quotes – Northcoast Antiquarian

One of the most striking images from Montaigne’s Essays, which has lodged itself firmly in my mind, comes from his Apology for Raymond Sebond. Specifically, within one paragraph, he uses wheat as an extended metaphor or an allegory wherein he suggests that the more wisdom or knowledge one acquires, the more humble one becomes. He writes:

To really learned men has happened what happens to ears of wheat: they rise high and lofty, heads erect and proud, as long as they are empty; but when they are full and swollen with grain in their ripeness, they begin to grow humble and lower their horns. (Montaigne, 1963, p. 227)

The image captures what I have found to be my experience insofar as that, with each passing year, as my hair has silvered and my eyes dimmed, I have found that wisdom requires casting the certitude, rigidity, and knowledge of youth aside for the humility of lived experience.

Additionally, I find the lesson to be an extraordinary corollary to my personal motto, about which I have previously written, Humilitatem Initium Sapientiae (humility is the beginning of wisdom).

Thus, having reflected if not obsessed upon Montaigne’s insight for well over a fortnight, I finally shaped my thoughts about it into a poem, the results of which are below.

The Ripened Ear
(Inspired by Montaigne)

Beneath the sun’s unyielding gaze, it grows,
The tender stalk, upright and full of pride,
Its hollow strength unbent by winds that blow,
Yet void of fruit, it stands unsatisfied.

But time, the patient sower, bids it yield,
To weight of grain within its swelling breast,
It bows its head, as on the golden field,
The burdened ear finds wisdom’s humble crest.

So too the soul, in ignorance, stands tall,
Unbowed by truths it dares not yet to see,
Until the harvest’s gentle weight does call,
And bends the heart to find humility.

For wisdom ripens where humility’s sown,
And humbleness, by wisdom, is full-grown.

Montaigne, M. de. (1963). Essays and selected writings: A bilingual edition (D. M. Frame, Trans. & Ed.). St. Martin’s Press.

Always being suspicious of pithy quotes attributed to famous dead people when the quotes do not cite a source, I had occasion to go down a rabbit hole this afternoon. I was underground for several hours.

Yesterday, I received two issues of The New York Review of Books in the post. The first issue I reviewed was delightful and quickly devoured. It also had a pithy quote at the end of the review entitled Piety & Power (written by David A. Bell). The book under review was about the life of the niece of Cardinal Richelieu, while the quote at issue was attributed to Spinoza. The quote was recorded at the very end of the review as: “Smile not, lament not, nor condemn, but understand.“

Finding the quote intriguing, I marked it for research, which I conducted today. I found multiple variations on the quote but no citation as to its source online. Thus, I became more creative in my online research, and searched for fragments of the quote, and found a variation of the quote which departed more significantly from the usual versions, which had a citation to Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus, an unfinished work exploring forms of government. He was writing the work in the year of his death. With that citation I was able to locate a copy of the manuscript, in Latin, and translate the entire text, which allowed me to see a most wonderful, robust quote in context, which is most certainly applicable to the dispassionate study of politics (the subject of the manuscript) as well as history.

I was also able to later find, on the Hathitrust.org website, an English translation from the 19th century, with which I will later compare the entirety of my translation. But overall, the comparisons I have made thus far show that my translation is able and where clunky, the older translation is also clunky — thus, the original Latin was clunky in places.

In any event, here is the original source for the quote above – which shows how transmuted the original words have become in the interest of pithy.

“Therefore, when I applied my mind to politics, I intended to demonstrate or deduce only those things which best agree with practice, are certain and indubitable, and to inquire into matters pertaining to this science with the same freedom of mind as we are accustomed to investigate mathematical subjects, but I diligently endeavored not to ridicule, mourn, nor detest human actions, but rather sought to understand them; and so I contemplated human emotions such as love, hatred, anger, envy, glory, mercy, and other movements of the mind, not as vices of human nature, but as properties which belong to it in such a way that they pertain to its nature as the movements of the air pertain to it, such as heat, cold, storms, thunder, and other such things which, although inconvenient, are necessary and have certain causes by which we try to understand their nature, and the mind rejoices equally in the true contemplation of knowing these things which are pleasing to the senses.” [Chapter I, IV]