“Que sçais-je?”

(”What do I know?”)

The Motto of Michel de Montaigne 

Do I know the significance of my own experiences?  Perhaps I know I am having experiences, and perhaps I can recount them more or less accurately, at least to myself and my own satisfaction, but does this mean I have the least understanding of their meaning?  

Hardly.

These are two things, experience and understanding – related, to be certain, but not the same beasts and not captured and maintained in the same manner.  It is easy to mistake the one for the other – how often might we understand something in essence or principle, and yet have little experience of it? 

Celibate saints wrote reams on the subjects of lust and the wiles of the flesh and of marriage and adultery, yet had not a moment, or more than a few moments of sheer experience of these.  I am not willing to dispose of all they had to say on these grounds – some of them may very well have glimpsed from a distance an accurate image of these things; there may be some profit to be had in their speech.

And the rest of us wretches, sinful and human as we are – how many of us have actually lived the life of flesh and lust and intense desire, and yet haven’t any understanding of what it is we do or have done?  No, that understanding is something we may have after the fact, and only then after performing the requisite contemplations, the laborious process of thought spurred on by an unquenchable ache… the hope that we might know something about what has happened.

Few of us go that extra step.  It is arduous, it is troublesome, it is odd, and above all it is inconvenient and all out of fashion.  Montaigne, the inventor of the essay – the essai, the “trials” of one’s own mind in the presence of this or that subject – put himself to the test to discover the answer to that question “Que sçais-je?” because he strongly suspected that the proper response is always, “Nothing,” or “Not very much,” as Socrates had grasped in his own day. 

By losing the false complacency born of the fantasy that one knows more than one actually does, a miraculous thing is born: A lack of fear in the face of the unknown.  The unknown becomes ever-present, not quite commonplace but a constant companion; not an occasion for terrors and anxieties, but an opportunity for the advent of wonder and questions born of wonder.  One becomes unafraid of experience; one become unafraid of the audacity required to question the shadowy opinions that pass for indubitable truths in the homes, the streets, the houses of government and the business offices and churches of the world.

There is a sort of losing that is synonymous with freedom from slavery.  To lose ones chains is not really a loss, but a blessing and a gain.

Yet, in the eyes of the world, from the points of view provided by the home, the street, the government, the business offices, and religions, such a person who dares to say with Montaigne and Socrates, “Que sçais-je?” appears to have lost all place in the order of things.  How will such a person, short of winning the lottery or having a good inheritance prosper in this world?  It is a fair question.  Montaigne did have an inheritance and a worldly position, but not long after his death, his fine Essays were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Roman Catholic Church and accused of housing all manner of heretical and dangerous opinions, from skepticism to Fideism and an uncomfortable element of tolerance.  Socrates, dear Socrates, spent a lifetime doing little more than asking questions, and made the rich and powerful of Athens so angry at him for his troubles they repaid him by throwing a rigged trial and leaving him no honorable choice than to carry out their death sentence by his own hand.  And with a smile.

Montaigne’s reputation suffered till Voltaire revived his memory over a hundred years after his death.  Socrates is still maligned in spirit, if not in fact, in all corners of the world.  In the eyes of Earth, losers: Not people one is usually encouraged to spend time with – except, perhaps, to be able to produce the credentials that say one has read a few of the Essays or has perused a Platonic Dialogue or two; and this passes for intelligence and learning.

There is all the difference in having read words and having gone on to live them and put them into effect in one’s life, spending the hours sweating the blood of Gethsemane in search of the deep and personal meaning of those words, the portion wherein one’s own Fate lies sleeping – the light behind the dark shell of the sounds.  This latter thing and this alone is understanding, and it requires a choice – the comfortable life of the world or the life of risk and uncertainty.  Discovery of one’s Fate may involve matters that are hardly the most pleasant to wrestle with.  Fate may send us out into the world of the pitch-black unknown to seek knowledge in the midst of the sheer chaos of raw and wild experience – but to experience with a mission, with awareness.

The life of the intellect, when lived properly, may be a thing of danger and adventure.  To say as seriously as Death, “Que sçais-je?” and risk everything on that question is a challenge to the universe – with those words you walk out alone, beyond the protection of numbers, into the night, throw your arms wide to the stars and say, “Here I am.  Show yourself to me.”  And you have no idea whether a bright Goddess will emerge from the woods to meet you or the One who walks to and fro like a lion seeking whom he may devour.  What do you know?  Nothing, except you are tired of not knowing and that you must know.