French Passions: Will Self on Montaigne

I'm very very moved and I'm very mu as we say in French as the series French passions is about to kick off for a very simple reason I'm going to be very straightforward on this you are so many here this evening and it's really important for us because I don't know why you came actually I don't know if you can now I mean I don't know if you came because you wanted to listen to yourself or maybe you are big fans of Montaigne I don't know I just know one thing and it's about myself I'm so happy to be able to listen to will self talking about Martin to have both these writers even one is dead obviously both here at the LCD for say tonight because that's the whole point of French passions of the series it's about reading within you you know but books books nurturing our lives being at the core of our lives and if you are so many so number tonight it's because obviously you share the feeling and that that's a good thing now I want to thank both Don King from the independent because voyage was very supportive from the start with this project and he eventually accepted to chair a series so I'm very thankful for that and above all I want to thank with self because apart from being one of my favorite writers he immediately said yes when I got in touch with him he wasn't you know afraid you know he could have thought what are these crazy French people you know how we are yelling at each other discussing literature over and over you know frivolous so thank you Boyd thank you will and let's do it with the meeting of will self under Montaigne we have a not so much a bat of the Giants I think we have more a marriage of true minds which of course is a phrase from one of Montagnes earliest in the warmest British fans a certain William Shakespeare and before it's hard to introduce I'll try all the same I don't think there's a more versatile or inventive writer at work in the English language today a write of enormous audacity of quite gleeful contempt for the boundaries between genres someone who always stimulates always excites and always takes us to places psychological social artistic but we have certainly never visited before I was just looking I realized that it's 20 years since well published his first book the quantity theory of insanity followed by other fictions such as cock-and-bull my idea fun great apes how the dead live the book of Dave by several collections of short stories and by nonfiction collected in books such as junk mail feeding frenzy and psychogeography which is based on an a column in the independent then last year we had walking to Hollywood a sort of personal mission or expedition where I really wouldn't quite know if I were a librarian or book shall sell aware to shelve it which i think is is part of the point now the third person on our platform this evening died in 1592 but his influence is certainly in the english-speaking and English writing world perhaps more visible and prominent than ever there have amazingly in the past 12 months been three popular books explaining and exploring the life and work of Montaigne quite why this should be I'm not sure since I can't see that there's any obvious anniversary but it just goes to show how present his Spirit is for us now I don't want to overload you with information in advance among montains 107 fantastic essays there is a very funny one on pedantry and i don't intend to to go down that road so it would be much more in the spirit of Montaigne to start with some words of his own and I think we'll has an extract that he wants to read Montaigne of course battled a lot to express his own humility in the essays sometimes with considerable success but not always all together credibly as he I think when the fascinating things about the essays is that they were remained inchoate right up to Montagnes death and even beyond his death so the many many glosses that he added over the years he reaches this kind of backwash position as a writer where of course he's become famous while he's still working on the essays I've decided to read this this comes from with the penguin when they reached their 60th anniversary brought out a nice tiny little book of four essays of Montagnes and this is a little selection from on the art of conversation that that struck me for reasons that I'll explain but I'll just read it to you first look and see who wield most power in our cities who do their jobs best you will find that they are usually the least clever there have been cases where women children and lunatics have ruled their states equally as well as the most talented princes course men more usually succeed in such things says lucida sees better than the subtle ones do we ascribed the deeds of their good fortune to their wisdom at quisque way Fortuna uh Teeter Eater pry Kellett earthquakes in de sapere Ilham omnes de Simas each outstanding man is raised by his good fortune we then say that he is clever that is why I insist that in all our activities their outcomes provide meager testimony of our Worth and ability now I was just about to say that it merely suffices for us to see a man raised to great dignity even though we know him three days before to be a negligible man there seeps into our opinions unawares a notion of greatness of talents and we convinced ourselves that by growing in style and reputation he has grown in merit our judgments of him are not based on his worth but as is with the case with counters of an abacus on the tokens of rank let his lack turn again let him have a fall and be lost in the crowd again then we all ask in wonder what had made him saw so high is this the same man we asked did he not did he not know more about it when he was up there our prince is satisfied with so little we were in good hands instead indeed we were that is something I have seen many times in my own days why even the mask of greatness which is staged in our