The Runaway Horse and the Evolution of the Self

On Montaigne, idleness, writing, and the strange business of encountering our former selves

I’ve been reading Montaigne’s essay Of Idleness, and I’ve found myself rather taken with his description of what happens when he gives his mind permission to wander.

Having withdrawn from public affairs, Montaigne imagines that his mind, freed from the demands of work and obligation, will finally have the opportunity to enjoy itself. He expects a certain tranquillity, perhaps even a productive kind of leisure. Instead, he discovers something quite different.

His mind bolts.

Like a runaway horse, it races down a hundred roads, producing chimeras and bizarre monsters, one after another, without order or purpose. The moment he releases it from its duties, it becomes an unruly creature, inventing strange possibilities and following associations that seem to have no particular destination.

I recognised that horse immediately.

I suspect I’ve been riding it most of my life.

My mind has always been inclined to wander. One thought leads to another, which opens a door onto something else, which reminds me of a conversation I overheard in a café, which connects to something Nietzsche said, which sends me rummaging through an old notebook looking for a half-remembered idea that may or may not have anything to do with where I started.

By the time I return to the original thought, if I return at all, I’ve travelled a considerable distance without necessarily having gone anywhere.

For a long time, I assumed this was simply how my mind worked. An occasionally inconvenient tendency towards digression. A preference for the interesting over the immediately useful. An inability, perhaps, to leave a perfectly good rabbit hole unexplored.

But Montaigne offers another way of looking at it.

What if the wandering isn’t a failure of attention?

What if it’s attention operating according to a different logic?

What if the horse knows something the rider doesn’t?

The strange fertility of doing nothing

There’s something wonderfully subversive about Montaigne’s discovery.

He sets out to do nothing, only to discover that doing nothing is practically impossible. The mind abhors a vacuum. Deprived of external direction, it begins producing its own entertainment, its own problems, its own improbable creatures.

It’s almost as though consciousness needs something to push against, and when the world stops providing resistance, it begins inventing resistance for itself.

Montaigne is initially troubled by what he finds. His imagination produces such a procession of absurdities that he begins recording them, partly so he can examine their ridiculousness.

And there, almost accidentally, we arrive at the birth of a literary form.

The essay.

Not the schoolroom variety, with its thesis statement, three supporting arguments, and a conclusion that dutifully repeats what we’ve already been told.

The essay in its original sense. From essayer: to try, to test, to attempt.

Montaigne doesn’t need to know what he thinks before he begins writing. Writing becomes the means by which he discovers what he’s thinking.

The horse runs. He follows.

And somewhere along the way, the journey becomes the work.

I find this enormously reassuring, because I’ve never been particularly comfortable with the idea that writing should begin with certainty. I’m suspicious of the writer who already knows exactly where the essay is going. If the destination is settled before the first sentence, what remains to be discovered?

Of course, there are occasions when writing serves the straightforward purpose of communicating something we already understand. Instructions, reports, explanations. I’ve written plenty of those.

But the writing I’m most drawn to is something else.

It’s a way of thinking aloud on the page.

A means of following an idea until it changes shape, doubles back, contradicts itself, or disappears into the undergrowth, leaving me to wonder what it was I thought I was pursuing in the first place.

And sometimes, just sometimes, it emerges somewhere unexpected, carrying something I didn’t know I was looking for.

The temptation to explain everything

This brings me to Tom McCarthy.

I’ve been thinking about his fiction after reading a New Yorker essay examining his fascination with systems, structures, patterns, and the apparently endless human appetite for meaning.

McCarthy’s characters are frequently engaged in elaborate projects of interpretation. They collect information, establish connections, construct theories, and attempt to produce some definitive account of the world.

In Satin Island, for instance, a corporate anthropologist is consumed by the possibility of producing a Great Report, something capable of bringing together the bewildering multiplicity of modern life into a coherent whole.

I recognise something of myself in that ambition too.

Not because I believe a Great Report is possible, but because the desire to connect things is almost irresistible.

I have spent years writing blog posts, keeping notebooks, collecting quotations, following philosophical trails, and building what I think of as my textual underground: an expanding network of essays, fragments, memories, conversations, and associations.

I want the ideas to speak to one another.

