Montaigne on the inner life: Don't take life so seriously

What is there left for us to learn from Montaigne on the subject of happiness? For one, that 'back shop' doesn't mean the room behind your place of work. Increasingly confined to his bed, in the crummy 17th-floor apartment that doubled as his home office, my dad read these lines with an eyebrow raised. Granted, Montaigne himself penned them from a castle-tower eyrie, overlooking the vast estate of his château. He didn't mean for us to take refuge there - this privileged perch was just where he did his writing (as I do mine now in the storage unit behind my house, a heavy wooden partition setting me off from the boxes and mess). No, the physical 'back shop' is just a writer's den, and this misunderstanding has caused critics to huff about Montaigne's solipsism, as if what he really said was: Go be alone and make great art . This does not lead to happiness, I assure you.

When my dad emailed back, misreading Montaigne in just this way, he nonetheless conceded that the passage I'd sent him was 'thoughtful'. But not, he added 'surprising', as 'Many writers nowadays speak of personal space, meditation, being alone at times, and so on.' He went on to say how there was a difference between voluntary and involuntary solitude. 'Many of us, as we age, become too much involved in that space.' It's not just the confinement but the loss of all able-bodied experience that they're missing out on, and my dad (as ever) listed them: going to the market, dancing, seeing family and friends - precisely the things that Montaigne cautioned his readers not to count on for happiness.

Certainly, an unnamed interlocutor haunts the text, the kind we usually chalk up to self-talk. Talking to people who won't talk back (or who can't because they're no longer with us) is a form of conversational intimacy we might read as an extension of Montaigne's general affability. In life, Montaigne was known about town as a raconteur with an open-door policy for guests. Even Bakewell, who sums up his back shop as a form of 'Stoic detachment', notes that in another lasting dictum Montaigne cried: 'Be convivial: live with others.' If Montaigne's back shop is meant to mend a broken heart, then it is not by avoiding future pain, but by coming into a different relation with it.

Montaigne's mental chatter had a buoyancy to it, as he bounced from one subject to the next, going with the current. What I couldn't convey to my dad, evidently, was this lightness of attention, distilled in that most famous of Montaignisms: ' Que sais-je? ' (What do I know?) In his celebratory portrait of Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837 comments that: 'His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road.' Not taking life quite so seriously - the pursuit of happiness notwithstanding - might then be Montaigne's key to dying well. After all, there might be no surer inner peace in one's final days than not needing it so badly.