Montaigne, and philosophers like him, sometimes place too much emphasis on self-knowledge. I lack the quotation because I've been reading the Apology for Raymond Sebond without, as I usually do, underlining favorite bits. (If I were to do that, the nearly the whole chapter would get marked up.) There's a specific passage in which he questions the value of knowing anything when, as is the case with most of us, we barely know ourselves. I'd contend that there's a pleasure in reveling in certain kinds of arcana, even if the risk is deviating into pedantry and self-obliviousness. Best of all, for sheer entertainment value, is knowledge about the natural world. Here's a soliloquy from Redmond O'Hanlon's Trawler that furnishes an example:

"...that fish, a Roughhead grenadier, Macrourus berglax, is a Rattail, a member of the closely related family the Macrouridae--and they're deep-water fishes that live on the continental slopes and across the abyssal plains of all the oceans of the earth. Their armoured head, those heads of theirs, they're pitted with sense organs, and their eyes I tell you, in 1908 a German biologist, August Breauer--he worked out that the retina of a Rat-tail had around 20 million long slender rods in an area of one-sixteenth of a square-inch. And that, Redmond is around 225 times more than we have in our own eyes. Now, as you may know, the rods are for night-vision, so in dim light a Rat-tail may be able to see over 200 times as well as we can! And that's not all, because on the underside of most Rat-tails , but not ours, not this particular one, the Roughhead grenadier, there's an open gland in which they play host to luminous bacteria. Most of the time they leave their bacteria alone, waiting round the gland and they squeeze their bacteria, they annoy them--and the bacteria light up! And they've other special muscles too, like haddock--they've got really big swimbladders, the Rat-tails, and in the males, only in the males, they have these bizarre muscles set round the swimbladder. So it's obvious, isn't it? Their function must be entirely sexual. So imagine that! The males drum in the abyss--in the black night, the perpetual darkness, they drum up their females! And Redmond, it must be noisy down there, and full of the weirdest flashing lights, red and purples and blues, whatever--because I.G. Priede, Monty Priede, a hero of mine, at my own university, Aberdeen: he's estimated that for just two species of Rat-tails in the abyssal depths, Coryphaenoides armatus and yaquinae, at a population density of about 200 fish per square kilometer, you have a global biomass of around 150X10^6 tonnes. And that, Redmond, is just about the total world commercial fish catch!"

Montaigne riffing on the vanity of human knowledge is one of the more satisfying themes of his essays. He quotes philosophers, scientists and poets, juxtaposes their beliefs and arguments, and, as often as not, confesses his incapacity for voting a party line, or holding to any line whatsoever. "The writings of the ancients, I mean the good writings, full and solid, tempt me and move me almost wherever they please; the one I am listening to always seems to me the strongest; I find each one right in his turn, although they contradict each other." (Apology for Raymond Sebon).

There's a pronounced conservative streak in Montaigne's skepticism: "Thus when some new doctrine is offered to us, we have great occasion to distrust it, and to consider that before it was produced its opposite was in vogue; and, as it was overthrown by this one, there may arise in the future a third invention that will likewise smash the second." 

Perhaps this is what allows him, despite a memory buzzing with Lucretius and other top-drawer pagan writers, to remain a faithful Catholic in a time of religious upheaval.

I've had a copy of Phineas Finn gathering dust on my dresser-drawer for a couple years, but I hadn't read a single line of Anthony Trollope's until last week. A few words of admiration moved me to start, beginning with this pugilistic essay by David Mamet, titled Charles Dickens Makes Me Want to Throw Up:

"I’ve read Anthony Trollope’s entire work several times, not because I am schooled, educated or right-thinking—I don’t believe I am more afflicted in these than most—but because I like to read. Trollope’s 47 novels, nonfiction and incidental work are a delight. His prose is clear, perfectly rhythmic, concise and, at turns, trenchant and profoundly funny."

Mamet's right, whatever one thinks of Dickens. On page 83 of Phineas Finn is a passage that squares with each descriptor of Mamet's phrase; a lucid take on American politics, that doesn't ring false in December 2017:

"[In the United States]...political enmity exists, but the political enmity produces private hatred. The leader of parties there really mean what they way when they abuse each other, and are in earnest when they talk as though they were about to tear each other limb from limb."

Mamet reports that Trollope, a true monster of prolificity, awoke at 5:30 each morning to churn out 2,500 words. He wrote his novels while working a regular shift at the post office and raising two children.