plays effects are somewhat and deceives us what I worship in Kings is the crowd of their worshippers everything should bow and submit to our Kings accept our intelligence my reason was not made for bending and bowing my knees were I read that section and then that night I dreamt I had a dream that it used to be said I think probably 25 or 30 years ago that all British men and at one time or another had an erotic dream about the Queen curiously you don't hear that said quite so much nowadays but that night after reading that passage of Montaigne I had if not an erotic dream about the Queen I had a dream about the Queen and it was slightly erotic Lee tinged I have to say that the Queen was played by Tilda Swinton in my dream and approached me with her retinue all of us in in approximate late Renaissance Montaigne Ian garb and addressed me in very familiar tones and chided me for my republicanism and I found myself in the dream struck by the Queen's bearing her wit a great tilda swinton esque beauty her a pursue and at the end of our chat it was a sort of receiving line I found myself breaking out in a sweat as I bent my knee and called her Your Majesty and and awoke from this dream incredibly upset as you can imagine and realize pretty quickly well as I went downstairs that it was the impact of Montagnes observations on monarchy which preoccupied him throughout his writing that it had had this influence on me and I thought this is what people are talking about when they talk about the kind of customary acceptance of monarchies in that way but more disturbingly I then turned on the radio and there was the news of the by-election results from Oldham and I found myself still in a Montaigne Ian mindset as I listen to this he goes on in that passage to decry what he calls rule by the mob as well and I found myself listening to these by election results and thinking that maybe I didn't really believe in democracy either anymore so that for me in a way sums up I mean there are very few writers I mean nobody's subconscious is of much interest to anybody else unless you pay them but but it did seem to me that that was very strange I couldn't imagine a writer who would infiltrate my mind not just as a series of images or as a kind of procession of conceits or but actually penetrated intellectually into my dream life and how do you think he does that is it to do with the way that he constructs an argument is that the sense of going on journey with him following the movement of his mind so that he's taking you to places to destinations that you never expected to reach when he said so I think it is absolutely to do with that this is the translation by MA screech and I'm not really competent to say how close it is to to the original Montaigne but I think it is absolutely that quality of him as a writer of feeling that you are standing at his shoulder or more exactly that you're engaged in some kind of strange conversation with him and that no holds are barred that he will take on a subject and if he begins to feel that he has nothing to say about it he'll interpolate something else if he wants to go deeper into it he'll go deeper into it if something else occurs to him and it is the free play of his mind that is insourcing in that way that seems to entrace one what was this an instant hit with you when you first discovered him it was it love at first I had a kind of odd introduction to Montaigne I can't claim to be you know I started reading Montaigne in my early 30s and I'd been I wouldn't say ignorant of him up until that point but I hadn't read him and I didn't have a great awareness of him and I went to live on a remote Scots island in in the Orkney Islands and one of the books I took with me was was ma screeches at that time relatively new translation of the essays and I was very isolated on this island I was completely on my own in a remote house and I picked up the essays and felt that companionship that many people have commented on in relation to Montaigne almost instantly it was a kind of it felt like a kind of kismet because there I was completely isolated and here was a book that supplied me with the most acute sense of the presence of another psyche imaginable and I've never read Montaigne systematically what I did then was to turn to the essays that had arresting titles and plunge into them and rather like Montaigne himself when I felt myself in some sense flagging I'd read another bit and it became part of the ritual of my day and I've continued that relationship with Montaigne in the subsequent 20 odd years has it been roses all the way have there been fallings out moments where you felt slightly separate from from him or has the intimacy always persist I think the intimacy has persisted but the strange thing and I think it kind of comes back to the passage I'd read and in a way I probably should have gone on and read what he says about it's kind of abhorrent of course at that time in you know late 16th and early 17th century France the concept of democracy as we understand it wasn't quite the same idea but I think the reason why I thought my dream was so interesting was because he's so succeeded in taking me into his perspective including his own time that I started to view you know our form of democracy from a Montaigne Ian's perspective which was why it started to become quite abhorrent to me by which I mean to say that that that such he is his ability to time travel as a writer to feel psychically present that you're quite pulled up short I mean even in reading that passage when he says that you know he has seen women rule effect you know there are some people who like to to present Montaigne as a proto feminist you can you can present him as a proto environmentalist you can a proto this a proto that but you know there are moments when you know reading that passage when I thought oh that's a bit that's a bit misogynistic of you