Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth

Home-Cosmography: The Renaissance Basis of the Essay

home-cosmog raphy the renaissance basis of the essay - “Direct your eye inwards, and you’ll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered.Travel them, and be Expert in home-cosmography.” . . . If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travelers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. Start now on the farthest western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too. Henry DavidThoreau, Walden, quoting William Habington, “To My Honoured Friend Sir Ed. P. Knight,” in Castara (1634) - This page intentionally left blank Few would dispute that the essay as we know it began with Michel de Montaigne’s first edition of his Essais in 1580. Significant predecessors had appeared in ancient Rome, the prose writings of Seneca and Plutarch in particular, and in the Orient there had been the tenth-century meditations of Sei Shonagon known as The Pillow Book and the fourteenth-century Essays in Idleness by Kenko. But in truth, these last, so-called essays that are part of a tradition known as “following the brush,” bear little resemblance to Montaigne’s work, which was soon followed in England by Francis Bacon’s ten brief Essays in 1597 (later greatly expanded, just as Montaigne expanded his), Sir William Cornwallis’s Essays in 1600, and John Donne’s Devotions in 1624. Whatever the similarity between the prose of Seneca and Plutarch and that of Europeans a millennium and a half later, there was no direct link and certainly no ongoing tradition. Most important, nothing like the self-explorations of Montaigne had ever appeared. His“efforts,”mere trials or attempts, were genuinely different, representing something new. For this reason, Montaigne understood the necessity of both explaining and defending his manner and subject in his apologia “Of Practice.” In this essay he writes confidently and not at all defensively, beginning with an account of a fall from his horse that very nearly cost him his life. He follows with reflections on sleep, its relation to death, and its propaedeutic and propagating value, and he turns to the matter of his writing about it all: 29 This account of so trivial an event would be rather pointless, were it not for the instruction that I have derived from it for myself; for in truth, in order to get used to the idea of death, I find there is nothing like coming close to it. Now as Pliny says, each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up. What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me. More is to be said, however, and needs to be. So Montaigne opens his defense with a frank acknowledgment of the new and controversial nature of his undertaking, this studying of himself on paper, scrupulously and microscopically—the tension is unmistakable. Montaigne’s description of exactly what his innovation consists of is as good a description of the essay as has ever been managed (I quote it again, therefore): It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it. And it is a new and extraordinary amusement, which withdraws us from the ordinary occupations of the world, yes, even from those most recommended.1 The object of his writing, Montaigne insists, is self-discovery, or, rather, self-exploration. Cornwallis, a few years later, made his essaying an“apprenticeship in self-knowledge.”2 As he develops the point, Montaigne reverts to defending writing and publishing his results: It is many years now that I have had only myself as object of my thoughts, that I have been examining...