shall one day be pronounced holy’; and he set the date somewhere around the dawn of the third millennium: ‘Let us assume that people will be allowed to read [my work] in about the year 2000.’ He was sure they would enjoy it when they did:

It seems to me that to take a book of mine into his hands is one of the rarest distinctions that anyone can confer upon himself. I even assume that he removes his shoes when he does so – not to speak of boots.

A distinction because, alone among the cabbage-heads, Nietzsche had realized that difficulties of every sort were to be welcomed by those seeking fulfilment:

You want if possible – and there is no madder ‘if possible’ –

to abolish suffering

; and we? – it really does seem that

we

would rather increase it and make it worse than it has ever been!

Though punctilious in sending his best wishes to friends, Nietzsche knew in his heart what they needed:

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities – I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished.

Which helped to explain why his work amounted to, even if he said so himself:

The greatest gift that [mankind] has ever been given.

3

We should not be frightened by appearances.

In the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time … usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make. Thus the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache … usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent – and as such he will be treated. (Ill. 22.1)

4

He had not always thought so well of difficulty. For his initial views, he had been indebted to a philosopher he had discovered at the age of twenty-one as a student at Leipzig University. In the autumn of 1865, in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig’s Blumengasse, he had by chance picked up an edition of The World as Will and Representation, whose author had died five years previously in an apartment in Frankfurt 300 kilometres to the west:

I took [Schopenhauer’s book] in my hand as something totally unfamiliar and turned the pages. I don’t know which daimon was whispering to me: ‘Take this book home.’ In any case, it happened, which was contrary to my custom of otherwise never rushing into buying a book. Back at the house I threw myself into the corner of a sofa with my new treasure, and began to let that dynamic, dismal genius work on me. Each line cried out with renunciation, negation, resignation.

The older man changed the younger one’s life. The essence of philosophical wisdom was, Schopenhauer explained, Aristotle’s remark in the Nicomachean Ethics:

The prudent man strives for freedom from pain, not pleasure.

The priority for all those seeking contentment was to recognize the impossibility of fulfilment and so to avoid the troubles and anxiety that we typically encounter in its pursuit:

[We should] direct our aim not to what is pleasant and agreeable in life, but to the avoidance, as far as possible, of its numberless evils … The happiest lot is that of the man who has got through life without any very great pain, bodily or mental.

When he next wrote home to his widowed mother and his nineteen-year-old sister in Naumburg, Nietzsche replaced the usual reports on his diet and the progress of his studies with a summary of his new philosophy of renunciation and resignation:

We know that life consists of suffering, that the harder we try to enjoy it, the more enslaved we are by it, and so we [should] discard the goods of life and practise abstinence.

It sounded strange to his mother, who wrote back explaining that she didn’t like ‘that kind of display or that kind of opinion so much as a proper letter, full of news’, and advised her son to entrust his heart to God and to make sure he was eating properly.

But Schopenhauer’s influence did not subside. Nietzsche began to live cautiously. Sex figured prominently in a list he drew up under the heading ‘Delusions of the Individual’. During his military service in Naumburg, he positioned a photograph of Schopenhauer on his desk, and in difficult moments cried out, ‘Schopenhauer, help!’ At the age of twenty-four, on taking up the Chair of Classical Philology at Basle University, he was drawn into the intimate circle of Richard and Cosima Wagner through a common love of the pessimistic, prudent sage of Frankfurt.

5

Then, after more than a decade of attachment, in the autumn of 1876, Nietzsche travelled to Italy and underwent a radical change of mind. He had accepted an invitation from Malwida von Meysenbug, a wealthy middle-aged enthusiast of the arts, to spend a few months with her and a group of friends in a villa in Sorrento on the Bay of Naples.

(Ill. 22.2)

‘I never saw him so lively. He laughed aloud from sheer joy,’ reported Malwida of Nietzsche’s first response to the Villa Rubinacci, which stood on a leafy avenue on the edge of Sorrento. From the living room there were views over the bay, the island of Ischia and Mount Vesuvius, and in front of the house, a small garden with fig and orange trees, cypresses and grape arbours led down to the sea.

The house guests went swimming, and visited Pompeii, Vesuvius, Capri and the Greek temples at Paestum. At mealtimes, they ate light dishes prepared with olive oil, and in the evenings, read together in the living room: Jacob Burckhardt’s lectures on Greek civilization, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La Bruyère, Stendhal, Goethe’s ballad Die Braut von Korinth, and his play Die natürliche Tochter, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato’s Laws (though, perhaps spurred on by Montaigne’s confessions of distaste, Nietzsche grew irritated with the latter: ‘The Platonic dialogue, that dreadfully self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectics, can only have a stimulating effect if one has never read any good Frenchmen … Plato is boring’).

And as he swam in the Mediterranean, ate food cooked in olive oil rather than butter, breathed warm air and read Montaigne and Stendhal (‘These little things – nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness – are beyond all conception of greater importance than anything that has been considered of importance hitherto’), Nietzsche gradually changed his philosophy of pain and pleasure, and with it, his perspective on difficulty. Watching the sun set over the Bay of Naples at the end of October 1876, he was infused with a new, quite un-Schopenhauerian faith in existence. He felt that he had been old at the beginning of his life, and shed tears at the thought that he had been saved at the last moment.

6

He made a formal announcement of his conversion in a letter to Cosima Wagner at the end of 1876: ‘Would you be amazed if I confess something that has gradually come about, but which has more or less suddenly entered my consciousness: a disagreement with Schopenhauer’s teaching? On virtually all general propositions I am not on his side.’

One of these propositions being that, because fulfilment is an illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain rather than seeking pleasure, living quietly, as Schopenhauer counselled, ‘in a small fireproof room’ – advice that now struck Nietzsche as both timid and untrue, a perverse attempt to dwell, as he was to put it pejoratively several years later, ‘hidden in forests like shy deer’. Fulfilment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good.

7

What had, besides the food and the air, helped to change Nietzsche’s outlook was his reflection on the few individuals throughout history who appeared genuinely to have known fulfilled lives; individuals who could fairly have been described – to use one of the most contested terms in the Nietzschean lexicon – as Übermenschen.

The notoriety and absurdity of the word owe less to Nietzsche’s own philosophy than to his sister Elisabeth’s subsequent enchantment with National Socialism (‘that vengeful anti-Semitic goose’, as Friedrich described her long before she shook the Führer’s hand), and the unwitting decision by Nietzsche’s earliest Anglo-Saxon translators to bequeath to the Übermensch the name of a legendary cartoon hero.

Hitler greeting Elisabeth Nietzsche in Weimar, October 1935 (Ill. 22.3)

But Nietzsche’s Übermenschen had little to do with either airborne aces or fascists. A better indication of their identity came in a passing remark in a letter to his mother and sister:

Really, there is nobody living about whom I care

much

. The people I like have been dead for a long, long time – for example, the Abbé Galiani, or Henri Beyle, or Montaigne.

He could have added another hero, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. These four men were perhaps the richest clues for what Nietzsche came in his maturity to understand by a fulfilled life.

They had much in common. They were curious, artistically gifted, and sexually vigorous. Despite their dark sides, they laughed, and many of them danced, too; they were drawn to ‘gentle sunlight, bright and buoyant air, southerly vegetation, the breath of the sea [and] fleeting meals of flesh, fruit and eggs’. Several of them had a gallows humour close to Nietzsche’s own – a joyful, wicked laughter arising from pessimistic hinterlands. They had explored their possibilities, they possessed what Nietzsche called ‘life’, which suggested courage, ambition, dignity, strength of character, humour and independence (and a parallel absence of sanctimoniousness, conformity, resentment and prissiness).

Montaigne (1533–92) (Ill. 22.4)

Abbé Galiani (1728–87)

Goethe (1749–1832) (Ill. 22.5)

Stendhal/Henri Beyle (1783–1842) (Ill. 22.6)

They had been involved in the world. Montaigne had been mayor of Bordeaux for two terms and journeyed across Europe on horseback. The Neapolitan Abbé Galiani had been Secretary to the Embassy in Paris and written works on money supply and grain distribution (which Voltaire praised for combining the wit of Molière and the intelligence of Plato). Goethe had worked for a decade as a civil servant in the Court in Weimar; he had proposed reforms in agriculture, industry and poor relief, undertaken diplomatic missions and twice had audiences with Napoleon.

(Ill. 22.7)

On his visit to Italy in 1787, he had seen the Greek temples at Paestum and made three ascents of Mount Vesuvius, coming close enough to the crater to dodge eruptions of stone and ash.

(Ill. 22.8)

Nietzsche called him ‘magnificent’, ‘the last German I hold in reverence’: ‘He made use of … practical activity … he did not divorce himself from life but immersed himself in it … [he] took as much as possible upon himself … What he wanted was totality; he fought against the disjunction of reason, sensuality, feeling, will.’