Montaigne you know you're kind of pulled up because you feel he must be with you that he doesn't share all of your sensibilities but that's not an alienation from him as a person I don't think it's more that that what is that the one reads him as a friend not as a guru I don't think you you read him as a guru though of course that is to take him out of his time because his impact as a philosopher was enormous and incredibly influential I mean just on you know the two next key figures in French philosophy to come along I mean des car was absolutely overpowered by by by Montaigne and constructed the discourses entirely as an aim to refute Montaigne and of course Pascal as well was desperate to kind of deal with the problems that Montaigne threw up and I think that one of the most interesting things about Montaigne is that of course there is if not a systematic and architectonic philosophy a very evolved philosophy there in the essays but the funny thing is for me of course it is that both there cotton and Pascal asked their scandalized by Montaigne their scandalized by his intimacy by his apparent lack of system by his as you say the star going accept skepticism but dissolves all overarching concepts and is this one reason why he feels so contemporary to us that we are reaching back beyond the age of absolutist philosophical systems to the idea of thought as process I think that's absolutely true and the interesting thing about Montaigne Ian's skepticism is and I think his skepticism is as radical and as thorough going as David Humes I mean it's it's there in every linear Montand it's when when one reads Hume and comes across the word God one takes it with an entire packet of Maldon sea salt you can almost hear the sort of rather dry Edinburgh Ian tones sort of wringing it out with Montaigne and this kind of hinges really on the apology for Raymond's sea bond and his whole kind of attitude towards natural religion there are a lot of equivocations to be to be made about his relationship with his Catholicism about his relationship with God but setting all of that to one side I think that Montaigne is is in many ways the most complete skeptical thinker imaginable I think nothing stands before him no his understanding of the power of convention on the way people behave is absolutely you know without parallel and do you also as I find reading him it means that the term he is able to sympathize the trouble of sympathy is now quite a weak word but but to to understand not only what it's like to be another kind of person but to be another kind of animal possibly what it's like to be a flower or a tree that along with the skepticism about the grand ideas goes incredible paths of identification with other forms of life yeah well I mean it's interesting I mean I think the second of these recent books on on Montaigne I'm trying to remember the name of the guy who wrote it's also frampt Sol Frampton's folk takes as its title that famous tag from Montana how do I know when I'm playing with my cat that my cat isn't playing with me a very subversive statement and it's interesting how ingrained our attitudes you know or how successful we might argue de car was in reducing animals to the level of automata you know I said this to my nine-year-old son the other day that Montaigne e'en tag and he said he didn't miss a beat and he said I said how do I know when I'm playing we don't have a cat we have a dog with the dog that the dog isn't playing with me and he said because it's a dog stupid which sort of which kind of throws Montagnes line into such greats aliens because if a nine-year-old child is so inculcate it with that kind of speciesism then it shows you how how I mean I suppose you could argue now Montaigne was a famously loved riding was happier in the saddle he writes a great deal about his relationship with horses and of course it's an era in which relationships with the natural world were less mediated than our own I mean you can go in this great city of ours from one year to the next barely encountering another species at all but but all that being said it was it was still incredibly subversive of him to to dare that and I think I think that too I think I think of all the proto's that are set up on his behalf that idea that he felt an instinctive commonality with all of creation amounting to an environmental consciousness is probably the most valid and are there any moments where you feel the opposite where you are acutely conscious of the four hundred years of cultural change that separate us from him I mean you mentioned ideas of democracy and so forth are there other areas where you feel he really is back there in his tower in them Bordeaux but I can't reach him I think that's the paradox of Montaigne the truth of the matter is I always feel that and I'm rather struck by the way in which all of those three books that have been published recently again all of them set Montaigne up as a kind of proto blogger you know they use that image of the way in which the Internet has has kind of allowed everybody to publish their kind of intimate thoughts in that way to the world as a kind of paradigm in a way for us to sort of understand what the Montaigne Ian project is and I rather resist there I find that a rather suspect idea partly because I think there is no kind of comparison between the kind of early print age in which he was working and thinking and conceptualizing of what he did and the kind of post print electronic age within which people blog I think I don't think that's the right model for what's going on between reader and writer and what what the writer intends but more than there and far more importantly when you read Montaigne you know you're with a late you know Renaissance mind immediately because of the way in which he thinks about what it is to know things and he thinks about what it is to know things absolutely solidly within the