To my surprise, this year I discovered Michel de Montaigne as a good friend. I read his essay “Of Experience” with my students in a seminar on philosophy and the good life, and I felt really engaged by his attitude towards life. I particularly appreciate his hedonist view that nature weaves together what is truly good and what is truly pleasurable.
Montaigne liked to be present to the pleasures of his bodymind and enjoy them. For example, he liked to walk in his orchard:
When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of solitude, and to me.
This is a sixteenth-century European take on the pleasures of being present to a solitary walk.
Henry David Thoreau offered a nineteenth-century American version of it in his essay “Walking”:
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? … Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
Thoreau also liked to be present to his walks with his full bodymind, though Montaigne’s garden-stroll variety of walking did not respond to his desire for revitalizing the wildness within him by exploring the wilderness about him, where he felt at home.
Nonetheless, I find a kinship, an affinity, between Montaigne and Thoreau with regard to desiring to be present to their walks. This year, for various reasons, I have had more access to botanic gardens and urban parks than to wilder woods and forests. So Montaigne has been a close, unexpected companion, a friend who has enriched my vital philosophy.
Moreover, as I wrote at the outset, his approach to hedonism hits close to the right experiential mark for me:
Nature has observed this principle like a mother, that the actions she has enjoined on us for our need should also give us pleasure; and she invites us to them not only through reason, but also through appetite. It is unjust to infringe her laws.
Nature intertwines reason and desire, the necessary and the pleasurable, so that both together incline us towards what is true, just, and beautiful.
May I develop the discernment to apprehend and follow those inclinations.
[Cover picture: Wooded river bank at Rio Prata, São Paulo, Brazil.]
Daniel G. Campos 