08 Nov We taste nothing pure… (MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE)
The feebleness of our condition is such that things cannot, in their natural simplicity and purity, fall into our use; the elements that we enjoy are changed, and so ’tis with metals; and gold must be debased with some other matter to fit it for our service.
Neither has virtue, so simple as that which Aristo, Pyrrho, and also the Stoics, made the end of life; nor the Cyrenaic and Aristippic pleasure, been without mixture useful to it.
Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience:
From the very fountain of our pleasure, something rises that is bitter, which even in flowers destroys. (Lucretius)
Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it; would you not say that it is dying of pain? Nay, when we frame the image of it in its full excellence, we stuff it with sickly and painful epithets and qualities, languor, softness, feebleness, faintness, morbidezza: a great testimony of their consanguinity and consubstantiality.
The most profound joy has more of severity than gaiety, in it. The highest and fullest contentment offers more of the grave than of the merry:
Even felicity, unless it moderate itself, oppresses.
(Seneca)
Pleasure chews and grinds us; according to the old Greek verse, which says that “the gods sell us all the goods they give us”; that is to say, that they give us nothing pure and perfect, and that we do not purchase but at the price of some evil.
(Xenophon)
Labour and pleasure, very unlike in nature, associate, nevertheless, by I know not what natural conjunction.
Socrates says, that some god tried to mix in one mass and to confound pain and pleasure, but not being able to do it; he bethought him at least to couple them by the tail.
Metrodorus said, that in sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure. I know not whether or no he intended anything else by that saying; but for my part, I am of opinion that there is design, consent, and complacency in giving a man’s self up to melancholy. I say, that besides ambition, which may also have a stroke in the business, there is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy. Are there not some constitutions that feed upon it?
’tis a certain kind of pleasure to weep.
(Ovid)
Nature discovers this confusion to us; painters hold that the same motions and grimaces of the face that serve for weeping; serve for laughter too; and indeed, before the one or the other be finished, do but observe the painter’s manner of handling, and you will be in doubt to which of the two the design tends; and the extreme of laughter does at last bring tears:
No evil is without its compensation.
(Seneca)
When I religiously confess myself to myself, I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and loyal a lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt—would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself. Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley.
Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra’s head, who pretend to clear the law of all inconveniences:
Every great example has in it some mixture of injustice, which recompenses the wrong done to particular men by the public utility.
(Annals)
The Essays of Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
