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"There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being."
- Montaigne, Of Experience
1.
"Of Experience" is Montaigne's last and, I insist, greatest essay. It inspires us with its wisdom and balance. Montaigne, like Goethe, had the knack-some would say the bad taste-of benefiting from his experience at every stage of life and achieving a calm, benign perspective with age. Which I can't entirely seem to do. I am approaching my seventieth birthday: three score and ten, the alleged fulfillment of a lifespan. I am still agitated, perplexed. I look back at all that has happened to me and it seems as though it were practically nothing. To quote the last line of Borges' poem on Emerson: "I have not lived. I want to be someone else."
2
On the other hand, I want to be only myself. I think I know what I am about, am comfortable with that person, can distinguish good writing from bad, and decent human beings from jerks. Less and less do I feel the need to justify my conclusions. I carry myself in public with impervious self-confidence. (In private is another story.) My students look to me for answers, and I improvise -something that passes for adequate. Most of the dilemmas that shake these young people, their existential, religious or romantic doubts, their future professional prospects, their worries that someone won't like them, roll off my back. It could be that I am just numbed, unable to summon the urgency behind what to them constitutes a crisis. Mine is the questionable wisdom of passivity. What I cannot change, I no longer let myself be insanely bothered by. Even the latest political folly elicits from me only a disgruntled shrug. I am more upset when my favorite sports team loses; but then I remind myself that it wasn't, technically, my fault since I lacked magical powers to alter the outcome.
3.
"Are you experienced?" asked Jimi Hendrix, tauntingly. Does he mean; have I slept with fifty groupies, humped a guitar onstage before adulating thousands,...