Manipulating Montaigne

Why continue with the blog now that we’re home? What’s the point?

I started a blog in anticipation of going to sea. I didn’t look beyond the adventure. I didn’t want to.

If the world were made differently, I would want to still be at sea now. But the trade winds don’t blow all year round. In the southern hemisphere, the tropical cruising “off season” is from November through till March, which is when cyclones reliably rip through the Pacific and the top of Australia. Cruising people we met were mostly intending to be in a port situated below 25 S by early to mid November (our insurance company insisted upon it). A few people were heading north rather than south, planning to hole up in stifling hot, windless equatorial places like Malaysia and Borneo. Either way, these next five months are pretty much a dead zone for cruising unless you’re lucky enough to be in NZ or Tasmania. They’re when yachties haul out and fix up the boat, re-discover domesticity and the charms of family and friends, balance the exchequer, and ….what else?

I can’t answer that yet. The city used to supply everything I needed. It doesn’t anymore. There’s something I’m missing. I’ve listened to other yachties talk about how they splice together their sea and shore lives, but there’s some piece of the puzzle I haven’t quite laid my hands on. Sometimes I think the answer is as banal as finding a new hobby (the squirm factor is high –needlework has come to mind, and sadly, I’m not joking). Alex seems happy to fill a lot of his available mental space with boat paraphernalia – if he’s not sprucing up Kukka, he’s looking at boat websites, talking about boats, dreaming or reading about boats. I’m not so much. I can go part of the way, but not all the way with him.

What I need to figure out is how to make these next years work better for me in the “off season”. Bread-making alone will not suffice (though I’m experimenting with spelt flour today…). My children need me to keep out of their lives, and my previous line of work doesn’t excite me any more (being “over work”, rather than over-worked, is a tricky thing to explain, and not something to shout about at my tender age). So, I’m going to co-opt the blog for my own mid-life exploratory (read, if you will, self-indulgent) ends, in addition (of course) to retaining its original nautical flavour.

The appeal of blogging, as opposed to writing a self-indulgent book like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love is that you can throw as many words and pictures into the “blogosphere” as you like, and while no-one may be the much the wiser for your efforts, the resources you use are trifling.

Yesterday I took three crates of non-fiction books, leftovers from my working life, to a second-hand book shop in Glebe. The dealer took about half of them (mostly, for the record, books about feminism and religion) and offered me a cash payment of $6 or a credit of $120 to be spent over the next 12 months. I didn’t flinch. I took the credit.

I didn’t have the will or the energy to hawk my the rest around (finding a parking spot near a second-hand bookstore has to be the worst part of the exercise). I understand the economics of the publishing industry which is now like any other. Product depreciates sharply once it leaves the showroom (sorry, bookshop). I drove home and tipped my books into the paper recycling bin. It hurt. I’m a book lover, and from a generation which still has trouble thinking of books as disposable product. But I needed the shelf space…for different books.

Over the past few months I’ve been reading a selection of Michel de Montaigne’s essays, the earliest of which were published in 1572. I occasionally pause to absorb the incredible fact of such wise, witty and provocative prose being available to me, a 21^st century reader. Books are great, aren’t they, and the written word is the stuff I can do least without, but I reckon if Montaigne were alive in 2010, he might have been a blogger.

Listen to this: “Let the man who is in search of knowledge fish for it where it lies; there is nothing that I lay less claim to. These are my fancies, in which I make no attempt to convey information about things, only about myself.”

And this: “I freely state my opinion about all things, even those which perhaps fall outside my capacity, and of which I do not for a moment suppose myself to be a judge. What I say about them, therefore, is mean to reveal the extent of my own vision, not the measure of the things themselves..”

My Penguin paperback edition of Montaigne is a 1957 translation by J.M. Cohen which is still in print – there’s a turn-up for the books, as my dad would have said. I doubt that Montaigne thought a lot about how his work would be preserved. He just wanted to satisfy an itch – to know himself and through that prism, to arrive at some of life’s truths. At 40, he had a medal cast which was inscribed with the question, “What do I know?” He first retreated from public life at 38 to read and write. Luckily for him, he’d inherited a big country house in the Dordogne, and he devoted one of its two towers to his library. Now you can see why we need a bigger boat – or why Alex might be encouraging me to continue with the blog. Grandiose dreams are not his exclusive preserve!

All the photos above were taken by Alex at this year's Sculpture by the Sea exhibition which opened shortly after we came back to Sydney. The sculptures are set up beside the ocean path which runs from Bondi to Tamarama beaches.