Stendhal had accompanied Napoleon’s armies around Europe, he had visited the ruins of Pompeii seven times and admired the Pont du Gard by a full moon at five in the morning (‘The Coliseum in Rome hardly plunged me into a reverie more profound …’).

Nietzsche’s heroes had also fallen in love repeatedly. ‘The whole movement of the world tends and leads towards copulation,’ Montaigne had known. At the age of seventy-four, on holiday in Marienbad, Goethe had become infatuated with Ulrike von Levetzow, a pretty nineteen-year-old, whom he had invited out for tea and on walks, before asking for (and being refused) her hand in marriage. Stendhal, who had known and loved Werther, had been as passionate as its author, his diaries detailing conquests across decades. At twenty-four, stationed with the Napoleonic armies in Germany, he had taken the innkeeper’s daughter to bed and noted proudly in his diary that she was ‘the first German woman I ever saw who was totally exhausted after an orgasm. I made her passionate with my caresses; she was very frightened.’

And finally, these men had all been artists (‘Art is the great stimulant to life,’ recognized Nietzsche), and must have felt extraordinary satisfaction upon completing the Essais, Il Socrate immaginario, Römische Elegien and De l’amour.

8

These were, Nietzsche implied, some of the elements that human beings naturally needed for a fulfilled life. He added an important detail; that it was impossible to attain them without feeling very miserable some of the time:

What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever

wanted

to have as much as possible of one

must

also have as much as possible of the other … you have the choice: either

as little displeasure as possible

, painlessness in brief … or

as much displeasure as possible

as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their

capacity for joy

.

The most fulfilling human projects appeared inseparable from a degree of torment, the sources of our greatest joys lying awkwardly close to those of our greatest pains:

Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the

favourable

conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible.

9

Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment.

Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfilment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable.

We might imagine that Montaigne’s Essays had sprung fully formed from his mind and so could take the clumsiness of our own first attempts to write a philosophy of life as signs of a congenital incapacity for the task. We should look instead at the evidence of colossal authorial struggles behind the final masterpiece, the plethora of additions and revisions the Essays demanded.

(Ill. 22.9)

Le Rouge et le noir, Vie de Henry Brulard and De l’amour had been no easier to write. Stendhal had begun his artistic career by sketching out a number of poor plays. One had centred on the landing of an émigré army at Quiberon (the characters were to include William Pitt and Charles James Fox), another had charted Bonaparte’s rise to power and a third – tentatively titled L’Homme qui craint d’être gouverné – had depicted the slide of an old man into senility. Stendhal had spent weeks at the Bibliothèque Nationale, copying out dictionary definitions of words like ‘plaisanterie’, ‘ridicule’ and ‘comique’ – but it had not been enough to transform his leaden play-writing. It was many decades of toil before the masterpieces emerged.

If most works of literature are less fine than Le Rouge et le noir, it is – suggested Nietzsche – not because their authors lack genius, but because they have an incorrect idea of how much pain is required. This is how hard one should try to write a novel:

The recipe for becoming a good novelist … is easy to give, but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says ‘I do not have enough talent.’ One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes every day until one has learnt how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one’s eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer … one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost for instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise

for some ten years

; what is then created in the workshop … will be fit to go out into the world.

The philosophy amounted to a curious mixture of extreme faith in human potential (fulfilment is open to us all, as is the writing of great novels) and extreme toughness (we may need to spend a miserable decade on the first book).

It was in order to accustom us to the legitimacy of pain that Nietzsche spent so much time talking about mountains.

10

It is hard to read more than a few pages without coming upon an alpine reference:

Ecce Homo

: He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of heights, a

robust

air. One has to be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger one will catch cold. The ice is near, the solitude is terrible – but how peacefully all things lie in the light! how freely one breathes! how much one feels

beneath

one! Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains.

On the Genealogy of Morals

: We would need

another

sort of spirit than those we are likely to encounter in this age [to understand my philosophy] … they would need to be acclimatized to thinner air higher up, to winter treks, ice and mountains in every sense.

Human, All Too Human

: In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.

Untimely Meditations

: To climb as high into the pure icy Alpine air as a philosopher ever climbed, up to where all the mist and obscurity cease and where the fundamental constitution of things speaks in voice rough and rigid but ineluctably comprehensible!

He was – in both a practical and spiritual sense – of the mountains. Having taken citizenship in April 1869, Nietzsche may be considered Switzerland’s most famous philosopher. Even so, he on occasion succumbed to a sentiment with which few Swiss are unacquainted. ‘I am distressed to be Swiss!’ he complained to his mother a year after taking up citizenship.

Upon resigning his post at Basle University at the age of thirty-five, he began spending winters by the Mediterranean, largely in Genoa and Nice, and summers in the Alps, in the small village of Sils-Maria, 1,800 metres above sea-level in the Engadine region of south-eastern Switzerland, a few kilometres from St Moritz, where the winds from Italy collide with cooler northern gusts and turn the sky an aquamarine blue.

Nietzsche visited the Engadine for the first time in June 1879 and at once fell in love with the climate and topography. ‘I now have Europe’s best and mightiest air to breathe,’ he told Paul Rée, ‘its nature is akin to my own.’ To Peter Gast, he wrote, ‘This is not Switzerland … but something quite different, at least much more southern – I would have to go to the high plateaux of Mexico overlooking the Pacific to find anything similar (for example, Oaxaca), and the vegetation there would of course be tropical. Well, I shall try to keep this Sils-Maria for myself.’ And to his old schoolfriend Carl von Gersdorff, he explained, ‘I feel that here and nowhere else is my real home and breeding ground.’

Nietzsche spent seven summers in Sils-Maria in a rented room in a chalet with views on to pine trees and mountains. There he wrote all or substantial portions of The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols. He would rise at five in the morning and work until midday, then take walks up the huge peaks that necklace the village, Piz Corvatsch, Piz Lagrev, Piz de la Margna, jagged and raw mountains that look as if they had only recently thrust through the earth’s crust under atrocious tectonic pressures. In the evening, alone in his room, he would eat a few slices of ham, an egg and a roll and go to bed early. (‘How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?’)

Today, inevitably, there is a museum in the village. For a few francs, one is invited to visit the philosopher’s bedroom, refurbished, the guidebook explains, ‘as it looked in Nietzsche’s time, in all its unpretentiousness’.

(Ill. 22.10)

Yet to understand why Nietzsche felt there to be such an affinity between his philosophy and the mountains, it may be best to skirt the room and visit instead one of Sils-Maria’s many sports shops in order to acquire walking boots, a rucksack, a water-bottle, gloves, a compass and a pick.

(Ill. 22.11)

A hike up Piz Corvatsch, a few kilometres from Nietzsche’s house, will explain better than any museum the spirit of his philosophy, his defence of difficulty, and his reasons for turning away from Schopenhauerian deer-like shyness.

At the base of the mountain one finds a large car park, a row of recycling bins, a depot for rubbish trucks and a restaurant offering oleaginous sausages and rösti.

(Ill. 22.12)

The summit is, by contrast, sublime. There are views across the entire Engadine: the turquoise lakes of Segl, Silvaplana and St Moritz, and to the south, near the border with Italy, the massive Sella and Roseg glaciers. There is an extraordinary stillness in the air, it seems one can touch the roof of the world. The height leaves one out of breath but curiously elated. It is hard not to start grinning, perhaps laughing, for no particular reason, an innocent laughter that comes from the core of one’s being and expresses a primal delight at being alive to see such beauty.

But, to come to the moral of Nietzsche’s mountain philosophy, it isn’t easy to climb 3,451 metres above sea-level. It requires five hours at least, one must cling to steep paths, negotiate a way around boulders and through thick pine-forests, grow breathless in the thin air, add layers of clothes to fight the wind and crunch through eternal snows.

11

Nietzsche offered another alpine metaphor. A few steps from his room in Sils-Maria a path leads to the Fex Valley, one of the most fertile of the Engadine. Its gentle slopes are extensively farmed. In summer, families of cows stand reflectively munching the almost luminously rich-green grass, their bells clanging as they move from one patch to another.

(Ill. 22.13)

Streams trickle through the fields with the sound of sparkling water being poured into glasses. Beside many small, immaculate farms (each one flying the national and cantonal flags) stand carefully tended vegetable gardens from whose loamy soils sprout vigorous cauliflowers, beetroots, carrots and lettuces, which tempt one to kneel down and take rabbit-like bites out of them.

If there are such nice lettuces here, it is because the Fex Valley is glacial, with the characteristic mineral richness of soil once a glacial mantle has retreated. Much further along the valley, hours of strenuous walking from the tidy farms, one comes upon the glacier itself, massive and terrifying. It looks like a tablecloth waiting for a tug to straighten out its folds, but these folds are the size of houses and are made of razor-sharp ice, and occasionally release agonized bellows as they rearrange themselves in the summer sun.