context of classical understanding and classical knowledge there isn't probably more than four or five mine's in any of the essays where he doesn't quote usually from a latin writer because he was fluent in Latin and had the greatest you know commerce with those or authors or from from a Greek writer usually translated into Latin and that is so unlike the way in which we tend to think and right now we don't think in a way we don't require things to be substantiated by a kind of valency in that way but but don't you think there's a kind of constant dialectic it yet yes he's quoting Plutarch he's quoting key Citadis or whoever and then he will tell you about kind of his headache or what the dog is doing or that there was a hailstorm last night so that there's this constant switching between authority and experience yes that that's right but I suppose what I'm saying here is is the paradox for me is that that while he seems very present to me more present as a writer I think yeah the other two writers who I feel are uncannily present are Byron in his journals I mean everybody has their own thing but for me and peeps in his Diaries but the way in which Montaigne is present to me is both as if he's here and as if he is speaking to me from his own age and I think again that's kind of almost a function of timing I mean he is in a kind of midpoint I mean not actually a chronological midpoint but he seems to me to be in a midpoint between the classical world and our own and that he's acting as a kind of condensing flask of this kind of ancient wisdom and as a kind of pre-modern or very early modern mind in uniting it with the free play of his immediate experience and in terms of his modernity I suppose now when we have such an endless sort of circulation of books about the body and everything that go that can go wrong with it and because he was one of the first persister matically to write about his own physical incarnation and his ailments and and his weaknesses and thus that strike you as being particularly close to us I in a way I suppose he was able to write about the body because he was in a position of relative comfort I mean despite this his experience of his great friend's death at an early age and and the many children that he and his wife lost in infancy and this kind of seminal experience he had of being kind of not from his horse and seriously injured and then in the latter part of his life the growing problem with the stone which of course afflicted peeps as well peeps under underwent the operation for the stone I don't think that was probably an option for Montaigne so you know that his was not a life as we know from the essay is devoid of physical pain it was not so fantastically saturated with it and saturated with the bodily that he wasn't able to achieve some kind of distance from it so again yes I think that is one of the kind of modern aspects of Montaigne that that he he has enough repose up there in the tower in his circular room to be able to place his own physical sensations under the microscope of his prose do you think he has anything in particular to teach us about attitudes to religion broadly conceived in other words the the convictions that other people have and how they relate to our own well I think in many ways that's that's the philosophic nub of Montaigne I think that's obviously what upset Pascale quite so much and and I think that it's a very difficult area to enter into and you're never sure with Montaigne whether he's not just covering his back you know he the essays were began at a period of really dreadful kind of internee sign religious wards it was a period in which the equivalence between religion and political ideology was was more or less exact and you know that there are many people I think even today who really want to do a strange thing with Montaigne they want to take all the skepticism in and the full weight of the skepticism and somehow they leave him it reminds me of kind of English Tories in the old sense they still want to leave him with the old religion sort of wrapped around him and even in that passage I read there though it isn't directly about religion his attitude towards monarchy seems C can be read as being redolent of that the idea is you know we must we must accept that everything is convention and therefore to be we must be sceptical about it but at the end we still need some convention and that seems to be what he's saying about his relationship with Catholicism but I'm not really convinced I can't help but feel that so thoroughgoing it's his understanding of how contingent all of these things are that I can't quite help but believe that he he really was a religious skeptic as well a skeptic in the sense of actually not believing in a personal God or what we might call an agnostic someone who is intellectually thinks it's intellectually impossible to reach a position of faith oh I'm not quite sure I agree with your definition of what an agnostic is I would say an agnostic was was was somebody who quite simply didn't know where and I think that's what Montaigne is but of course I would say that being an agnostic myself and I wanted you know and I think everybody's urges is to somehow remake Montaigne in their own image and that's the part of the problem of his intimacy I do know that and when I read the accounts that wish to leave him with the old religion Garba him I feel kind of irritated and I think we'll my Montaigne you know he wouldn't he wouldn't have done that but but for it being part of the customary you know as customary his sort of drinking Vittal at last atutor I'll say you know if that's what I think montains Catholicism is is like yes but would it be fair to characterize him as a kind of conservative in that however thoroughgoing his skepticism he thinks there is a point to take through all the conventional stuff I mean he served in the Palermo in Bordeaux he