Why are we together?

In the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne attempted to understand the reasons that move us to be together, whether we be frighteningly different or attractively similar. In the Municipal Library of Bordeaux is a copy of Montaigne’s Essays annotated in his hand, with corrections for the printer, which Montaigne kept by his bedside to revise it at his leisure. In the first book, in Essay 28, he had written about his relationship with Etienne de la Boetie, a dear friend who had died in 1563 at the age of thirty-three, and whose loss Montaigne had felt so deeply. “In the friendship of which I’m speaking,” Montaigne says, “souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found.” According to Montaigne, in this kind of relationship the separation between “I” and “the other” is not denied: each preserves intact his individuality and uniqueness; only that the “seam” that unites them, and which is consequently what divides one human being from the other, “cannot be found” in the eyes of the observer: it remains undetected and therefore unlabelled, free from the possibility of prejudice. This distinct invisibility, this evident but indefinable “separateness” that links two individuals in affectionate concern for one another, is what a fluid, multifaceted may strive for, not only between two but between all of its members. Before jumping to the conclusion that such relationships are impossible on so large a scale, let us ask: in what does it consist, exactly, this as-if seamless relationship? Montaigne confesses that he finds it impossible to give an answer: “If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed.” This is how the paragraph ends in the text of all editions of the Essays, up to 1588. But then, in 1592, shortly before his death, Montaigne found a sort of an answer and scribbled it on the right hand margin of the printed book. After “it cannot be expressed,” he wrote in his elegant script, “except by replying, because it was him.” That is to say, because of those qualities that identified his friend and yet remained ineffable, because of what lent him existence not because of their perceived difference but because of his intrinsic qualities. And then, a few days or months later, as if the full notion had suddenly been revealed to him, Montaigne added five more words in a hurried hand and in a different ink, so that today we can read the whole sentence as one single thought, luminous in its wisdom: “If you pressed me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed, except by replying, because it was him and because it was me.”

ALBERTO MANGUEL, The City of Words

I want the above read at my funeral.