Anyone who has ever zoned out or been caught daydreaming has experienced the incredible power and velocity their minds travel at. One second, you're thinking about rhubarb pie, and the next you're thinking about porcelain fountains. The Spanish idiom describes this situation perfectly: "
Estoy en la luna." Although the rough translation of this phrase is "I am on the moon," it is meant as "My head is in the clouds," which flawlessly explains how we can go from the earth to the moon in a matter of
seconds--all in our head. American novelist David Foster Wallace once described the human train of thought as something that is "too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant." However, the Renaissance Era philosopher known as Michel de Montaigne captures his thoughts in a collection of essays he produced throughout his life. In his essays, he manages to accurately contain his thoughts and ideas and prove Wallace wrong. Something very amusing is comparing a "messy" writer (Montaigne) with an organized writer by the name of Jane Austen, most famously known as the author of the classic novel
Pride and Prejudice. These two authors couldn't be more different in their style, as it is portrayed in their works.
Just like everyone else, Montaigne gets incredibly distracted and branches out on tangents that aren't directly related to the essay he began to write about. An example of such tangents would be in the essay entitled "On Liars." He begins this essay discussing how "evil minds" are ones that lie to others or even to itself. By the end of the essay, however, he ends up discussing memory and his own personal experiences with forgetting something important to him only to remember when it was too late. Montaigne's train of thought is painted all over the page with disorganized thoughts and ideas which is the polar opposite of Austen. Austen's work is very well organized and descriptive, sometimes taking a few paragraphs just to paint the scene of a certain part of the book. While Montaigne can go from zero to sixty then back to zero again all in the same sentence, Austen occupies an entire chapter just to hold a conversation. Chapter 8 in Pride and Prejudice is entirely a conversation between Mr. Darcy, Miss Bingley, and Elizabeth. The rate at which Montaigne and Austen complete their thoughts in their work is so distant, they make literature extend it's limits even further.
Wallace's claim that our minds are too sporadic with thoughts too be contained on paper or even verbally can be contradicted by just the diversity of topics Montaigne covers in his collection of essays. One of the topics Montaigne covers is simply about smells. Writing an entire essay about smells is not something most wouldn't ever do or even have the motivation to do. It takes a string of thought to be stretched to it's
ultimate tensile strength in order for an entire essay to be written on smells and yet, Montaigne does it with total ease. The only way he could write about something so pointless and boring is if he were writing his every thought that came into his head at that precise moment in time--which he was. Compare that to Jane Austen, and it's a cocaine-fed
cheetah vs. a napping
sloth: in terms of expression of thought. All of the ideas and thoughts are still there, its just a matter of organization and filtering out the irrelevant ones.
As American novelist David Foster Wallace writes, "What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant." This quote is perhaps the best way to describe what is seen in Michel de Montaigne's collection of essays. From an insightful outlook on sadness, to a spacey string of thoughts about smells, Montaigne never kept his mind on the leash and could have truly said, "Estoy en la luna." On the other end of the spectrum sits Jane Austen, an organized author who composes her thoughts and ideas like a maestro during an elegant symphony. The two couldn't be more different, but both are extremely influential on modern literature.