was narrow Bordeaux he was a diplomat he kind of ran his estate there was no sense that he was in conscious revolt on the level of behavior against his time no that's absolutely right and that's why I say I'm guilty of trying to remake him in my own image and again it's this problem of his astonishing intimacy as a writer that leads you into the trap again and again if not you know accepting that he's absolutely his own man and he's doing his own thing and I think that's right he is a conservative with a small C and a very he believes and he is seen so powerfully the kind of effects of anarchy and of misrule that he doesn't really want any part of it at all he wants he wants again it's a paradox he wants us to be able to absolutely question convention but to understand its value at the same time and its value particularly in you know you know de Tocqueville's maxim was really made for Montaigne you know the law is there to dissuade our worst impulses not encourage our best and I think that would be Montagnes position as well and when it comes to his account of the pleasures of life ring is true now as it would have done for him in that he is he's kind of such a wonderful writer to tell you how to enjoy a glass of wine or a walk in the country or a ride on his horse yes I mean I think that's that's the point at which you know again I think that the the three books that came out recently in English have managed to sort of swerve round it but I'm sure somewhere in the milder reaches of the self-help section of the bookstore there'll be somebody who'll soon enough write a book called you know how how Montaigne can make you happy and fulfilled you know something rather grotesque like that but the truth you know but but the truth of matter is that that is why we go to Montaigne it's because braided in with this intense observation of the play of his own thought braided in with this formidable erudition braided in with this you know strong philosophic scepticism that is evolved but so lightly worn in the prose that it slides up on you is this fantastic sensuality and this almost you know kind of mystical appreciation of the quotidian and of the value of the cotillion and the enjoyment of it and and you know I think I think that that he responded to the loss of I can never print now I don't know the correct pronunciation Bertie his great friend when he was a young man and to his own near-death experiences in a way that we all wish we could respond to such things by by being you know by living just for the day in that way and again and again throughout the essays you're pulled back into the immediacy of experience in a very very sensual way and of course it's an absolutely timeless and you know this is why you know somebody even somebody is abject ly up as nature could find you know great solace in Montaigne and sort of said it was an indispensable always carried Montaigne with him you know somebody is off with the fairies as nature and the bad fairies does Montaigne ever disappoint you are there ever moments where you feel that he is not living up to his best self or to our expectations or his wisdom no I don't think there are actually I mean I don't think there are and and the reason for that is because he's so upfront about his method and his own failings I mean I think sometimes I'd rather clumsily was trying to say that at the beginning because what you have and in for example in MA screeches translation there is some disputes now about the different levels of writing and rewriting and and you know what is absolutely definitive in terms of the essays I don't think there is a definitive version but you do have this odd phenomenon that you can definitely pick out later on his his glosses on the essays that are later at the point at which they've become an enormous hint you sometimes feel that his humility has become a little strained I mean he is a kind of you know relatively speaking a kind of literary superstar towards the end of his life and when he writes when he writes with humility and it's early you totally buy it when he writes with humility later on you feel hang on a minute I know I'm not sure I you know you're always saying you're so stupid and that you know nothing and hang on a minute these have been a great here and you must have some understanding of the impact they've had at this point but that being noted because he never sets out to system build because he never sets out to be definitive because he never sets out to hold himself up as an simpler of a superior kind of humanity but only as an exemplar of humanity quar humanity he can never disappoint but almost by definition and if you start reading Montaigne and you experience lodger and you think oh this is a bit boring then then he makes it you free to put him down he never makes that claim on you that so many books do either through an arch tectonic or through a hectoring tone all through the weather that you are compelled to stay on them in fact in in the essay I just read from a little later on he observes of himself he said he sat down and read and reread Tacitus is history at one sitting and he says almost as an aside this was the first time I had read any book for more than an hour at a time in the last 20 years so at that point you know you're in good company if you want to put him down after half an hour or 45 minutes which is an incredible relief actually to experience it and that's why I've been able to sort of continue this almost relationship of a vastly extended flirtation with Montaigne because he licenses you to pick him up and put him down and obviously we started off with reading are there any if you were faced with a Montaigne virgin are there any particular essays you would recommend as the best way in oh well I mean obviously the the short ones I mean it's very difficult I mean the apology for Roman sea bond which is really the crux of Montaigne and