Michel de Montaigne loves to repose.
There is nothing that ought so much to be recommended to youth as activity and vigilance: our life is nothing but movement. I bestir myself with great difficulty and am slow in everything, whether in rising, going to bed, or eating.
Seven o’clock in the morning is early for me, and where I rule, I never dine before eleven nor sup till after six. I formerly attributed the cause of the fevers and other diseases I fell into to the heaviness that long sleeping had brought upon me, and have ever repented going to sleep again in the morning. Plato is more angry at excess sleeping than at excess drinking. I love to lie hard and alone, even without my wife, as kings do, and well covered with clothes. Since I have grown old, I receive warm cloths to lay at my feet and stomach when I need them. They found fault with the great Scipio because he was a great sleeper—not, in my opinion, for any other reason than because men were displeased that he alone should have nothing in him to be found fault with. If I am fastidious in my way of living, it is rather in my lying than in anything else, but generally I give way and accommodate myself as well as anyone to necessity. Sleeping has taken up a great part of my life, and I yet continue, at the age I now am, to sleep eight or nine hours together. I wean myself to my advantage, from this propensity to sloth, and am evidently the better for so doing. I find the change a little hard indeed, but in three days it is over, and I see but few who live with less sleep, when need requires, and who more constantly exercise themselves, or to whom long journeys are less troublesome. My body is capable of a firm agitation but not of a violent or sudden one. I evade of late violent exercises and such as make me sweat, when my limbs grow weary before they are hot. I can stand a whole day together, and am never weary of walking, but from my youth, I have ever preferred to ride upon paved roads. On foot, I get up to the breech in dirt, and little fellows as I am are subject in the streets to be elbowed and jostled, for want of presence. I have ever loved to repose myself, whether sitting or lying, with my heels as high as or higher than my seat.
From “Of Experience.” In 1571 Montaigne retired to his family’s castle near Bordeaux, tired of “the slavery of the court and of public duties,” and began his writing career, declaring that a self-portrait could be done just as comprehensively with a pen as with a paintbrush. “I give my soul now one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it,” he writes elsewhere in his Essays.
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