I’d like to read some Montaigne — partly because it’s like 18th-century self-help, and partly in spite of it.
I have a love-hate relationship with the idea of self-help. On the one hand, it’s a genre full of charlatans, fly-by-night money-back guarantees, misguided seekers, and people looking for ways to get rich quick. On the other hand, what higher goal could there be than becoming a better person (whatever that might mean)? What higher philosophy is there than the question of humanity’s purpose? The real allure of self-help is, or ought to be, not finding out how to be “successful,” but to discover humanity’s greatest potential, and find out how one can fulfill it.
When I read an actual piece of self-help writing, I sometimes find myself torn back and forth between the love and the hate. For example, a few years ago I found out about polyphasic sleep, a way of using a rigid nap schedule to sleep just two hours per day. I was repelled by the idea of “hacking” my body’s natural rhythms, as if it were a machine that could be hotwired or supercharged. Nevertheless I tried it — not because I was trying to become more successful or productive (though that certainly was a nice side effect during the 18-month trial), but I because I was after deeper answers: what is sleep really for? And how would it feel to live one’s life in such a fundamentally different way? How much of our sense of ‘being human’ is wrapped up in the daily cycle of sleep and waking? I got some interesting results (which I won’t go into here) and eventually stopped because it was too hard to keep to the rigid nap schedule.
But it’s because of this love-hate relationship that I’m interested in learning more about Montaigne. A while back it was rather fashionable for self-help bloggers to read and discuss him (probably at least in part because of a timely book by Sarah Bakewell that they could link to and get affiliate money from Amazon). Unfortunately, most of the self-help bloggers dismissed the long philosophical tradition he drew from and focused on his cheekiness, his self-experimentation, and his productivity. But I would rather know what he thought of cannibalism, the custom of wearing clothes, warhorses, solitude, sleep (of course), and the complex notion of self (for he famously said “I turn my gaze inward… I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself”). And I would rather know his place in the long philosophical tradition of the west, that strange mix of earnest seeking and personality cult.
Cutting to the chase: I’d like to read some good self-help that I don’t have to feel two ways about.
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Ocean, a poem
Mary Oliver
I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is
always grief more than enough,
a heart load for each of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.
On the edge of the Sea, Alison and I are getting married today. May our souls be wound round each other in joy. May Earth, Sea and Sky bless us, and may our love be as great as they, and as free, as wild, as young, and as eternal.
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On Wednesday we visited the Angel Oak near Charleston, South Carolina. It is a vast thing, probably over a thousand years old, twisted and hoary and huge, like a cross between a live oak and an elephant. From a short distance away, it looks like a whole grove of trees; under its boughs, it is a cathedral of gnarled, bearded wood, floored with waxen golden leaves.
Some random thoughts I had while sitting, meditating, and walking around and under the Oak:
Most trees are a tall trunk, from which spread the branches in a halo. The human body is much the same. Most animals follow a slightly different scheme: a horizontal trunk, supported by multiple limbs. Human architecture tends to follow the animal scheme, a horizontal roof supported by multiple pillars. But there are exceptions, such as the yurt, which is supported by a central pillar, and is extremely sturdy.
The Angel Oak has multiple support points, like an animal; but the overwhelming impression is more like an atom or an amoeba: its trunk is less like a central pillar, and more like a nucleus. Its branches and roots go up, down, sideways, in all directions.
This tree is a god. Literally. Touching its bark, you have same sense of something ancient, nigh-eternal, and very present, aware of you. Tolkien had it right when he described Treebeard’s eyes.
One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know but it felt as if something that grew in the ground – asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years. — Tolkien, The Two Towers
Time. The tree is old, old, but time is measured in changes. For something that changes little… time moves more slowly. The Oak moves slowly compared to humans, so a thousand human years is not a thousand oak years. Still, it loses and regains its leaves each year (in the spring); it is not changeless.
It is a living sculpture carved by gravity, light, air, time, and the forest around it. The branches curve and twist in unexpected ways, echoes of obstacles the tree once faced, now long-gone. For some reason, it hasn’t grown to the east. Maybe there was a building there, or another large tree, now vanished?
The tree has grown to become an axis mundi. An axis mundi, a world tree or central mountain, sits in a central location, and exerts its influence over the whole world; and the whole world is reflected within it. Just so: the Angel Oak influences the land all round it, physically and spiritually, so that the land echoes the oak; and the oak reflects the land all round it, too. Of course, this is true of all things; it is only our human manners of seeing and thinking that make some axes mundi clearer than others.
The Angel Oak and its surrounding forest are threatened by development. Get more information here.
Oddments
- Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! Bury it, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and you get nothing but decay. -Shaw
- And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. -Shakespeare
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A puzzle: Do you exist?
Descartes famously answered this one by saying cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Is it true, though? Does “thinking” have to be attached to a “thinker”? And what is “thinking” (cogitare) anyway?
For Christians, the Self definitely exists, and is in fact eternal: after you die, your soul continues on — perhaps in heaven, perhaps in hell, perhaps in some other intermediate state, depending on your sect. Obviously, death is a great change; but not so great that the individual selfhood is destroyed. The thinker, and the thinking, goes on forever.
For the Buddhists, the existence of the Self is one of the great illusions of the world. This belief is one of the trickiest of Buddhist tenets to wrap one’s mind around and really come to terms with, and is easily misunderstood. But although I’m no longer Buddhist, I think the Buddhist conception of self is very close to correct, and a good grasp of it is essential to the way I try to live my life as a druid.
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