I want a thought recorded ten years ago to encounter something I read yesterday. I want the marginal note in an old book to find its way into an essay about artificial intelligence. I want the peculiar observation made over coffee to become an unexpected doorway into a question about consciousness.

And with our increasingly sophisticated digital tools, it’s tempting to imagine that all of this could eventually become a comprehensive map of my intellectual life.

Every idea connected.

Every reference indexed.

Every association preserved.

A Great Report of the self.

But I wonder whether that would be a mistake.

Because the moment I begin trying to explain everything, I risk turning an adventure into an administrative exercise.

The textual underground should be a territory for wandering, not a machine for arriving.

Perhaps its value lies not in producing a complete account of what I think, but in preserving the conditions under which new thinking can happen.

After all, the map is never the territory.

And the horse has little interest in maps.

A long exposure of consciousness

I was discussing all this recently when I found myself describing writing as another way of letting the horse run, while also capturing a snapshot of its movement in time.

I liked that description at first.

A piece of writing preserves something fleeting. A thought that might otherwise have dissolved into the general atmosphere of consciousness gets caught on the page.

There it remains, available for inspection, while the mind that produced it continues onwards.

But the more I thought about the metaphor, the more I realised that a snapshot doesn’t quite capture what happens during the writing itself.

A snapshot freezes an instant.

Writing, at least the kind of writing I’m talking about, takes place over time. The mind moves while the sentences accumulate. An idea begins in one form and gradually becomes something else.

Perhaps the better metaphor is long-exposure photography.

Leave the shutter open and moving objects become traces. Light travels across the image. Motion, which would ordinarily disappear from one moment to the next, becomes visible as a pattern.

An essay can do something similar.

It records not merely what I thought, but the movement of thinking itself.

The diversions, hesitations, associations, sudden reversals, and occasional moments of clarity leave their marks on the page.

The resulting piece is not necessarily a faithful representation of a belief.

It’s a trace of an encounter between a mind and an idea.

And this makes the personal weblog a rather peculiar kind of philosophical instrument.

Unlike a book, which generally arrives in the world presenting itself as a completed object, the weblog remains gloriously unfinished.

Today’s post can contradict something I wrote last week.

Next month’s essay might complicate a conviction I held for twenty years.

A casual observation recorded this morning could become the seed of an entirely different understanding five years from now.

The weblog doesn’t require me to present a consistent, polished philosophical system.

It allows me to be inconsistent, exploratory, mistaken, provisional, and occasionally ridiculous.

In other words, it allows me to be human.

Meeting the people I used to be

But there’s another dimension to this that I hadn’t fully appreciated until recently.

When I return to something I wrote years ago, I don’t simply remember what I was thinking at the time.

I encounter a previous version of myself.

And these encounters can be rather strange.

Sometimes they’re reassuring.

I’ll read something from ten years ago and discover that a particular conviction, despite everything that has happened in the intervening decade, remains remarkably intact. The language might have changed. The surrounding ideas might be more sophisticated. But there is something recognisably continuous between the man who wrote those words and the man reading them now.

At other times, the experience is shocking.

I’ll come across a passage and wonder how on earth I managed to believe something so confidently. Or I’ll recognise an attitude, an assumption, a way of seeing the world that now feels almost foreign.

Who was that fellow?

What was he thinking?

And why did he sound so certain?

The temptation, of course, is to regard these moments as evidence of progress. The present self looks back upon the earlier self with the faintly smug satisfaction of someone who has finally worked things out.

But I’m not convinced that the newer version is always the wiser one.

Sometimes the earlier me understood something I’ve subsequently forgotten.

Sometimes he possessed a clarity that I’ve managed to complicate out of existence.

Sometimes he was closer to a particular truth precisely because he hadn’t yet acquired all the elaborate explanations I now carry around.

The conversation, then, isn’t simply between ignorance and enlightenment.

It’s between two different arrangements of experience.

Two versions of a person who have travelled different distances and seen different things.

And occasionally, when those versions meet, something extraordinary happens.

They evolve into something else.

Like a Pokémon.

Yes, I realise I’ve just dragged Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Tom McCarthy into the world of Pokémon, but bear with me.

The Pokémon theory of personal evolution

The conventional story of personal development is rather linear.

We begin as an imperfect version of ourselves. We learn, grow, acquire wisdom, overcome limitations, and gradually become better equipped to navigate the world.

