On Montaigne's Skin

05/21/2008 6:18 AM – 6:40 AM

And waking up this morning, it is cloudy and I feel good. And this matters, and this matters not in the least. I’m finally reading the “Essays” of Montaigne. This morning I read the one “On Sadness.” It’s on both deep sadness and deep joy and he gives examples of how both have killed people. He then says, “Violent emotions like these have little hold on me. By nature my sense of feeling has a hard skin, which I daily toughen and thicken by arguments.”

And yet few would say, on reading the “Essays” that Montaigne was a man devoid of warmth. Perhaps what I am experiencing at this point is just the passing of the passions and a learning of the deeper paths of contentment and doing. I would say that I definitely could use a little thickening of the skin. St. Ayn, a thick skin if ever there was one, was secretly prone to acts of private silliness – dancing to her “tiddily-wink” music, waving the satin streamers that her husband had bought her for her birthday. Silliness, a forgiving humor, and deep affection that while it doesn’t explode can be depended upon – these are good emotion to cultivate.

Emotions that overwhelm are for people whose bodies produce an ungodly amount of hormones – excellent for sending into battle and making babies, but not very good for much else, certainly not planning a campaign or raising children. The people that write “Essays” or build “Falling Water,” people that do beautiful work that takes a long time, past the point of excitement and into sustained attention, focused until actual completion is achieved– these are people that make a 7^th generation difference. Being alive and apprehending the job that one wishes to do and then engaging in the unexciting, daily tasks that are required of completing something difficult and complex and good – this is an emotion that effects. I am not a mystic. God does not speak to me in visions or voices. He does not prove his existence, no matter how deeply I feel the need. I have faith in my chair. Let God then be like my chair, only remarked upon when something unexpected occurs. To attempt to capture the nature of God is to attempt to prove the existence of other minds, better leave it to the mystics. In the sane, it is accomplished by a faith that turns invisible, like cobwebs in twilight, but it remains part and parcel of being human nonetheless.