What Do You Do When You Feel So Mad You Could Bite?

Dear Friend,

This morning I read Montaigne's essay "How the soul discharges its emotions against false objects when lacking real ones."

A local gentleman of ours who is marvelously subject to gout would answer his doctors quite amusingly when asked to give up salted meats entirely. He would say that he liked to have something to blame when tortured by the onslaughts of that illness: the more he yelled out curses against the saveloy or the tongue or the ham, the more relief he felt. Seriously though, when our arm is raised to strike it pains us if the blow lands nowhere and merely beats the air . . .

 . . . it seems that the soul . . . loses itself when shaken and disturbed unless it is given something to grasp on to; and so we must always provide it with an object to butt up against and to act upon.

This passage made me think of Mr. Rogers. I remember watching him as a child and feeling relieved because, in his gentle way, he explained to me that I wasn't bad for feeling angry sometimes. He also gave me some great suggestions for how to handle those angry feelings. (For one thing, I could hit a pillow! Hitting a pillow is totally OK!) I believe this song was part of the episode where he gave the anger talk. It seems like the whole world could use this now --

So, what do you do when you feel so mad you could bite?

Love,
A

Montaigne on How to Toughen Your Skin

Dear Friend,

It's 2:20AM. There's a splendid thunderstorm going on. Inside, my house is deliciously silent. We're tucked into the side of a hill, like a ship run ashore. I'm enjoying the view from my husband's office. His large bay window is the prow.

School starts tomorrow for my oldest three kids. The last several days have been noisy and exciting -- Go! Go! Go! -- back to school preparations and a birthday party to boot. The wonderful pulse of life that comes with a large family has lately felt like a marathon for my nerves.

Waking during the night can be blissful, though I'll likely suffer for it tomorrow, especially if the baby won't take a nap. For now though I feel too refreshed and focused to sleep. Maybe insomnia is not something I should battle. Maybe -- like my unusual heart beat -- it's just me.

If your night's sleep is often broken into segments with a mid-night interval, you will appreciate this article. Some of us heed the sound of an ancient ancestral chime. Or something.

Anyway, when I woke up tonight I decided not to be frustrated with myself.

Carpe noctem!

I recently picked up Montaigne's Essays again. Click here to read a short post I wrote two years ago in which I compare reading Essays to paying a visit to my rich, quirky uncle (who happens to live in a chateau).

Château de Montaigne via Wikipedia 

Montaigne is considered the Father of the Essay, so I suppose this also makes him Patron Saint of Bloggers. He's quite an engaging person to know. No topic is off limits.

Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it. 

But fair warning: rarely does Montaigne stick to his point. He's all over the place! Reading him feels like partaking in a conversation full of delightful rabbit trails. I love him for this. He likes to go deep, but we can also talk candidly about stuff like bodily functions. We can ramble a bit, then go on with what we were first discussing. Or not.

I'm sure I'd grow weary of other writers for using his method, but it works for him. I expect this randomness out of him, I suppose. And because he's the first true essayist, I feel like this gives me permission to loosen up a little and just blog what's on my mind. As I've mentioned before, I've found if I wait until I have time to make my posts tidy I end up going long stretches without blogging anything.

I also believe reading Essays is good for my depression. Montaigne is so much more rational than me! I tend to experience an exhausting array of peaks and valleys of emotion. In "On Sadness,"  he gives examples of people who are seized by a sadness in a "deaf, speechless stupor." Others "languish for love" or even "die of happiness." As for Montaigne --

Violent emotions . . . have little hold on me. By nature my sense of feeling has a hard skin, which I daily toughen and thicken by arguments. 

In one segment of "On Sadness" I wrote a question mark in the margin:

We cannot display our grief or our convictions during the living searing heat of the attack; the soul is then burdened by deep thought and the body is cast down, languishing for love. That is the source of the occasional impotence which sometimes comes so unseasonably upon men when making love, and of that chill produced, in the very lap of delight by excessive ardour. 