(Ill. 22.14)

It is hard to conceive, when standing at the edge of the cruel glacier, how this frozen bulk could have a role to play in the gestation of vegetables and lush grass only a few kilometres along the valley, to imagine that something as apparently antithetical to a green field as a glacier could be responsible for the field’s fertility.

Nietzsche, who often walked in the Fex Valley carrying a pencil and leather-bound notebook (‘Only thoughts which come from walking have any value’), drew an analogy with the dependence of positive elements in human life on negative ones, of fulfilment on difficulties:

When we behold those deeply-furrowed hollows in which glaciers have lain, we think it hardly possible that a time will come when a wooded, grassy valley, watered by streams, will spread itself out upon the same spot. So it is, too, in the history of mankind: the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was none-the-less necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise its house. The frightful energies – those which are called evil – are the cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity.

12

But frightful difficulties are sadly, of course, not enough. All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a ground-breaking work of economic theory. Envy may lead to bitterness, or to a decision to compete with a rival and the production of a masterpiece.

As Nietzsche’s beloved Montaigne had explained in the final chapter of the Essays, the art of living lies in finding uses for our adversities:

We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life.

And some 300 years later, Nietzsche returned to the thought:

If only we were fruitful fields, we would at bottom let nothing perish unused and see in every event, thing and man welcome manure.

How then to be fruitful?

13

Born in Urbino in 1483, Raphael from an early age displayed such an interest in drawing that his father took the boy to Perugia to work as an apprentice to the renowned Pietro Perugino. He was soon executing works of his own and by his late teens had painted several portraits of members of the court of Urbino, and altarpieces for churches in Città di Castello, a day’s ride from Urbino across the mountains on the road to Perugia.

But Raphael, one of Nietzsche’s favourite painters, knew he was not then a great artist, for he had seen the works of two men, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Leonardo da Vinci. They had shown him that he was unable to paint figures in motion, and despite an aptitude for pictorial geometry, that he had no grasp of linear perspective. The envy could have grown monstrous. Raphael turned it into manure instead.

In 1504, at the age of twenty-one, he left Urbino for Florence in order to study the work of his two masters. He examined their cartoons in the Hall of the Great Council where Leonardo had worked on the Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo on the Battle of Cascina. He imbibed the lessons of Leonardo and Michelangelo’s anatomical drawings and followed their example of dissecting and drawing corpses. He learned from Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi and his cartoons of the Virgin and Child, and looked closely at an unusual portrait Leonardo had been asked to execute for a nobleman, Francesco del Giocondo, who had wanted a likeness of his wife, a young beauty with a somewhat enigmatic smile.

The results of Raphael’s exertions were soon apparent. We can compare Portrait of a Young Woman which Raphael had drawn before moving to Florence with Portrait of a Woman completed a few years after.

(Ill. 22.15)

(Ill. 22.16)

Mona had given Raphael the idea of a half-length seated pose in which the arms provided the base of a pyramidal composition. She had taught him how to use contrasting axes for the head, shoulder and hands in order to lend volume to a figure. Whereas the woman drawn in Urbino had looked awkwardly constricted in her clothes, her arms unnaturally cut off, the woman from Florence was mobile and at ease.

Raphael had not spontaneously come into possession of his talents; he had become great by responding intelligently to a sense of inferiority that would have led lesser men to despair.

The career path offered a Nietzschean lesson in the benefits of wisely interpreted pain:

Don’t talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name all kinds of great men who were not very gifted. They

acquired

greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it) through qualities about whose lack no man aware of them likes to speak: all of them had that diligent seriousness of a craftsman, learning first to construct the parts properly before daring to make a great whole. They allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.

Raphael: studies for Niccolini-Cowper Madonna; Niccolini-Cowper Madonna (Ill. 22.17)

(Ill. 22.18)

Raphael had been able – to use Nietzsche’s terms – to sublimate (sublimieren), spiritualize (vergeistigen) and raise (aufheben) to fruitfulness the difficulties in his path.

14

The philosopher had a practical as well as a metaphorical interest in horticulture. On resigning from Basle University in 1879, Nietzsche had set his heart on becoming a professional gardener. ‘You know that my preference is for a simple, natural way of life,’ he informed his surprised mother, ‘and I am becoming increasingly eager for it. There is no other cure for my health. I need real work, which takes time and induces tiredness without mental strain.’ He remembered an old tower in Naumburg near his mother’s house, which he planned to rent while looking after the adjoining garden. The gardening life began with enthusiasm in September 1879 – but there were soon problems. Nietzsche’s poor eyesight prevented him from seeing what he was trimming, he had difficulty bending his back, there were too many leaves (it was autumn) and after three weeks, he felt he had no alternative but to give up.

Yet traces of his horticultural enthusiasm survived in his philosophy, for in certain passages, he proposed that we should look at our difficulties like gardeners. At their roots, plants can be odd and unpleasant, but a person with knowledge and faith in their potential will lead them to bear beautiful flowers and fruit – just as, in life, at root level, there may be difficult emotions and situations which can nevertheless result, through careful cultivation, in the greatest achievements and joys.

One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis.

(Ill. 22.19)

But most of us fail to recognize the debt we owe to these shoots of difficulty. We are liable to think that anxiety and envy have nothing legitimate to teach us and so remove them like emotional weeds. We believe, as Nietzsche put it, that ‘the higher is not allowed to grow out of the lower, is not allowed to have grown at all … everything first-rate must be causa sui [the cause of itself].’

Yet ‘good and honoured things’ were, Nietzsche stressed, ‘artfully related, knotted and crocheted to … wicked, apparently antithetical things’. ‘Love and hate, gratitude and revenge, good nature and anger … belong together,’ which does not mean that they have to be expressed together, but that a positive may be the result of a negative successfully gardened. Therefore:

The emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness and lust for domination [are] life-conditioning emotions … which must fundamentally and essentially be present in the total economy of life.

To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

15

It was for their apparent appreciation of the point that Nietzsche looked back in admiration to the ancient Greeks.

It is tempting when contemplating their serene temples at dusk, like those at Paestum, a few kilometres from Sorrento – which Nietzsche visited with Malwida von Meysenbug in early 1877 – to imagine that the Greeks were an unusually measured people whose temples were the outward manifestations of an order they felt within themselves and their society.

This had been the opinion of the great classicist Johann Winckelmann (1717–68) and had won over successive generations of German university professors. But Nietzsche proposed that far from arising out of serenity, classical Greek civilization had arisen from the sublimation of the most sinister forces:

The greater and more terrible the passions are that an age, a people, an individual can permit themselves, because they are capable of employing them as

a means

,

the higher stands their culture

.

The temples might have looked calm, but they were the flowers of well-gardened plants with dark roots. The Dionysiac festivals showed both the darkness and the attempt to control and cultivate it:

Nothing astonishes the observer of the Greek world more than when he discovers that from time to time the Greeks made as it were a festival of all their passions and evil natural inclinations and even instituted a kind of official order of proceedings in the celebration of what was all-too-human in them … They took this all-too-human to be inescapable and, instead of reviling it, preferred to accord it a kind of right of the second rank through regulating it within the usages of society and religion: indeed, everything in man possessing

power

they called divine and inscribed it on the walls of their Heaven. They do not repudiate the natural drive that finds expression in the evil qualities but regulate it and, as soon as they have discovered sufficient prescriptive measures to provide these wild waters with the least harmful means of channeling and outflow, confine them to definite cults and days. This is the root of all the moral free-mindedness of antiquity. One granted to the evil and suspicious … a moderate discharge, and did not strive after their total annihilation.

The Greeks did not cut out their adversities; they cultivated them:

All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, in which they draw their victims down by weight of stupidity – and a later, very much later one in which they marry the spirit, ‘spiritualize’ themselves. In former times, because of the stupidity of passion, people waged war on passion itself: they plotted to destroy it …

Destroying

the passions and desires merely in order to avoid their stupidity and the disagreeable consequences of their stupidity seems to us nowadays to be itself simply an acute form of stupidity. We no longer marvel at dentists who

pull out

teeth to stop them hurting.

(Ill. 22.20)

Fulfilment is reached by responding wisely to difficulties that could tear one apart. Squeamish spirits may be tempted to pull the molar out at once or come off Piz Corvatsch on the lower slopes. Nietzsche urged us to endure.

16

And far from coincidentally, never to drink.

Dear Mother

,

If I write to you today, it is about one of the most unpleasant and painful incidents I have ever been responsible for. In fact, I have misbehaved very badly, and I don’t know whether you can or will forgive me. I pick up my pen most reluctantly and with a heavy heart, especially when I think back to our pleasant life together during the Easter holidays, which was never spoiled by any discord. Last Sunday, I got drunk, and I have no excuse, except that I did not know how much I could take, and I was rather excited in the afternoon

.

