FOLLOWING MONTAIGNE’S FOOTSTEPS – The art of lightness

440 years after Michel de Montaigne, day by day and following the same route, I retraced his footsteps to escape from the world of Trump, Covid and algorithms. 2500 kilometres from Bordeaux to Rome covered in over five months, from June to December 2020, riding my mare, Destinada (or Desti). This is an extract from my travel diary.

In everyday life, I love rococo palaces, linen jackets and English clubs. In short, I am a snob, as in Boris Vian's song, which read:

"I am a snob

I ride my horse every morning

because I love the smell of dung".

However, after two months of riding “with my ass on the saddle” - as Montaigne elegantly wrote - I had to revise my convictions. Constrained and forced, I learned the opposite of snobbery: the art of lightness.

To ease my burden, my luggage was reduced to the essentials: two T-shirts, two briefs, two pairs of socks, two trousers, a rain gear and a six-hundred-gram tent. Come to think of it, even the caretaker's shirt seems superfluous and could end up in rags.

I share the first aid kit with my mare (including the thermometer: to be disinfected after use).

My farrier's equipment has been mercilessly shortened with a hacksaw. My stainless steel fork had also been cut in half to save weight. I eventually got rid of it: what good is a fork when you have a spoon?

My body has embraced this lightening process, effortlessly losing the extra fifteen kilos. Like Montaigne, I can even forget my pain (stone disease for him, tinnitus for me). As for Desti, she doesn't have a useless buckle on her saddle, the quarters of which have been sacrificed to make room for simple bumpers, while the net can be turned into a halter at will.

From this attention to purification in every sphere springs a form of aesthetics.

Despite the holes that are beginning to appear, my merino wool T-shirts are of refined sobriety. My jeans have the beautiful look of real denim (the Japanese have recently brought it back into vogue). My very soft Australian hat is marked by scratches from the branches and the leather of its harness glistens in the sun.

"Cowboy, where's your colt?" a digger shouted at me as I crossed the Marne. However, I did not try to disguise myself. Obeying the strict canons of horsemanship, I spontaneously adopted the style of the cattlemen. In the absence of a colt, I pull out my Swiss Army knife.

Having nothing too much, I lack nothing.

It's a satisfaction that Montaigne, a reader of the Stoics, knew well: “One must have a rare sensibility to taste the goods of fortune. It is tasting them, not possessing them, that makes us happy.”

I savour what is offered to me along the way, knowing that I will take nothing with me. As I no longer have a fixed abode, I avoid the temptation to accumulate things.

When the municipality of Epernay asked me to fill in an authorisation form for image rights, I indicated "itinerant" as my address. This seemed the most precise answer.

Why is this question asked so often? Aren't we “at home” wherever we settle?

I have lost the habit of taking the keys out of my pocket. I have slept in yurts, tents, caravans, tepees, in a mobile home, in a living room under construction, in a grape-pickers' dormitory, in a pilgrim shelter inhabited by bats...

A roof and a source of water are enough to make me happy.

The only thing that matters to me now is the warmth of a welcome.

So I share Montaigne's distaste for abundance: the misery of our time: “It is not famine,” he writes, “but rather abundance that produces greed”.

With my needle and thread, it is now a matter of honour for me to repair rather than buy more.

My relationship with money has been reversed. As a snob, I used to spend generously. Now, however, I carefully examine every label. Not to gain 'purchasing power' but, on the contrary, to get closer to the right price: the one paid by the producer rather than the middlemen.

Paying five euros for a plastic 'fresh salad' when you can, in the same shop, buy two tomatoes, eggs and a cucumber for three times less, seems to me the height of vanity. Isn't this, after all, what economics is all about? The science of exchange, as opposed by Aristotle to chrematistics, understood as the mere urge to accumulate?

The shedding of material goods corresponds to an emotional lightening. I have plenty of time to think about my loved ones, plenty of time to reassure them of my love, but I do not miss them, in the sense that lack is a sad feeling, a symptom of incompleteness.

“One must have a wife, children, possessions and above all health,” Montaigne recommends, “but not become attached in such a way that our happiness depends on them, because the greatest thing in the world is to know how to be for oneself”.

This solipsism is anything but selfishness. It is a way of being in harmony with oneself, autonomous, free, which allows everyone to be more open to others.

When a friend accompanies me on my route (often on a mountain bike, a good way to follow a horse), I rejoice. When he says goodbye to me at the station, leaving me alone on the platform, I feel no regrets, not even the slightest anxiety.

I enter my back room, as Montaigne used to say, which awaits me very fresh, very clean, with the ever-fulfilled promise of a long interior monologue. Isn't this the very purpose of the journey: “to give yourself plenty of time to take care of yourself”?

On the contrary, the relational vortex in which society plunges us, the thousands of virtual friends we “like” right into our bedrooms, do they not testify to a debilitating inability to be alone?

Why are we running away from ourselves?

What is true for the body is also true for the mind. Little by little, I rationed my spiritual food. I have given up newspapers, but also books. In eight weeks I have only read one on my Kindle (Bartabas, by Jérôme Garçin), for lack of time but also lack of desire. Now I prefer to sew a folder, study my route or let my mare graze.

"To richly fulfil the vow of poverty, adding to it the vow of the spirit", wrote Montaigne, who hated scholars, pedants, and self-absorbed ignorant people.

One must know how to cultivate one's own experience, forgetting for a while the piles of academic studies and analyses, too academic, whose sophisticated concepts turn into blinkers.

The erudite Montaigne also knew how to reject the thoughts of others.

What do we think about on the road, six to eight hours a day? A thousand logistical trifles. A few obsessions that return, throbbing. Big unanswered questions. But also nothing.

This is the miracle of thought in motion, a gratuitous pleasure sought after from Rousseau to Houellebecq, via Nietzsche: making the mind fly.

For example, I found myself becoming music. As I was leaving Loisy-sur-Marne, for a good ten minutes only a slow and serious melody played in a continuous loop in my head: the last movement of Beethoven's last sonata (the unattainable opus 111). The patter of hooves kept time. Desti was a conductor and my subconscious a concert pianist. I woke up as I approached a bridge over the Marne, full of nothing.

I don't want to make minimalism an absolute rule of life: I cheat a little.

Non voglio fare del minimalismo una regola di vita assoluta: baro un po'.

Instead of Au Vieux Campeur sandals, I brought ‘furlane’ with me: Venetian slippers with rubber soles and velvet fabric, Modigliani model, in 'anarchic purple' colour. I wear them every step of my way. It is with these cardinal shoes that I stir the hay and piss on the brambles.

You will excuse me for this discreet and yet snobbish relapse: I dream of enjoying a smoked whisky in an English club on my return but, just as the Stoics indulged in voluntary cures of poverty, I will continue to reserve spaces or times to feel lighter.

"Antifragility!", Nassim Taleb would exclaim, advising us to cultivate a rigorous resilience, building a material and moral refuge where we can hole up in times of crisis. "Wisdom", Montaigne would say more simply. He called it a "constant joy"...

In copertina: Gaspard e Destinada
immagini per gentile concessione di Gaspard Koenig