"If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it"
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Montaigne takes the grand human panic about death and punctures it with something like a shrug. The line works because it stages a reversal: we treat dying as a skill to master, an exam we’re destined to fail, but he insists it’s the one event we’re not actually responsible for performing. The phrase “don’t bother your head about it” is doing more than soothing. It’s a quiet jab at the era’s obsessive moral bookkeeping, the anxious rehearsal of “a good death” that early modern Christians were trained to perfect through confession, last words, and proper fear.
His sly move is to deputize “Nature” as the competent professional. Not God, not priestcraft, not heroic willpower: Nature. That choice carries the subtext of Montaigne’s broader project in the Essays, where he treats philosophy less as a ladder to transcendence than as a discipline of unpretentious self-knowledge. “On the spot” and “fully and adequately” sound almost bureaucratic, like death is a service with guaranteed delivery. The humor is deliberate: by making death seem ordinary, he steals its power to dominate the living imagination.
Context matters: Montaigne writes in a France torn by the Wars of Religion, where mortality is not theoretical and certainty is weaponized. His Stoic-leaning counsel isn’t denial; it’s triage. Stop catastrophizing what you can’t control. Spend your attention on the only craft you can actually practice: living with steadiness, curiosity, and a little less self-dramatization. Death, he implies, doesn’t need your performance. It arrives with its own instructions.
His sly move is to deputize “Nature” as the competent professional. Not God, not priestcraft, not heroic willpower: Nature. That choice carries the subtext of Montaigne’s broader project in the Essays, where he treats philosophy less as a ladder to transcendence than as a discipline of unpretentious self-knowledge. “On the spot” and “fully and adequately” sound almost bureaucratic, like death is a service with guaranteed delivery. The humor is deliberate: by making death seem ordinary, he steals its power to dominate the living imagination.
Context matters: Montaigne writes in a France torn by the Wars of Religion, where mortality is not theoretical and certainty is weaponized. His Stoic-leaning counsel isn’t denial; it’s triage. Stop catastrophizing what you can’t control. Spend your attention on the only craft you can actually practice: living with steadiness, curiosity, and a little less self-dramatization. Death, he implies, doesn’t need your performance. It arrives with its own instructions.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
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