So wrote eighteen-year-old Friedrich to his mother Franziska after four glasses of beer in the halls of Attenburg near his school in the spring of 1863. A few years later, at Bonn and Leipzig universities, he felt irritation with his fellow students for their love of alcohol: ‘I often found the expressions of good fellowship in the clubhouse extremely distasteful … I could hardly bear certain individuals because of their beery materialism.’

Nietzsche’s student fraternity at Bonn University.

Nietzsche is in the second row, leaning to one side.

Note, in the row below, the fraternity beerkeg. (Ill. 22.21)

The attitude remained constant throughout the philosopher’s adult life:

Alcoholic drinks are no good for me; a glass of wine or beer a day is quite enough to make life for me a ‘Vale of Tears’ – Munich is where my antipodes live.

(Ill. 22.22)

‘How much beer there is in the German intelligence!’ he complained. ‘Perhaps the modern European discontent is due to the fact that our forefathers were given to drinking through the entire Middle Ages … The Middle Ages meant the alcohol poisoning of Europe.’

In the spring of 1871, Nietzsche went on holiday with his sister to the Hôtel du Parc in Lugano. The hotel bill for 2–9 March shows that he drank fourteen glasses of milk.

It was more than a personal taste. Anyone seeking to be happy was strongly advised never to drink anything alcoholic at all. Never:

I cannot advise all

more spiritual

natures too seriously to abstain from alcohol absolutely.

Water

suffices.

Why? Because Raphael had not drunk to escape his envy in Urbino in 1504, he had gone to Florence and learned how to be a great painter. Because Stendhal had not drunk in 1805 to escape his despair over L’Homme qui craint d’être gouverné, he had gardened the pain for seventeen years and published De l’amour in 1822:

If you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that [you harbour in your heart] … the

religion of comfortableness

. How little you know of human

happiness

, you comfortable … people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case,

remain small

together.

17

Nietzsche’s antipathy to alcohol explains simultaneously his antipathy to what had been the dominant British school of moral philosophy: Utilitarianism, and its greatest proponent, John Stuart Mill. The Utilitarians had argued that in a world beset by moral ambiguities, the way to judge whether an action was right or wrong was to measure the amount of pleasure and pain it gave rise to. Mill proposed that:

[A]ctions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

The thought of Utilitarianism, and even the nation from which it had sprung, enraged Nietzsche:

European vulgarity, the plebeianism of modern ideas [is the work and invention of]

England

.

Man does

not

strive for happiness; only the English do that.

He was, of course, also striving for happiness; he simply believed that it could not be attained as painlessly as the Utilitarians appeared to be suggesting:

All these modes of thought which assess the value of things according to

pleasure

and

pain

, that is to say according to attendant and secondary phenomena, are foreground modes of thought and naïveties which anyone conscious of

creative

powers and an artist’s conscience will look down on with derision.

An artist’s conscience because artistic creation offers a most explicit example of an activity which may deliver immense fulfilment but always demands immense suffering. Had Stendhal assessed the value of his art according to the ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ it had at once brought him, there would have been no advance from L’Homme qui craint d’être gouverné to the summit of his powers.

(Ill. 22.23)

Instead of drinking beer in the lowlands, Nietzsche asked us to accept the pain of the climb. He also offered a suggestion for town-planners:

The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is – to

live dangerously

! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!

Vesuvius, exploding in 1879, three years before the above statement was written (Ill. 22.24)

And if one were still tempted to have a drink, but had no high opinion of Christianity, Nietzsche added a further argument to dissuade one from doing so. Anyone who liked drinking had, he argued, a fundamentally Christian outlook on life:

To believe that wine

makes cheerful

I would have to be a Christian, that is to say believe what is for me in particular an absurdity.

18

He had more experience of Christianity than of alcohol. He was born in the tiny village of Röcken near Leipzig in Saxony. His father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was the parson, his deeply devout mother was herself the daughter of a parson, David Ernst Oehler, who took services in the village of Pobles an hour away. Their son was baptized before an assembly of the local clergy in Röcken church in October 1844.

(Ill. 22.25)

Friedrich loved his father, who died when he was only four, and revered his memory throughout his life. On the one occasion when he had a little money, after winning a court case against a publisher in 1885, he ordered a large headstone for his father’s grave on which he had carved a quotation from Corinthians (1 Cor 13.8):

Die Liebe höret nimmer auf

Charity never faileth

‘He was the perfect embodiment of a country pastor,’ Nietzsche recalled of Carl Ludwig. ‘A tall, delicate figure, a fine-featured face, amiable and beneficent. Everywhere welcomed and beloved as much for his witty conversation as for his warm sympathy, esteemed and loved by the farmers, extending blessings by word and deed in his capacity as a spiritual guide.’

(Ill. 22.26)

Yet this filial love did not prevent Nietzsche from harbouring the deepest reservations about the consolation that his father, and Christianity in general, could offer those in pain:

I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible charge any prosecutor has ever uttered. To me it is the extremest thinkable form of corruption … [it] has left nothing untouched by its depravity … I call Christianity the

one

great curse, the

one

great intrinsic depravity …

One does well to put gloves on when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do so … Everything in it is cowardice, everything is self-deception and closing one’s eyes to oneself … Do I still have to add that in the entire New Testament there is only

one

solitary figure one is obliged to respect? Pilate, the Roman governor.

Quite simply:

It is indecent to be a Christian today.

19

How does the New Testament console us for our difficulties? By suggesting that many of these are not difficulties at all but rather virtues:

If one is worried about timidity, the New Testament points out

:

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5.5)

If one is worried about having no friends, the New Testament suggests

:

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil … your reward is great in heaven. (Luke 6.22–3)

If one is worried about an exploitative job, the New Testament advises

:

Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh …

Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3.22–4)

If one is worried at having no money, the New Testament tells us

:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (Mark 10.25)

There may be differences between such words and a drink but Nietzsche insisted on an essential equivalence. Both Christianity and alcohol have the power to convince us that what we previously thought deficient in ourselves and the world does not require attention; both weaken our resolve to garden our problems; both deny us the chance of fulfilment:

The two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to climb to the tops of mountains, and so had built themselves a philosophy claiming that their bases were delightful. Christians had wished to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment (a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but did not have the courage to endure the difficulties these goods demanded. They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for while praising what they did not want but happened to have. Powerlessness became ‘goodness’, baseness ‘humility’, submission to people one hated ‘obedience’ and, in Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘not-being-able-to-take-revenge’ turned into ‘forgiveness’. Every feeling of weakness was overlaid with a sanctifying name, and made to seem ‘a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment’. Addicted to ‘the religion of comfortableness’, Christians, in their value system, had given precedence to what was easy, not what was desirable, and so had drained life of its potential.

20

Having a ‘Christian’ perspective on difficulty is not limited to members of the Christian church; it is for Nietzsche a permanent psychological possibility. We all become Christians when we profess indifference to what we secretly long for but do not have; when we blithely say that we do not need love or a position in the world, money or success, creativity or health – while the corners of our mouths twitch with bitterness; and we wage silent wars against what we have publicly renounced, firing shots over the parapet, sniping from the trees.

How would Nietzsche have preferred us to approach our setbacks? To continue to believe in what we wish for, even when we do not have it, and may never. Put another way, to resist the temptation to denigrate and declare evil certain goods because they have proved hard to secure – a pattern of behaviour of which Nietzsche’s own, infinitely tragic life offers us perhaps the best model.

21

Epicurus had from an early age been among his favourite ancient philosophers; he called him ‘the soul-soother of later antiquity’, ‘one of the greatest men, the inventor of an heroic-idyllic mode of philosophizing’. What especially appealed to him was Epicurus’s idea that happiness involved a life among friends. But he was rarely to know the contentment of community: ‘It is our lot to be intellectual hermits and occasionally to have a conversation with someone like-minded.’ At thirty, he composed a hymn to loneliness, ‘Hymnus auf die Einsamkeit’, which he did not have the heart to finish.

The search for a wife was no less sorrowful, the problem partly caused by Nietzsche’s appearance – his extraordinarily large walrus moustache – and his shyness, which bred the gauche stiff manner of a retired colonel. In the spring of 1876, on a trip to Geneva, Nietzsche fell in love with a twenty-three-year-old, green-eyed blonde, Mathilde Trampedach. During a conversation on the poetry of Henry Longfellow, Nietzsche mentioned that he had never come across a German version of Longfellow’s ‘Excelsior’. Mathilde said she had one at home and offered to copy it out for him. Encouraged, Nietzsche invited her out for a walk. She brought her landlady as a chaperone. A few days later, he offered to play the piano for her, and the next she heard from the thirty-one-year-old Professor of Classical Philology at Basle University was a request for marriage. ‘Do you not think that together each of us will be better and more free than either of us could be alone – and so excelsior?’ asked the playful colonel. ‘Will you dare to come with me … on all the paths of living and thinking?’ Mathilde didn’t dare.