and the most evolved statement of his philosophic position his attitudes towards religion comes with a lot of baggage oddly for Montaigne in other words it's very difficult to engage with it unless you know something about the religious wars of its period you know something about Reformation and you know the counter-reformation and all those kinds of things whereas to read Montaigne on thumbs or on smells you really don't need anything and indeed the the process for people who are perhaps not so learning in those areas is of being opened up in a rather delicious way by these very very short essay so I think just start with the short ones start with the ones that are on if you like quitted IANA that they don't seem to be too highly pitched but even there's the first essay in this little volume on the cannibals which is enormously important for Montaigne I mean it's this very very radical statement of what would be called today cultural relativism dirty word in our own Imperial and aggrandizing era but you know Montaigne absolutely subscribes the idea that there's no intrinsic difference between the americans from brazil that he encounters and anybody else that's a good way in I think on the cannibals as well and of course for for an English reader that is the essay that Shakespeare quotes virtually verbatim in The Tempest yes we had Jonathan bait on on radio three last night lecturing on Shakespeare and Montaigne and it's it's very very thrilling when you realize the very very close charged relationship that Shakespeare must have had creatively and intellectually with Montaigne I mean it's it's almost like you know sort of watching two fantastically sexy film stars making love to each other or something it's a kind of it's a kind of philosophic Warrior ISM of a very very high order and I think bate Illustrated it very well but in fact montains influence it seems to me it's very pervasive particularly in French culture and I was thinking when listening to bate lecture on on Montaigne and Shakespeare last night I was thinking I'd like to hear a lecture because I've been rereading seminal recently I'd like to hear a lecture on seminal and more maintain because actually or rather Montaigne and McCrae because when you think about it meg ray is a Montaigne Ian detective he's absolutely obsessed by the free play of his mind he's obsessed by in media res just he has to be in the place he's not interested in logic Oh deductive systems he's obsessed by the sensual and the quotidian in life and indeed seminar in reflecting their grain even in the Roman der is doing exactly the same thing I mean I've never seen it ever written up that the seminar was influenced by Montaigne but I think it an almost inescapable conclusion we have this travel journal that was actually dictated to his secretary when he when he undertook these travels towards the end of his life but it's not really kind of systematically there in the essays this I had this idea of travel I mean it is definitely and what's fascinating I think from what we know about the journal was how kind of enthusiastic he was as a tourist he was like a kind of you know he was like the kind of guy who wants the adventure option rather than anything else and wants to to to really you know absorb the cultures he's traveling through and and I obviously but I think he comes to that relatively late in life he doesn't do this big journey until he's into his 50s and the bulk of the essays have in fact been written in that way so I suppose that's why I didn't automatically occur to me I love the little a point that he makes about the size of wine club in Germany they're too big in Italy they're too small well I mean that sums it all up doesn't it we understand the world not as you know theoretical physicists would ask us to understand it as a mathematical construct that we can apprehend from outside and we don't necessarily understand it perhaps us as poets would like us to understand it as a series of elusive and and metaphoric remarks from which we move to understanding the meta friend we understand it absolutely as agents and we understand it not only as agents by lifting up vital bottles and putting on our pants and coming to the attitude font size we also understand it as actors in the drama of our own mind and I think he does very very much begin to do you get the feeling through the essays that he he's been linked himself I've really kind of cracked something here I really do understand something very profound but but again it takes somebody who is at least instinctively I mean again is interesting about his is kind of read Toryism if you like it takes somebody who is in many ways and again going back to the passage I read in the beginning who absolutely sees through the pretensions of power in all its forms and the kind of the kind of vanities of the world to be able to pull it off you know to be able to be in their practice one thing that's very much missing from our understanding of Montaigne and it's something that actually if you get the opportunity to read ma Screech's introductory essay to his translation of the essays I think he writes about very well where is actually the three recent books even is it Sarah Bradford even even her book I think it's the best of the three in a way and attempts to give a very rounded picture of Montaigne I don't think she gets either is is that I don't think we can altogether take it word about his relationships with other people you know what we do know is that he was engaged in some quite nasty litigation with his mother that he had a weekend we can only assume that his relationship with his wife was quite distant in all sorts of ways so you know if we you know if we if we work on a character based on Montaigne on his own estimation I don't think we'd be necessarily approaching what he was possibly like thank you very much for Thank You Boyd thank you you

