The Montaigne diet

It finally dawned on me, only very recently, that people's idea of what their diet ought to be comes to them in much the same way as their idea of what their belief about God ought to be—from their parents and culture. Diet and dogma have much in common.
    It was appropriate, then, that I found the following quotation from Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) in John A. McDougall, M.D.'s 1985 book about diet and lifestyle, McDougall's Medicine: A Challenging Second Opinion:

Whenever a new discovery is reported to the Scientific world, they say first, "It is probably not true."
    Thereafter, when the truth of the new proposition has been demonstrated beyond question, they say, "Yes, it may be true, but it is not important."
    Finally, when sufficient time has elapsed to fully evidence its importance, they say, "Yes, surely it is important, but it is no longer new."

    McDougall's "new discovery," which he was disappointed hadn't been immediately accepted as certainly true and important (and to salve which disappointment he seems to have been in need of Montaigne's help), was that

the diet and lifestyle which best supports your natural tendencies to heal and stay healthy...is based around proper foods, moderate exercise, adequate sunshine, pure air and water, and surroundings comfortable to your psychological well-being.
    The primary component, the diet, is centered around a variety of starchy plant foods such as rice, potatoes, and pastas with the addition of fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables. Animal-derived foods and plant products that are refined or otherwise processed are not health-supporting....[p. 307, from "A Brief Summary of the McDougall Plan"]¹

This dawning calls on me to revise my eating choices, as my theological dawning called on me to amend what I believed about God.
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1. It is interesting to note that Dr. McDougall's views on health are compatible with those of Dr. Nortin M. Hadler, author of (for example) Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America, and that Dr. Hadler is scheduled to be at Dr. McDougall's Advanced Study Weekend, February 19-21, in Santa Rosa, California.
       Santa Rosa is just fifteen miles from where I went to elementary school and was taught what I should eat and believe.

Imagining I'm alive

On my commute this morning, I came across a description in the September 7 New Yorker that is a fair description of my blogging. It's Jane Kramer on the late, long essay "On Vanity" by Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)¹:

It is a meditation on dying and, at the same time, on writing—or, you could say, on writing oneself to life in the face of death, on getting "lost" in words and in "the gait of poetry, all jumps and tumblings" and in the kind of space where "my pen and my mind both go a-roaming." ("My mind does not always move straight ahead but backwards too," he says. "I distrust my present thoughts hardly less than my past ones and my second or third thoughts hardly less than my first.") And it draws pretty much the whole cast of characters from his library into the conversation....

The phrase "writing oneself to life" echoed a phrase I'd used a few days previously in an email to Joe:

If my mind isn't sparking, I feel dead. If it sparks a bit, I imagine that I'm alive. My first year working for IBM...I kept myself alive only by reading, reading, reading....

The flint of my mind is sparked by being struck by one stone or another of what I read, and my blog posts tend to be the kindling that the spark has set ablaze.
    Is it ironic that so many of my posts, produced as "writing myself to life," allude to or squarely confront my death? Only if it was ironic that Montaigne's "meditation on dying" was at the same time (to Kramer) a way of keeping himself alive in the face of death.

Previously unnoticed juxtaposition

It just struck me, the juxtaposition of my blog profile's "about me" quote from Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?

and the final stanza of Wallace Steven's poem "The Snow Man," which I quoted yesterday:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The size and age (and average temperature) of the universe, the brevity of our lives, and the finality of death do have a way of emphasizing our nothingness.
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1. "Me, Myself, and I," by Jane Kramer, in the Literary Lives column, p. 39 of the September 7 New Yorker.

"If we are to have a religion..."

In his 80's, John Mortimer (English barrister and creator of Horace Rumpole of the Old Bailey¹) published a sort of last will and testament, titled Where There's a Will. Montaignean² in its wry comment on life and culture, it reads as fresh as any of Mortimer's prose published over sixty years. Given my own current dominant theme, I was delighted by the things he had to say about religion, and I particularly liked this snippet from his final essay, "The Attestation Clause":

The meaningful and rewarding moments aren't waiting for us beyond the grave, or to be found on distant battlefields where history's made. They can happen quite unexpectedly, in a garden perhaps, or walking through a beech wood in the middle of the afternoon. If we are to have a religion, it should be one that recognizes the true importance of a single moment in time, the instant when you are fully and completely alive. [p. 180]

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1. Rumpole died with the passing of the actor Leo McKern (1920-2002), who brought him to life on British television and for me and many others will always be Rumpole.
2. Michel de Montaigne, by some credited with the invention of the essay, published his first collection in 1580.