A succession of similar rejections took their toll. In the light of his depression and ill health, Richard Wagner decided that there were two possible remedies: ‘He must either marry or write an opera.’ But Nietzsche couldn’t write an opera, and apparently lacked the talent to produce even a decent tune. (In July 1872, he sent the conductor Hans von Bülow a piano duet he had written, asking for an honest appraisal. It was, replied von Bülow, ‘the most extreme fantastical extravagance, the most irritating and anti-musical set of notes on manuscript paper I have seen for a long time’, and he wondered whether Nietzsche might have been pulling his leg. ‘You designated your music as “frightful” – it truly is.’)

Wagner grew more insistent. ‘For Heaven’s sake, marry a rich woman!’ he intoned, and entered into communication with Nietzsche’s doctor, Otto Eiser, with whom he speculated that the philosopher’s ill health was caused by excessive masturbation. It was an irony lost on Wagner that the one rich woman with whom Nietzsche was truly in love was Wagner’s own wife, Cosima. For years, he carefully disguised his feelings for her under the cloak of friendly solicitude. It was only once he had lost his reason that the reality emerged. ‘Ariadne, I love you,’ wrote Nietzsche, or, as he signed himself, Dionysus, in a postcard sent to Cosima from Turin at the beginning of January 1889.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche intermittently agreed with the Wagnerian thesis on the importance of marriage. In a letter to his married friend Franz Overbeck, he complained, ‘Thanks to your wife, things are a hundred times better for you than for me. You have a nest together. I have, at best, a cave … Occasional contact with people is like a holiday, a redemption from “me”.’

In 1882, he hoped once more that he had found a suitable wife, Lou Andreas-Salomé, his greatest, most painful love. She was twenty-one, beautiful, clever, flirtatious and fascinated by his philosophy. Nietzsche was defenceless. ‘I want to be lonely no longer, but to learn again to be a human being. Ah, here I have practically everything to learn!’ he told her. They spent two weeks together in the Tautenburg forest and in Lucerne posed with their mutual friend Paul Rée for an unusual photograph.

(Ill. 22.27)

But Lou was more interested in Nietzsche as a philosopher than as a husband. The rejection threw him into renewed prolonged, violent depression. ‘My lack of confidence is now immense,’ he told Overbeck, ‘everything I hear makes me think that people despise me.’ He felt particular bitterness towards his mother and sister, who had meddled in the relationship with Lou, and now broke off contact with them, deepening his isolation. (‘I do not like my mother, and it is painful for me to hear my sister’s voice. I always became ill when I was with them.’)

There were professional difficulties, too. None of his books sold more than 2,000 copies in his sane life-time; most sold a few hundred. With only a modest pension and some shares inherited from an aunt on which to survive, the author could rarely pay for new clothes, and ended up looking, in his words, ‘scraped like a mountain sheep’. In hotels, he stayed in the cheapest rooms, often fell into arrears with the rent and could afford neither heating nor the hams and sausages he loved.

His health was as problematic. From his schooldays, he had suffered from a range of ailments: headaches, indigestion, vomiting, dizziness, near blindness and insomnia, many of these the symptoms of the syphilis he had almost certainly contracted in a Cologne brothel in February 1865 (though Nietzsche claimed he had come away without touching anything except a piano). In a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug written three years after his trip to Sorrento, he explained, ‘As regards torment and self-denial, my life during these past years can match that of any ascetic of any time …’ And to his doctor he reported, ‘Constant pain, a feeling of being half-paralysed, a condition closely related to seasickness, during which I find it difficult to speak – this feeling lasts several hours a day. For my diversion I have raging seizures (the most recent one forced me to vomit for three days and three nights; I thirsted after death). Can’t read! Only seldom can I write! Can’t deal with my fellows! Can’t listen to music!’

Finally, at the beginning of January 1889, Nietzsche broke down in Turin’s Piazza Carlo Alberto and embraced a horse, was carried back to his boarding-house, where he thought of shooting the Kaiser, planned a war against anti-Semites, and grew certain that he was – depending on the hour – Dionysus, Jesus, God, Napoleon, the King of Italy, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Voltaire, Alexander Herzen and Richard Wagner; before he was bundled into a train and taken to an asylum in Germany to be looked after by his elderly mother and sister until his death eleven years later at the age of fifty-five.

22

And yet through appalling loneliness, obscurity, poverty and ill health, Nietzsche did not manifest the behaviour of which he had accused Christians; he did not take against friendship, he did not attack eminence, wealth, or well-being. The Abbé Galiani and Goethe remained heroes. Though Mathilde had wished for no more than a conversation about poetry, he continued to believe that ‘for the male sickness of self-contempt the surest cure is to be loved by a clever woman.’ Though sickly and lacking Montaigne or Stendhal’s dexterity on a horse, he remained attached to the idea of an active life: ‘Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book – I call that vicious!’

He fought hard to be happy, but where he did not succeed he did not turn against what he had once aspired to. He remained committed to what was in his eyes the most important characteristic of a noble human being: to be someone who ‘no longer denies’.

23

After seven hours of walking, much of it in the rain, it was in a state of extreme exhaustion that I reached the summit of Piz Corvatsch, high above the clouds that decked the Engadine valleys below. In my rucksack I carried a water-bottle, an Emmental sandwich and an envelope from the Hotel Edelweiss in Sils-Maria on which I had that morning written a quote from the mountain philosopher, with the intention of facing Italy and reading it to the wind and the rocks at 3,400 metres.

Like his pastor father, Nietzsche had been committed to the task of consolation. Like his father, he had wished to offer us paths to fulfilment. But unlike pastors, and dentists who pull out throbbing teeth and gardeners who destroy plants with ill-favoured roots, he had judged difficulties to be a critical prerequisite of fulfilment, and hence knew saccharine consolations to be ultimately more cruel than helpful:

The worst sickness of men has originated in the way they have combated their sicknesses. What seemed a cure has in the long run produced something worse than what it was supposed to overcome. The means which worked immediately, anaesthetizing and intoxicating,

the so-called consolations

, were ignorantly supposed to be actual cures. The fact was not noticed … that these instantaneous alleviations often had to be paid for with a general and profound worsening of the complaint.

Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad.

To regard states of distress in general as an objection, as something that must be abolished, is the [supreme idiocy], in a general sense a real disaster in its consequences … almost as stupid as the will to abolish bad weather. (Ill. 22.28)

Notes

Acknowledgements

Copyright Acknowledgements

Picture Acknowledgements

Notes

Consolation for Unpopularity

Aside from a mention of Aristophanes and quotations from Plato’s Phaedo, the portrait of Socrates is drawn from Plato’s early and middle dialogues (the so-called Socratic dialogues): Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus, Meno, Protagoras and Republic, book I

Quotations taken from:

The Last Days of Socrates

, Plato, translated by Hugh Tredennick, Penguin, 1987

Early Socratic Dialogues

, Plato, translated by Iain Lane, Penguin, 1987

Protagoras and Meno

, Plato, translated by W. K. C. Guthrie, Penguin, 1987

Gorgias

, Plato, translated by Robin Waterfield, OUP, 1994.

1 So … deaths: Apology, 29d

2 Whenever … angle: Laches, 188a

3 Let’s … courageous: Laches, 190e–191a

4 At … battle: Laches, 191c

5 By … inescapable: Meno, 78c–79a

6 I … cities: Apology, 36b

7 I … well-being: Apology, 36d

8 I … fellow-citizen: Apology, 29d

9 I … narrow: Apology, 36a

10 If … choose: Gorgias, 472a-b

11 The … him: Gorgias, 471e–472a

12 When … public: Crito, 47b

13 Don’t … say: Crito, 47a–48a

14 I … time: Apology, 37a–b

15 If … sleeping: Apology, 30d–31a

16 In … off: Phaedo, 116c–d

17 When … himself: Phaedo, 117a-d

18 What … friends!: Phaedo, 117d

19 And … man: Phaedo, 118a

Consolation for Not Having Enough Money

Quotations taken from:

The Essential Epicurus

, Epicurus, translated by Eugene O’Connor, Prometheus Books, 1993

The Epicurean Inscription

, Diogenes of Oinoanda, translated by Martin Ferguson Smith, Bibliopolis, 1993

On the Nature of the Universe

, Lucretius, translated by R. E. Latham, revised by John Godwin, Penguin, 1994

1 If … forms: Fragments, VI.10

2 Pleasure … life: Letter to Menoeceus, 128

3 The … this: Fragments, 59

4 The … happiness: Letter to Menoeceus, 122

5 A … malady: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III.1070

6 Just … mind: Fragments, 54

7 Send … like: Fragments, 39

8 Of … friendship: Principal Doctrines, 27

9 Before … wolf: quoted in Seneca, Epistle, XIX.10

10 We … politics: Vatican Sayings, 58

11 The … pleasant: Letter to Menoeceus, 126

12 What … anticipation: Letter to Menoeceus, 124–5

13 There … living: Letter to Menoeceus, 125

14 Of … necessary: Principal Doctrines, 29

15 Plain … away: Letter to Menoeceus, 130

16 As … without: Porphyry reporting Epicurus’s view in On Abstinence, 1.51.6–52.1

17 Nothing … little: Fragments, 69

18 The … accomplished?: Vatican Sayings, 71

19 The … joy: Vatican Sayings, 81

20 idle opinions: Principal Doctrines, 29

21 Luxurious … flesh: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 109

22 One … overflowing: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 108

23 Real … science: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 2

24 Having … salvation: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 3 (adapted)

25 chosen … senses: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, V.1133–4

26 send … like: Fragments, 39

27 ergo … herbas: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, II.20–33

28 When … poverty: Vatican Sayings, 25

29 Mankind … seas: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, V.1430–5

30 It … good: Letter to Menoeceus, 129

Consolation for Frustration

Quotations taken from:

The Annals of Imperial Rome

, Tacitus, translated by Michael Grant, Penguin, 1996

The Twelve Caesars

, Suetonius, translated by Robert Graves, Penguin, 1991

Dialogues and Letters

, Seneca, translated by C. D. N. Costa, Penguin, 1997

Letters from a Stoic

, Seneca, translated by Robin Campbell, Penguin, 1969

Moral Essays

, volume 1, Seneca, translated by John W. Basore, Loeb-Harvard, 1994

Moral Essays

, volume 11, Seneca, translated by John W. Basore, Loeb-Harvard, 1996

Moral and Political Essays

, Seneca, translated by John M. Cooper and J. F. Procopé, CUP, 1995

Naturales Quaestiones

1 & 11, Seneca, translated by T. H. Corcoran, Loeb-Harvard, 1972

1 Where … tutor: Tacitus, XV.62

2 I … end: Tacitus, XV.63

3 He … undisturbed: Epistulae Morales, CIV.28–9

4 the Monster: Suetonius, Caligula, IV.22

5 on … neck!: Suetonius, Caligula, IV.30

6 I … it: Epistulae Morales, LXXVIII.3

7 There … vices: De Ira, II.36.5–6

8 Prosperity … tempers: De Ira, II.21.7

9 What … columns?: De Ira, I.19.4

10 Why … servant?: De Ira, II.25.3

11 Why … talking?: De Ira, III.35.2

12 Is … misbehave?: De Ira, II.31.4

13 There … dare: Epistulae Morales, XCI.15

14 Nothing … happen: Epistulae Morales, XCI.4

15 What … Fortune: De Consolatione ad Marciam, XI.3

16 You … happened …?: De Consolatione ad Marciam, IX.5

17 Who … immobile: Naturales Quaestiones, I.VI.11–12

18 the … never-ending: De Consolatione ad Marciam, IV.1

19 We … property: De Consolatione ad Marciam, IX.1–2

20 No … hour: De Consolatione ad Marciam, X.4

21 [The wise] … thought …: De Ira, II.10.7

22 Fortune … own: Epistulae Morales, LXXII.7

23 Nothing … whirl: Epistulae Morales, XCI.7

24 Whatever … empires: Epistulae Morales, XCLI.6

25 How … ruins?: Epistulae Morales, XCI.9

26 We … die: Epistulae Morales, XCI.12

27 Mortal … birth: De Consolatione ad Marciam, XI.1

28 Reckon … everything: De Ira, II.31.4

29 Quotiens … petisti: De Consolatione ad Marciam, IX.3

30 I … myself: Epistulae Morales, XIV.16

31 You … hope: Epistulae Morales, XXIV.1

32 I … happen: Epistulae Morales, XXIV.1–2

33 If … prison?: Epistulae Morales, XXIV.3

34 ‘I … now?’: Epistulae Morales, XXIV.17

35 The … good: Epistulae Morales, XVIII.9

36 Is … Fortune: Epistulae Morales, XVIII.5–9

37 Stop … poverty: Vita Beata, XXIII.1

38 I … half: Vita Beata, XXV.5

39 The … himself: De Constantia, V.4

40 The … left: Epistulae Morales, IX.4

41 The … tall: Vita Beata, XXII.2

42 The … them: Epistulae Morales, IX.5

43 Never … me: Consolation to Helvia, V.4

44 a … spirit: De Constantia, X.3

45 ‘So … table’: De Constantia, X.2

46 [The … everything: Epistulae Morales, LXXXI.25

47 I … mankind: Epistulae Morales, VI.7

48 Imagine … shops: Epistulae Morales, LVI.1–2

49 All … within: Epistulae Morales, LVI.5

50 When … destined: Bishop Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, 1.21 (quoted in A. A. Long & D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, CUP, 1987, volume 1, p. 386)

51 An … necessity: De Ira, III.16.1

52 When … philosopher: De Tranquillitate Animi, XIV.3

53 A … does: Naturales Quaestiones, II.16

54 Among … air: Naturales Quaestiones, VI.31.1–2

55 Winter … endure: Epistulae Morales, CVII.7–9

56 Quid … est: De Consolatione ad Marciam, xi.1

Consolation for Inadequacy

Quotations taken from:

The Complete Essays

, Michel de Montaigne, translated by M. A. Screech, Penguin, 1991. The notes refer firstly to the book number, then the essay number and lastly the page number.

1 I … lettuces: II.17.741

2 I … day: III.3.933

3 splendid … views: III.3.933

4 the … was: II.12.558

5 strikingly … humour: II.10.463

6 It … books: III.3.932

7 There … vexation: II.12.544

8 Man … [Cicero]: II.12.544

9 the … shit: II.37.870

10 Wherever … equinox: II.12.534

11 If … length: II.534

12 here … Trebizond?: II.12.517

13 Dare … pig?: I.14.57

14 We … excessive: II.12.541

15 To … blockheads: III.13.219

16 Our … behind: III.5.1005

17 When … unapproachable: II.12.637

18 then … soul: II.37.865

19 That … them: I.21.115

20 most … disorderly: I.21.116

21 so … death: I.21.116

22 [This] … it: III.5.994

23 He … blindfolded: I.3.15

24 The … being: III.13.1261

25 Except … once: I.21.112

26 admit … him: I.21.112

27 [The … it: I.21.115

28 to … offence: II.29.801

29 If … all: I.21.115

30 every … condition: III.2.908

31 Au … cul: III.13.1269

32 Les … aussi: III.13.1231

33 The … teeth: III.5.956

34 She … ditch: III.5.967

35 old crone: III.5.967

36 Had … naked: introductory note

37 Every … complete: III.5.1004

38 Everywhere … it!: III.5.992

39 Of … disrupted: III.13.1232

40 My … bed: III.13.1232

41 When … wise: III.5.992

42 What … power?: III.9.1119

43 It … being: III.9.1121

44 May … apart?: III.5.1010

45 Once … clime: III.9.1114

46 It … ours: III.13.1226

47 Each … wonder: III.13.1226

48 When … world’: I.26.176

49 They … sauces: I.23.123

50 scrupulously … cords: II.12.647

51 gathered … cloth: I.23.125

52 In … shoulders: II.12.538

53 Their … wives: I.31.234

54 One … valour: I.31.239

55 We … bows: II.12.521

56 Ah!… breeches …: I.31.241

57 Every … anything!: I.31.231

58 Defending … country: I.23.126

59 The … nothing: II.12.558

60 the … perspicuity: II.12.606

61 that … itself: III.13.1220

62 Anyone … heights: II.12.613

63 In … fire: III.9.1110

64 We … other: I.28.212

65 What … found: I.28.211

66 Luy … image: III.9.1112 (footnote)

67 In … on: I.28.217

68 painful … harm: p. 125, Montaigne’s Travel Journal, translated by Donald M. Frame, North Point Press, 1983

