A King of Shreds and Patches

A brief reflection on Montaigne's essay, "Of a Saying of Caesar's"

Human appetite, buffeted by ignorance of the self and of the nature of objects of desire, is perpetually unsatisfied. That is the central observation in Michel de Montaigne’s brief essay, “Of a Saying of Caesar’s.” In the span of about a page, Montaigne unfurls his primary concerns, characteristic of his most celebrated, longer essays, and exhibits the sinuous, earthy, living prose that marks his creation of the genre of the modern personal essay.

Michel de Montaigne

The opening lines of this short essay, contrary to its title, are not about Caesar’s words, but about how little thought we give to what we ourselves are. If we merely spent a little time considering our own nature we would quickly realize, he claims, that “this fabric of ours is built up of feeble and failing pieces.”¹ This is one of Montaigne’s central insights— in his note to the reader attached to the beginning of the essays he remarks that he is himself is the subject of his book and he discovers further on, and records at the beginning of Book II of the Essays, that “we are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.” For Montaigne, the inner life of each human being is a set of mismatched fragments, tied together with a bit of thread. In his efforts to trace his own thought and existence accordingly, the conclusion of the essay rarely is where we set out for at the beginning or in the title. Instead, the work flows from moment to moment, turning wherever he chooses. In this particular essay the work quickly turns to a discussion of the nature of the highest human good, and why philosophers have long disagreed about it. Oddly, there is no debate presented. Instead, Lucretius, the ancient materialist, gets center stage, with two substantial quotations taking up nearly half the essay in total. Lucretius presents a vision of life in which we are never satisfied because the very “vessel” in which all good things are experienced, has been corrupted by vice. The discussion of final ends is postponed indefinitely— instead Lucretius is quoted to defend the claim that ultimately even the highest good is worthless if the soul that experiences it has been corrupted. Yet how can a patchwork fabric, built up of “feeble and failing pieces,” be corrupted? What is there to be misused, and who is to judge what vice is for a collection of competing impulses? Montaigne seems to hope that by relentlessly investigating his own existence he might achieve an answer. He appears to be in search of an ethics for the fragmented self.²

In the final lines, we finally get the quotation we’ve anticipated, and perhaps longed for, all along. Unsurprisingly, it leaves us in a state of dissatisfaction, which seems to be the true theme of the essay. The saying is about fearing and trusting the unknown, an odd place to end up after a discussion that has ranged from our own inner fragmentation, to the obscure nature of the summum bonum, to the ultimate disappointment of all desire. We do not know the nature of the things we truly want, we want things whose natures we fail to understand, and because we cling to what is familiar, we never achieve the satisfaction of our desires. Caesar was perhaps chosen as an archetype of the desiring soul, always unsatisfied in its longing. Montaigne is emphatic that it is not the objects themselves that are unsatisfying, but rather our lack of understanding of them and of ourselves leads us to experience disappointment. But the quotation, which supposedly supports this claim, seems out of place: “it happens by a common vice of nature that we trust more, and fear more violently, things to us unseen, hidden, and unknown.” Is Caesar saying that our expectation of things is unrealistic when we know nothing about them? If so, the quote becomes particularly odd given Caesar’s own intense ambition. Caesar was quite well acquainted with power, and was at least accused of pursuing it immoderately. Desire, in his case, seems to have increased with knowledge. Montaigne leaves Caesar’s remark un-analyzed, an odd move that provokes yet more dissatisfaction in the reader. Once more, however, it must be assumed that the fault is one of understanding, not of the object themselves, which suggests that Montaigne’s little essay is itself an exercise in correcting our own inflated expectations, learning to rein in our desires, and finding contentment within the cobbled whole.

Postscript: I intend for this essay to be the first of many short pieces on Montaigne. If that appeals to you, please consider subscribing.

1. All Montaigne quotations are from the Donald Frame translation of The Complete Works, Everyman’s Library, New York, 2003. P. 272-273.

2. This facet of Montaigne’s inquiries is of course continued by his intellectual heirs: the fragmented self and its ethical implications is present in Hume, Nietzsche, Joyce, Woolf, Pessoa, and many others, including Shakespeare, who is quoted in the title of this piece.