The Horse Without a Rider

I have a standing belief that I would think beautifully if only I were left alone. Give me an empty week, the theory goes, no obligations, nothing to answer, and the good thoughts will finally arrive, the ones currently crowded out by errands. I have held this belief for years without testing it very hard, which is usually a sign that a belief is doing some other job than being true.

Montaigne tested it. In a very short early chapter of the Essays, "Of Idleness," he reports, in his own voice, what happened when he withdrew to his house meaning "to spend in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live." His plan was mine exactly. He "fancied I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure to entertain and divert itself," and he assumed it was by now "more settled and mature" and could be trusted with the afternoon.¹²

It could not. "I find that, quite contrary, it is like a horse that has broke from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to, and creates me so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design." A chimaera is the patchwork beast of Greek myth, and the word here simply means a wild fancy stitched together from nothing. He has prepared us for this. The chapter opens with fallow ground that, left to itself, grows rich only in "weeds and wild herbs that are unprofitable," and it states the principle flatly: "The soul that has no established aim loses itself."¹² So that is what the text says: leisure did not calm his mind; it unbridled it. What stings is the detail that the loose horse runs harder than any rider would have driven it. I had pictured freedom from tasks as rest. Montaigne describes it as more exertion, only pointless. I recognize this. The unclaimed hour is rarely when I think my clearest thought; it is when I compose replies to arguments nobody has made.

Then comes the last clause, which I like rather too much. He has begun to write the monsters down, "the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity," and "hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself." It, meaning his mind. And here I should be careful, because the reading that tempts me is that my own roving is secretly a book in waiting: look what Montaigne made of his. But he does not say the monsters were good. He calls them absurd, and says he is keeping a record in order to shame their maker. He is also an essayist presenting himself, and "I merely jot down my nonsense" is a pose as well as a confession; I can't tell from one page how much of each. What I can say is that the writing is not offered as the fruit of leisure. It is offered as the bridle he had to find once leisure had failed.¹²

Which leaves my theory in poor shape. I had been asking how to get more empty time. The question I'm left with is less comfortable: what, in the time I already have, is the rider? Montaigne's answer was a pen and a willingness to look at what came out. I don't know yet whether that is mine. I notice, though, that I have just written this down, and that the horse is, for the moment, standing fairly still.