I finished Volume II of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire this morning, which ends on a characteristically ominous note. The Emperor Theodosius is holding a feast for his dangerous and divided subjects, the Goths—recent immigrants and refugees, pushed toward the empire by the invasion of the Huns and finally admitted by the Emperor Valens—who split their allegiance between Fravitta “a valiant and honorable youth,” and “the fierce and faithless Priulf.” Here’s what happens: 

“…When the chiefs of both parties were invited to the Imperial table, they were insensibly heated by wine, till they forgot the usual restraints of discretion and respect; and betrayed, in the presence of Theodosius, the fatal secret of their domestic disputes. The emperor, who had been the reluctant witness of this extraordinary controversy, dissembled his fears and resentment, and soon dismissed the tumultuous assembly. Fravitta, alarmed and exasperated by the insolence of his rival, whose departure from the palace might have been the signal of a civil war, boldly followed him; and, drawing his sword, laid Priulf dead at his feed. Their companions flew to arms; and the faithful champion of Rome would have been oppressed by superior numbers, if he had not been protected by the seasonable interposition of the Imperial guards. Such were the scenes of Barbaric rage, which disgraced the palace and table of the Roman emperor; and, as the impatient Goths could only be restrained by the firm and temperate character of Theodosius, the public safety seemed to depend on the life and abilities of a single man.”

You can guess how that will turn out.

What am I reading this week? Trawler: A Journey Through the North Atlantic, by Redmond O’Hanlon; Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. II, by Ed Gibbon; Hello, Darkness by L.E. Sissman; Don Quijote (again); and, as I have been for the last year or so, Les Essais of Michel de Montaigne.

Trawler is a remarkable work of travel writing, flush with delicious technical words like winch, grapnel, trawl-doors, otter-boards and, of course, ordinary nautical terms like gunwhale, port/starboard, fore/aft, stern and bow, all of which—though I can never keep them quite straight—add to the frenetic delight of the story, which is simply of a middle-aged zoologist-adventurer who plunges himself into extreme situations and describes them with the utmost zest (and humor).

For those who are wondering, Henry James has got to be the best travel writer there ever was, though—contemplative, leisurely, lounging—utterly different from a knockabout maniac like O'Hanlon. Here's a sample from Italian Hours:

"...the charm of Pisa (apart from its cluster of monuments) is a charm of a high order. The architecture has but a modest dignity; the lions are few; there are no fixed points for stopping and gaping. And yet the impression is profound; the charm is a moral charm. If I were ever to be incurably disappointed in life, if I had lost my health, my money, or my friends, if I were resigned forevermore to pitching my expectations in a minor key, I should go and invoke the Pisan peace. Its quietude would seem something more than a stillness--a hush. Pisa may be a dull place to live, but it's an ideal place to wait for death."

"It is not easy—perhaps not even desirable—to judge other people by a consistent standard. Conduct obnoxious, even unbearable, in one person may be readily tolerated in another; apparently indispensable principles of behavior are in practice relaxed—not always with impunity—in the interests of those whose nature seems to demand an exceptional measure. That is one of the difficulties of committing human action to paper, a perplexity that really justifies the alterations of comedy with tragedy in Shakespearian drama: because some characters and some deeds...may be thought of only in terms appropriate to themselves, irrespective of their consequence. On the stage, however, masks are assumed with some regard to procedure: in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough. The disregard for the unities is something that cannot be circumvented in human life; though there are times when close observation reveals, one way or another, that matters may or may not have been so irreconcilable at the close of the performance as they appeared in the second act."

—Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing

"In an age of religious fervor, the most artful statesmen are observed to feel some part of the enthusiasm which they inspire; and the most orthodox saints assume the dangerous privilege of defending the cause of truth by the arms of deceit and falsehood. Personal interest is often the standard of our belief, as well as of our practice; and the same motives of temporal advantage which might influence the public conduct and professions of Constantine, would insensibly dispose his mind to embrace a religion so propitious to his fame and fortunes. ...As real virtue is sometimes excited by undeserved applause, the specious piety of Constantine, if at first it was only specious, might gradually, by the influence of praise, of habit, and of example, be matured into serious faith and fervent devotion."

—Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. II

"We are our memory,
 We are the chimerical museum of shifting shapes,
 That pile of broken mirrors."

—Jorge Luis Borges, Cambridge, trans. Hoyt Rogers

"In the various states of society, armies are recruited from very different motives. Barbarians are urged by the love of war; the citizens of a free republic may be prompted by a principle of duty; the subjects, or at least the nobles of a monarchy, are animated by a sense of honour; but the timid and luxurious inhabitants of a declining empire must be allured into the service by the hopes of profit, or compelled by the dread of punishment."

—Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. II

"I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over."

—John Masefield, Sea-Fever

"The appeal of history to us all is in the last analysis poetic. But the poetry of history does not consist of imagination roaming at large, but of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it. That which compels the historian to 'scorn delights and live laborious days' is the ardour of his own curiosity to know what really happened long ago in that land of mystery which we call the past. To peer into that magic mirror and see fresh figures there every day is a burning desire that consumes and satisfies him all his life, that carries him each morning, eager as a lover, to the library and the muniment room. It haunts him like a passion of almost terrible potency, because it is poetic. The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them."