69 Many … stall: III.9.1109

70 If … life: II.12.543

71 What … gout …?: II.12.542

72 I … etymology: II.17.749

73 We … empty: I.25.153–4

74 At … all: II.17.730

75 If … tennis: I.25.156

76 I … feet: II.12.604

77 Storming … lives: III.2.912

78 About … face: II.29.800

79 I … gardening: I.20.99

80 I … lettuces: III.17.741

81 It … capacities: III.5.971

82 I … her: I.21.117

83 If … shit!’: I.38.264

84 The … being: III.13.1261

85 I … rectors: II.12.542

86 I … [them]: II.17.740

87 I … interest: I.39.276

88 I … another: II.10.459

89 Difficulty … payment: II.12.566

90 Just … Paris: I.26.194

91 The … paraded: III.12.1173

92 The … yourself: II.17.746

93 … French: III.5.989

94 … them: III.5.989

95 Whenever … arse: I.25.155

96 In … everything: I.26.170

97 I … reputations: II.10.458 (my italics)

98 No … born: Seneca, Consolation to Helvia, XV.4

99 If … may: III.12.1196

100 In … spread: III.2.912

101 A … families: III.2.912

102 We … do: I.25.154

103 Invention … quotation: III.12. 1197

104 Will … say?: II.10.465

105 His … wind: II.10.464

106 There … dearth: III.13.1212

107 Were … man: III.13.1218

108 We … us: III.12.1175

109 You … stuff: III.2.908

110 I … melons: III.13.1251

111 I … again: III.13.1252

112 My … meals: III.13.1250

113 In … fingers: III.13.1255

114 I … course: III.13.1230

Consolation for a Broken Heart

Quotations taken from:

Parerga and Paralipomena

, volumes

I

and

II

, Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by E. F. Payne, OUP, 1972 (abbreviated as P1 and P2)

The World as Will and Representation

, volumes

I

and

II

, Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by E. F. J. Payne, Dover Publications, 1966 (abbreviated as W1 and W2, followed by page number)

Manuscript Remains

(4 volumes), Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by A. Hübscher, Berg, 1988 (abbreviated as MR)

Gesammelte Briefe

, Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by A. Hübscher, Bonn, 1978 (abbreviated as GB)

Gespräche

, Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by A. Hübscher, Stuttgart, 1971 (abbreviated as G)

Schopenhauer und die wilden Jahre der Philosophie

, Rüdiger Safranski, Rowohlt, 1990

1 We … nothingness: P2.XII.156

2 Human … error: P2.XI.287

3 It … happens: P2.XII.155

4 Even … despair: MR4.2.121

5 In … hand: MR4.2.36

6 I … nation: Safranski, p. 74

7 These … humans: Safranski, p. 78

8 pondering … misery: Safranski, p. 48

9 life … effort: G.15

10 serene … ever!: Safranski, p. 267

11 Young … man: GB.267

12 Sometimes … self-deception: MR1.597

13 A … monologues?: MR3.1.50

14 We … weather: MR1.628

15 I … me: G.239

16 Only … sex: P2.XXVII.369

17 Every … suffering: MR3.1.76

18 If … me: MR3.1.26

19 [I]ts … bedlamite: P1.3.144

20 That … Pope: MR3.3.12

21 To … other: MR4.7.50

22 Of … one!: MR4.4.131

23 any … like: GB.83

24 a … society: GB.106

25 If … heart: MR3.1.139

26 How … hare-hunt: MR3.4.26

27 After … misanthropy: P1.VI.482

28 I … me: G.58

29 Life … illusion: P2.XI.146

30 a … approach: Safranski, p. 419

31 The … heart: M14.7.25

32 The … dogs: P2.XII.153

33 comically … gruff: G.88

34 common biped: Safranski, p. 422

35 I … on: W2.30

36 the … people: W1.356

37 Two … manner: Safranski, p. 427

38 If … again: MR3.2.90

39 Human … deal: W2.243

40 Not … form: W, preface, 1844

41 Our … how: P1.298

42 the … fame: Safranski, p. 18

43 Would … minds?: MR3.II.5

44 suited … long: P2.614–26

45 She … married: G.225

46 I … shudder: MR4.7.102

47 human … error: P2.XI.287

48 We … material: W2.532

49 Love … happiness: W2.533

50 Why … it: W2.534

51 What … come: W2.534

52 [The … everything: W2.210

53 [It] … will: W2.209

54 The … individual: W2.536

55 There … two: W2.549

56 Everyone … produced: W2.546

57 The … other: W2.546

58 That … fortune: W2.558

59 Love … interest: W2.555

60 Has … heard: P2.XIV.166

61 It … badly: W2.558

62 The … present: W2.557

63 What … children: W2.545

64 between … itself: W2.536

65 To … it: W2.354

66 Contemplate … exertions: W2.353

67 There … disappointment: W2.634

68 What … them: P1.VI.480

69 The … life: W2.427

70 ‘Lotte … you!’: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe, translated by Michael Hulse, Penguin, 1989, p. 115

71 The … thousands: P2.XIX.208

72 In … sufferer: W1.206

Consolation for Difficulties

Quotations taken from:

Daybreak

, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, CUP, 1997 (abbreviated as D)

Ecce Homo

, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1979 (abbreviated as EH)

Beyond Good and Evil

, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1973 (abbreviated as BGE)

Human, All Too Human

, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, CUP, 1996 (abbreviated as HAH)

Wanderer and His Shadow

, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale and collected in HAH (Ibid.), CUP, 1996 (abbreviated as WS)

Untimely Meditations

, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, CUP, 1997 (abbreviated as UM)

The Anti-Christ

, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale and collected in

Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ

, Penguin, 1990 (abbreviated as AC)

The Will to Power

, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage, 1968 (abbreviated as WP)

The Gay Science

, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, 1974 (abbreviated as GS)

Twilight of the Idols

, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Duncan Large, OUP, 1998 (abbreviated as TI)

On the Genealogy of Morality

, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Carol Diethe, CUP, 1996 (abbreviated as GM)

Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe

, Friedrich Nietzsche, 8 volumes, DTV and de Gruyter, 1975–84 (abbreviated as Letter to/from followed by day/month/year)

1 cabbage-heads: EH. 3.5

2 It … being: EH. 14.1

3 I … holy: EH. 14.1

4 Let … 2000: Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, 24/9/86

5 It … boots: EH. 3.1

6 You … been!: BGE. 225

7 To … vanquished: WP. 910

8 the … given: EH. Foreword, 4

9 In … treated: D. 381

10 I … resignation: from Rückblick auf meine zwei Leipziger Jahre, III.133, Werke, Karl Schlechta Edition

11 The … pleasure: Schopenhauer, W2.150

12 [We … mental: Schopenhauer, P1.V.a.1

13 we … abstinence: Letter to his mother and sister, 5/11/65

14 I … joy: Letter from Malwida von Meysenbug, 28/10/76

15 The … boring: TI. X.2

16 These … hitherto: EH. 2.10

17 Would … side: Letter to Cosima Wagner, 19/12/76

18 in … room: Schopenhauer, P1.V.a.1

19 hidden … deer: GS. 283

20 that … goose: Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, early May 1884

21 Really … Montaigne: Letter to his mother, 3/21/85

22 gentle … eggs: D. 553

23 magnificent: TI.IX.49

24 the … reverence: TI. IX.51

25 He … will: TI. IX.49

26 The … profound: Stendhal, Voyages en France, Pleiade, p. 365

27 The … copulation: Montaigne, Essays, III.5.968

28 the … frightened: Stendhal, Oeuvres Intimes, Volume I, Pleiade, p. 483

29 Art … life: TI. IX.24

30 What … joy: GS. 12

31 Examine … possible: GS. 19

32 The … world: HAH. I.163 (my italics)

33 He … mountains: EH. Foreword, 3

34 We … sense: GM. II.24

35 In … tomorrow: HAH. II.358

36 To … comprehensible!: UM. III.5

37 I … Swiss!: Letter to his mother, 19/7/70

38 I … own: Letter to Paul Rée, end of July 1879

39 This … myself: Letter to Peter Gast, 14/8/81

40 I … ground: Letter to Carl von Gersdorff, 28/6/83

41 How … books?: WS. 324

42 Only … value: TI. I.34

43 When … humanity: HAH. I.246

44 We … life: Montaigne, Essays, III.13.1237

45 If … manure: HAH. II.332

46 Don’t … whole: HAH. I.163

47 You … strain: Letter to his mother, 21/7/79

48 One … trellis: D. 560

49 the … sui: TI. III.4

50 good … things: BGE. 2

51 Love … together: WP. 351

52 The … life: BGE. 23

53 The … culture: WP. 1025

54 Nothing … annihilation: HAH. II.220

55 All … hurting: TI. v.1

56 Dear … afternoon: Letter to his mother, 16/4/63

57 I … materialism: Letter to Carl von Gersdorff, 25/4/65

58 Alcoholic … live: EH. 2.1

59 How … intelligence!: TI. VIII.2

60 Perhaps … Europe: GS. III.134

61 I … suffices: EH. 2.1

62 If … together: GS. 338

63 [A]ctions … pleasure: Utilitarianism, J. S. Mill, Chapter 2, paragraph 2, Penguin, 1994

