Month: September 2024

I did not know Montaigne from Adam

“Where the development of talent is concerned we are still in the food-gathering stage. We do not know how to grow it. Up to now in this country when one of the masses starts to write, paint, etc., it is because he happens to bump into the right accident. In my case the right accident happened in the 1930s. I had the habit of reading from childhood, but very little schooling. I spent half of my adult life as a migratory worker and the other half as a longshoreman. The Hitler decade started me thinking, but there is an enormous distance between thinking and the act of writing. I had to acquire a taste for a good sentence — taste it the way a child tastes candy — before I stumbled into writing. Here is how it happened. Late in 1936 I was on my way to do some placer mining near Nevada City, and I had a hunch that I would get snowbound. I had to get me something to read, something that would last me for a long time. So I stopped over in San Francisco to get a thick book. I did not really care what the book was about — history, theology, mathematics, farming, anything, so long as it was thick, had small print and, no pictures. There was at that time a large secondhand bookstore on Market Street called Lieberman’s and I went there to buy my book. I soon found one. It had about a thousand pages of small print and no pictures. The price was one dollar. The title page said these were The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. I knew what essays were but I did not know Montaigne from Adam. I put the book in my knapsack and caught the ferry to Sausalito. Sure enough, I got snowbound. I read the book three times until I knew it almost by heart. When I got back to the San Joaquin Valley I could not open my mouth without quoting Montaigne, and the fellows liked it. It got so whenever there was an argument about anything — women, money, animals, food, death—they would ask: ‘What does Montaigne say?’ Out came the book and I would find the right passage. I am quite sure that even now there must be a number of migratory workers up and down the San Joaquin Valley still quoting Montaigne. I ought to add that the Montaigne edition I had was the John Florio translation. The spelling was modem, but the style seventeenth century — the style of the King James Bible and of Bacon’s Essays. The sentences have hooks in them which stick in the-mind; they make platitudes sound as if they were new. Montaigne was not above anyone’s head. Once in a workers’ barrack near Stockton, the man in the next bunk picked up my Montaigne and read it for an hour or so. When he returned it he said: ‘Anyone can write a book like this’.”(Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time)

A Mountain

Barzun, A Stroll with William James

Anyone brought up in the Alps and taking trips among them knows that “a mountain” is never twice the same — in shape, color, and “character.” It is “one thing” by a fiat helped by a name.

Bagehot, “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration”

Human character is a most complex thing, and the impressions which different people form of it are as various as the impressions which the inhabitants of an impassable mountain have of its shape and size. Each observer has an aggregate idea derived from certain actions and certain sayings, but the real man has always or almost always said a thousand sayings of a kind quite different and in a connection quite different; he has done a vast variety of actions among “other men” and “other minds”; a mobile person will often seem hardly the same if you meet him in very different societies. And how, except by discussion, is the true character of such a person to be decided? Each observer must bring his contingent to the list of data; those data must be arranged and made use of. The certain and positive facts as to which every one is agreed must have their due weight; they must be combined and compared with the various impressions as to which no two people exactly coincide. A rough summary must be made of the whole. In no other way is it possible to arrive at the truth of the matter. Without discussion each mind is dependent on its own partial observation. A great man is one image — one thing, so to speak — to his valet, another to his son, another to his wife, another to his greatest friend. None of these must be stereotyped; all must be compared. To prohibit discussion is to prohibit the corrective process.

IWP Authors

Some of the authors at IWP Books:

  • Walter Bagehot
  • John Jay Chapman
  • Erwin Chargaff
  • G. Lowes Dickinson
  • E. M. Forster
  • Aldous Huxley
  • Desmond MacCarthy
  • Albert Jay Nock
  • José Ortega y Gasset
  • Agnes Repplier
  • Alfred Sidgwick
  • Anne Goodwin Winslow

Montaigne

New at IWP Books: Jacob Zeitlin, 1934, Montaigne. The book first appeared as the introduction to Jacob Zeitlin’s translation of the Essays, published in 1934–36. The translation itself is not available online, and a physical copy is a rare find. Donald Frame, who published his own translation in 1958, thought the introduction was “excellent.”

Durable as Brass

A new collection of Horace translations, including 134 English translations of Exegi Monumentum (ode 30, book III), is available at the collections of translations page. A few of the first lines of different translations:

I have reared a monument outlasting brass
I have reared a monument to outlive bronze
I have wrought out a monument more durable than bronze
I here have reared a monument
I now have rais’d a firmer monument
In princely state, by Egypt’s scorching sand
In vain the future snaps his fangs
I’ve a monument reared more enduring than brass
I’ve built a monument of brass
I’ve built a monument to outlast
I’ve built my monument outlasting brass
I’ve finished all constructive pains
I’ve made a monument to outlast bronze
I’ve made a monument to pass
I’ve rais’d a lasting Monument t’ out-vye
I’ve rais’d a Monument
I’ve rais’d a trophy firm o’er brass
I’ve rais’d a Work, that shall surpass
I’ve raised a monument outlasting bronze
I’ve raised a monument than brass more durable
I’ve raised a Monument which will endure
I’ve raised a pillar that shall last
I’ve rear’d a monument, my own
I’ve reared a fame outlasting brass
I’ve reared a goodly monument
I’ve reared a monument alone
I’ve reared a monument more strong than brass
I’ve wrought a Monument more strong then Brass
I’ve wrought a monument more tall