—G.M. Trevelyan, quoted in Men and Centuries by J.H. Plumb

"Il n’est qu’une erreur et qu’un crime: vouloir enfermer la diversité du monde dans des doctrines et des systèmes. C’est une erreur que de détourner d’autres hommes de leur libre jugement, de leur volonté propre, et de leur imposer quelque chose qui n’est pas en eux. Seuls agissent ainsi ceux qui ne respectent pas la liberté, et Montaigne n’a rien haï autant que la “frénésie”, le délire furieux des dictateurs de l’esprit qui veulent avec arrogance et vanité imposer au monde leurs “nouveautés” comme la seule et indiscutable vérité, et pour qui le sang de centaines de milliers d’hommes n’est rien, pourvu que leur cause triomphe."

—Stefan Zweig, Montaigne

"There is only one error and one crime: to try and shut up the diversity of the world within doctrines and systems..."

"A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face."

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Maker (1960), trans. Andrew Hurley

"[It was] told of the elephants by a king of their country, Juba, that when by the craft of their hunters one of them finds himself caught in certain deep pits that they prepare for them and cover with brush to fool them, his comrades arrive posthaste with many stones and logs to help him get out. But this animal in so many other actions approaches human capacity that if I wanted to trace in detail what experience has taught us about him, I should easily win the argument that I ordinarily maintain, that there is more difference between a given man and a given man than between a given animal and a given man."

—Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebon (1575-1576, 1578-1580), trans. Donald M. Frame

"She had lived with long-haired men and short-haired women, she had contributed a flexible faith and an irremediable want of funds to a dozen social experiments, she had partaken of the comfort of a hundred religions, had followed innumberable dietary reforms, chiefly of the negative order, and had gone of an evening to a séance or a lecture as regularly as she had eaten her supper."

—Henry James, The Bostonians (1886)

"At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody, so that his 'nobodiness' might not be discovered. In London he found the calling he had been predestined to: he became an actor, that person who stands upon a stage and plays at being another person, for an audience of people who play at taking him for that person. The work of a thespian held out a remarkable happiness to him—the first, perhaps, he had ever known; but when the last line was delivered and the last dead man applauded off the stage, the hated taste of unreality would assail him. He would cease being Ferrex or Tamerlane and return to being nobody. Haunted, hounded, he began imaging other heroes, other tragic fables. Thus while his body, in whorehouses and taverns around London, lived its life as body, the soul that lived inside it would be Caeser, who ignores the admonition of the Sybil, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters."

—Jorge Luis Borges, Everything and Nothing from The Maker (1960), trans. Andrew Hurley

"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I have read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit of for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgement I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it."

—Montaigne

1. Though mentally loaded up with remembered poetry, Montaigne preferred reading history, and especially biography, to other genres: “[Historians] are pleasant and easy; and at the same time, man in general, the knowledge of whom I seek, appears in them more alive and entire than in any other place—the diversity and truth of his inner qualities in the mass and in detail, the variety of the ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him.  Now those who write biographies, since they spend more time on plans than on events, more on what comes from within than on what happens without, are most suited to me. That is why in every way Plutarch is my man.” (Of Books)

2. In his short story, Tres Versiones de Judas, Jorge Luis Borges invents a Swedish theologian who publishes a heretical argument for the heroism of Judas. In the mind of Nils Runeburg, the apostle betrayed Christ not for thirty silver coins, but as an act of supreme self-sacrifice, perhaps surpassing Christ's own. Instigating the Passion through his betrayal, Judas played a key role in human redemption, while permanently condemning himself: “Renuncio al honor, al bien, a la paz, al reino de los cielos, como otros, menos heroicamente, al placer.” Runeberg’s argument is predictably rejected; he eventually goes mad, wandering the streets of Malmo, until he dies in 1912 of a ruptured aneurysm.

3. Henry James, in his collection of travel writings, Italian Hours, provides me with a new word: busky. Webster tells me the word is obsolete and replaced by bosky, meaning "1: having abundant trees or shrubs. 2: of or relating to a woods." James is writing of a visit to Genoa and the watery surrounds:

"[The] bay of Lerici is charming; the bosky gray-green hills close it in, and on either side of the entrance, perched on a bold headland, a wonderful old crumbling castle keeps ineffectual guard." 

"It may be said with some plausibility that there is an abecedarian ignorance that comes before knowledge, and another, doctoral ignorance that comes after knowledge: an ignorance that knowledge creates and engenders, just as it undoes and destroys the first."

—Montaigne, "Of Vain Subtleties"

Hazlitt on why the Arts are not progressive:

"The arts of painting and poetry are conversant with the world of thought within us, and with the world of sense without us—with what we know, and see, and feel immediately. They flow from the sacred shrine of our own breasts, and kindled at the living lamp of nature. The pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high, the depths and soundings of the human heart were as well understood three thousand years ago, as they are at present; the face of nature and the 'the human face divine', shone as bright then as they have ever done. It is this light, reflected by the true genius on art, that marks out its path before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses' feet, like that which 'circled Una's angle face,

'And made a sunshine in the shady place.'

Nature is the soul of art."