64 European … England: BGE. 253

65 Man … that: TI. I.9

66 All … derision: BGE. 225

67 The … Vesuvius!: GS. 283

68 To … absurdity: EH. 2.1

69 He … pastor … guide: III.93. Werke, Karl Schlechta Edition

70 I … depravity: AC. 62

71 One … governor: AC. 46

72 It … today: AC. 38

73 The … Christianity: TI. VIII.2

74 not- … -revenge: GM. I.14

75 a … accomplishment: GM. I.13

76 the … comfortableness: GS. 338

77 the … antiquity: WS. 7

78 one … philosophizing: WS. 295

79 It … like-minded: Letter to Paul Deussen, ?/2/70

80 Do … thinking?: Letter to Mathilde Trempedach, 11/4/76

81 He … opera: Diary, Cosima Wagner, 4/4/74

82 The … time: Letter from Hans von Bülow, 24/7/72

83 You … is: Letter from Hans von Bülow, 24/7/72

84 For … woman!: Letter from Richard Wagner, 26/12/74

85 Ariadne … you: Postcard to Cosima Wagner, ?/1/89

86 Thanks … ‘me’: Letter to Franz Overbeck, late March or early April 1886

87 I … learn!: Letter to Lou Salomé, 2/7/82

88 My … me: Letter to Franz Overbeck, 25/12/82

89 I … them: Letter to Franz Overbeck, ?/3/83

90 scraped … sheep: Letter to his mother, 4/10/84

91 As … time: Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, 14/1/80

92 Constant … music!: Letter to Doctor Otto Eiser, ?/1/80

93 for … woman: HAH. I.384

94 Early … vicious!: EH. 2.8

95 no … denies: TI. IX.49

96 The … complaint: D. 52 (my italics)

97 To … weather: EH. 14.4

Acknowledgments

I am much indebted to the following authorities for their comments on chapters of this book: Dr Robin Waterfield (for Socrates), Professor David Sedley (for Epicurus), Professor Martin Ferguson Smith (for Epicurus), Professor C. D. N. Costa (for Seneca), the Reverend Professor Michael Screech (for Montaigne), Reg Hollingdale (for Schopenhauer) and Dr Duncan Large (for Nietzsche). I am also greatly indebted to the following for their comments: John Armstrong, Harriet Braun, Michele Hutchison, Noga Arikha and Miriam Gross. I would like to thank: Simon Prosser, Lesley Shaw, Helen Fraser, Michael Lynton, Juliet Annan, Gráinne Kelly, Anna Kobryn, Caroline Dawnay, Annabel Hardman, Miriam Berkeley, Chloe Chancellor, Lisabel McDonald, Kim Witherspoon and Dan Frank.

Copyright Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permission to reproduce extracts from previously published material:

Cambridge University Press: Human All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1996; and On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Carol Diethe, 1996; Dover Publications: World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Duncan Large, 1988; Oxford University Press: extracts reprinted from Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), by permission of Oxford University Press; extracts reprinted from Parerga and Paralipomena, Arthur Schopenhauer, (volumes I and II, trans. E. F. Payne, 1974) by permission of Oxford University Press; Penguin Books: Early Socratic Dialogues, Plato, trans. Iain Lane, 1987; The Last Days of Socrates, Plato, trans. Hugh Tredennick, 1987; Protagoras and Meno, Plato, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, 1987; Dialogues and Letters, Seneca, trans. C. D. N. Costa, 1997; Letters from a Stoic, Seneca, trans. Robin Campbell, 1969; The Complete Essays, Michel de Montaigne, trans. M. A. Screech, 1991; Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1996; and Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1979; Random House, Inc.: extracts from The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Copyright © 1967 by Walter Kaufmann. Extracts from The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Copyright © 1974 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

Picture Acknowledgments

The photographs in the book are used by permission and courtesy of the following:

Aarhus Kunstmuseum: 20.2; The Advertising Archives: 10.2 (DC Comics): 22.4; AKG London: (Musée du Louvre, Paris/Erich Lessing) 12.4, 19.4 (National Research and Memorial Centre for Classical German Literature, Weimar) 22.1, 22.2 (Neue Pinakothek, Munich) 22.5, 22.7 (University Library, Jena) 22.8; Albertina, Vienna: 22.17; Archivi Alinari, Florence: 22.24; American School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations: 4.4; The Ancient Art & Architecture Collection/© Ronald Sheridan: 13.10; The Art Archive: 12.1 (detail) 14.3, 16.1, 17.9; Associated Press: 13.7; G. Bell and Sons Ltd, from A History of French Architecture by Sir Reginald Blomfield (from the French Cours d’Architecture, 1921, J. F. Blondel & Daviler): 17.2, 17.10; Berkley, Miriam: 1.2; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: 1.6; Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Berlin: (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preussicher Kulturbesitz. Kupferstichkabinet): 1.4 (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preussicher Kulturbesitz. Antikensammlung): 12.5, 19.1, 22.3; The Anthony Blake Photo Library (Charlie Stebbings): 9.1 (© PFT Associates): 9.2; Bridgeman Art Library: (detail, INDEX, Spain): 6.3 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence): 13.1 (British Library): 13.4 (Musée Condé, Chantilly): 16.3 (Louvre, Paris/Peter Willi): 17.6 (Gavin Graham Gallery, London): 17.7, 18.2 (Corpus Christi College, Oxford): 17.8 (private collection): 13.6; British Architectural Library, RIBA, London: 6.5; By permission of the British Library: 17.3 (detail) 157, 18.4; © The British Museum: 3.1, 3.6, 13.8, 22.15; Chloë Chancellor: 4.1; Jean-Loup Charmet, Paris: 12.2; From Cheminées à la moderne, Paris, 1661: 17.11; CORBIS: 12.3, 14.1, 16.2, 18.3; Dassault Falcon Jet Corp, NJ, USA: 6.2; de Botton, Alain: 4.2 (Epicurean Life): 7.2, 10.4, 11.3, 13.2, 13.12, 13.13, 13.14, 14.2, 15.4, 15.5, 15.7, 20.1, 20.3, 20.7, 20.8, 22.10, 22.11–22.12, 22.13, 22.14, 22.23, 22.25, 22.28; From Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire, raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot & Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 1751: 8.1; Mary Evans Picture Library: 3.2, 3.8, 20.12, 22.6; Flammarion, Paris, from Les Arts Décoratifs – Les Meubles II du style Régence an style Louis XVI by Guillaume Janneau, 1929: 6.8; Werner Forman, Archive: 3.4; The Fotomas Index, 18.1, 22.19; The Garden Picture Library: 11.2; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, 17.1; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California: 7.1; Giraudon, Paris: 5B, 22.16; The Ronald Grant Archive: 5.2; G-SHOCK: 20.5; Robert Harding Picture Library: 13.11; © Michael Holford: 2.6; The Image Bank/David W. Hamilton: 2.3; Images Colour Library: 11.1; From The Insect World; from the French of Louis Figuier’s Les Insectes, 1868: 20.9; Ian Bavington Jones (photography): 45; Collection Kharbine-Tapabor, Paris: 20.11; Kingfisher. Illustrations from See Inside an Ancient Greek Town, published by Kingfisher. Reproduced with permission. Copyright © Grisewood & Dempsey Ltd, 1979, 1986. All rights reserved: 2.4, II, 4.3, 8.2; From Brevissima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias, Bartolomeo Las Casas, 1552: 17.4, 17.5; Lucca State Archives: 6.4; McDonald, Lisabel: 11.4, 17.12, 20.4, 20.10; Patrick McDonald/Epicurean Restaurant/Epicurean Life: 7.3; Metropolitan Museum of Art (Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund 1931): 1.1 (detail) 5.1 (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund 1930): 6.6; Montabella Verlag, St Moritz: 22.27; From Montaigne: A Biography by Donald M. Frame, published by Hamish Hamilton, 1965: 15.6; © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection: 22.18; © The Trustees of the National Museum of Scotland 2000: 2.5; PhotoDisc Europe Ltd/Steve Mason: 9.4; From Pompeiana: The Topography, Edifices and Ornaments of Pompeii by Sir William Gell, 1835: 13.3, 13.5; Quadrant Picture Library: 9.3, 13.9; Roger-Viollet, Paris: 3.3; Scala, Florence: 1.3, 6.7, 6.9, 8.3, 20.6, 21.1; Schopenhauer Archiv: 19.2, 19.3, 19.5, 19.6–19.7; Société Internationale des Amis de Montaigne, Paris: 22.9; Status, Athens/CORBIS: 3.5; Stiftung Weimarer Klassik/Goethe-Schiller Archiv, Weimar: 22.21, 22.26; Swissair Photo Library, Zurich: 86l; The Telegraph Colour Library: 2.1, 2.2; Topham Picturepoint: 22.22; University of Southampton, Brian Sparkes and Linda Hall: 3.7, 5.3; Vin Mag Archiv Ltd: 10.3; Agency-WCRS, Photographer – Glen Garner. Courtesy of Land Rover UK: 10.1; Wellcome Trust Medical Photographic Library: 22.20