Just a question mark. Because this was new information for me. (No one need comment with personal examples of experiencing untimely impotence due to excessive ardor! But see what I mean?This is one example of territory that is fair game for our host to discuss.) He wraps up his comment on impotence with some level-headed advice for life in general:

For pleasures to be tasted and then digested they must remain moderate: Curae leves lonquuntur, ingentes stupent. [Light cares can talk: huge ones are struck dumb.]

I depart from this visit to the chateau , feeling a little calmer, more steady, and rational. I'm smiling, actually. When calling on Montaigne, I must leave my hysterics at the door.

Moderately yours,

Adriana :-)

Eat the Fish; Pick out the Bones

I suppose I came down a bit hard on Michel de Montaigne in my recent post. I understand there are people out there who carry Essays around with them as a manual for living. There's some good stuff in Essays too. The accusing-women-for-having-shallow-love-for-their-children part is relatively short.

You don't need to dread reading Essays. It's pretty easy to follow. Montaigne speaks informally. You feel like you're having a conversation with your rich, quirky uncle (although I don't think Montaigne would have imagined that his conversation would include women -- esp. a nursing peasant like me -- ha!)

You know -- your rich, quirky uncle who happens to live in a chateau --

Chateau de Montaigne

You listen, sip your tea, and occasionally nod politely -- but dear Uncle can be long-winded and as he rambles on about how his book "means more to him than any flesh and blood son ever could", your eyes start to cross.

Last night, as I was reading Essays something stood out to me that made me soften a little toward Montaigne: he recognized his own ignorance. Now that I think about it, he really was not one to gloss over his faults. He was also indecisive; just when he is about to make a point, he changes his mind. His amiable tone, his frankness, and the fun-facts about antiquity which he often sprinkles in, are what keep me reading.

What have I learned so far on my quest?

St. Augustine showed me the restorative power of confession, the exaltation of the lowly, the immense wisdom and grace available to a yielded heart.

Margery Kempe showed me that if a person has a distinct vision and enough passion, she can accomplish her dream -- even if she is an illiterate, emotionally unstable woman with fourteen children.

Maybe the lesson from Montaigne is this: it's OK to choose a topic you know very little about and prattle on about it. You can even change your mind midstream and go the opposite direction. Above all, assume that everyone in the world cares about what you think.

Isn't that what we bloggers do every day?

How to Eat the Moon

This idea I have of a "classical education" is feeling really huge today. Montaigne's Essays (which apparently the Who's Who of academia for the last few centuries has adored ) is not jiving with me. I miss Saint Augustine. I keep glancing longingly at my untouched copy of City of God. I feel like I'm trying to move too fast. I could have spent years on Confessions.

I put Essays down this morning and started listening to Sarah Bakewell's book: How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. She is really enthusiastic about this guy. She thinks his personality is just charming. Was I raised in Plato's cave? I confess I had never heard of Montaigne until I started my quest.

The more I learn, the more I realize what I don't know. It feels like trying to eat the moon, one spoonful at a time.

Lie to Me

I happened to read Montainge's essay "On Conscience" just as my husband and I finished watching an episode of "Lie to Me". The show is loosely based on the career of Dr. Paul Ekman, an expert on recognizing deceit. I first read about Ekman in Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book Blink. 

The show is mesmerizing. It has inspired me to be more attentive to human expression. I especially like how they flash images of well-known people displaying key expressions in real life. (It seems that one of our former Presidents has been on every episode I've seen so far.)

Yet none of this is new of course. Montaigne said, "So wondrous is the power of conscience! It makes us betray, accuse and fight against ourselves. In default of an outside testimony it leads us to witness against ourselves."

Also - "Conscience can fill us with fear, but she can also fill us with assurance and confidence. And I can say that I have walked more firmly through some dangers by reflecting on the secret knowledge I had of my own will and the innocence of my designs."

How good are you at recognizing deceit?


How good are you at lying?