Channel: Culturetheque IFRU

Views: 28,990

Rating: 4.8232932 out of 5

Keywords: Michel De Montaigne (Author), Will Self (Author), Literature (Media Genre), French Literature (Field Of Study), French (Language In Fiction)

Id: a-Gzpmr5dAU

Length: 48min 4sec (2884 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/King_Atreides]

I like him better when he talks about cucumbers. He seems like a guy who doesn't know enough people who aren't philosophers and writers.

[u/ForgottenPotato]

took me way too long to realise Will Self was the name of the person.

[u/SexyPatrickDuffy]

Losing people to save the world.

[u/DirtyBeachTV]

I had a discussion with Will Self during a walk down Oxford street about politics. He seemed to think that in the next 100 years we will lose a big percentage of the human population to war or famine. I tried to argue that if we had a more socialist and ethical government we could end war and poverty. After all, the world grows enough food and to provide for everyone. His retort was a chimpanzee or sick insect can no more change their future environment than we can.

While mulling this over after we went our separate ways, I realised this would only apply if humans did not build this civilisation. I like Will and would love to know if he believes our government is run by aliens or reptilian beings. Meaning the monkey people have no power any more than the animals we keep in our farms or zoos. If not than I believe he was wrong and humans are capable of influencing our collective destiny.