Version 1.0 becomes Version 2.0.

The software gets upgraded. The bugs get fixed. The old system is replaced.

But that isn’t quite how I experience my own development.

There are moments when something I wrote years ago encounters something I understand today, and the interaction produces a third possibility that neither version of me could have reached independently.

It isn’t simply that the present self corrects the earlier self.

Nor is it a matter of recovering some lost wisdom.

It’s a kind of fusion.

The earlier thought contributes something. The present understanding contributes something. Their interaction generates a new configuration.

And suddenly there’s a version of me that didn’t exist before I reopened that old essay.

A philosophical Pokémon evolution.

Or perhaps a fusion, since neither version entirely disappears.

I rather like that image, absurd though it may be.

It suggests that personal growth isn’t merely the accumulation of experience but the continuing recombination of our own unfinished selves.

We don’t simply move forward through time.

We can also reach backwards, retrieve something from an earlier moment, and bring it into a new relationship with everything that has happened since.

The past is not a fixed storehouse of meanings.

It changes as we change.

Not because the events themselves change, but because the person interpreting them is never quite the same.

A memory that once meant failure can later become evidence of courage.

An old conviction that now appears naive might also reveal a neglected possibility.

A piece of writing that seemed insignificant when it was produced might suddenly become the missing piece in a puzzle I didn’t even know I was assembling.

And the curious thing is that the old essay has been sitting there all along, quietly awaiting an encounter with someone capable of reading it differently.

Even when that someone is me.

A conversation that crosses time

This is where the weblog becomes something more than a publishing platform.

It becomes a place where different versions of the self can meet.

The man writing today can enter into conversation with the man who wrote in 2016, or 2006, or whenever the archive happens to begin.

And because those conversations take place through writing, they can themselves become part of the archive, available for some future version to discover and reinterpret.

It’s a wonderfully recursive arrangement.

A conversation within a conversation, unfolding across years.

I imagine Mudtown Lion, my dishevelled metaphysical counterpart, would have something to say about all this.

He would probably be sitting in the corner of a café, hunched over a notebook, looking as though he’d just discovered a conspiracy involving the relationship between consciousness and the loyalty-card system.

“The trouble with personal growth,” he’d announce, without looking up, “is that nobody bothers to consult the previous versions before installing the update.”

He’d pause, consider his coffee, and then add:

“Besides, how do you know the earlier version wasn’t the advanced one?”

I would have to concede the point.

Because perhaps evolution isn’t always upward.

Perhaps it isn’t even directional.

Perhaps it’s simply the continuing transformation that occurs when experience encounters experience, when an old thought is brought into contact with a new one, when the person I was meets the person I am and neither emerges quite unchanged.

Back to the horse

Which brings me, by a rather circuitous route, back to Montaigne.

He withdraws from public life, hoping to find tranquillity, and discovers a runaway horse.

The mind refuses to remain still.

It gallops down unexpected roads, invents monsters, constructs fantasies, pursues peculiar associations.

So he begins writing.

Perhaps he imagines that recording these unruly thoughts will help him understand them, perhaps even bring them under control.

But more than four centuries later, here I am, encountering those thoughts and allowing them to set my own mind running.

Montaigne’s horse has escaped its original century.

It’s racing through mine.

It has carried me into a discussion of Tom McCarthy, through the architecture of my textual underground, into the strange territory of personal identity, and finally into an unlikely philosophical encounter with Pokémon.

I certainly didn’t anticipate that itinerary when I began reading Of Idleness.

And that’s rather the point.

The writing has not simply recorded a journey.

It has created one.

Perhaps this is what I love most about the essay in Montaigne’s original sense: it doesn’t require the writer to arrive with something definitive to say.

It only requires a willingness to attempt.

To follow.

To notice.

To see what happens when one thought encounters another.

And to leave behind some trace of the movement, knowing that one day a future self might return to these pages, recognise the person who wrote them, shake his head at some of his absurdities, and discover something worth carrying forward.

I wonder what he’ll make of this essay.

Perhaps he’ll find it reassuring.

Perhaps he’ll be shocked.

Perhaps he’ll have developed an entirely different understanding of consciousness, identity, and the relationship between writing and thought.

Or perhaps he’ll encounter something here that combines with whatever he has become, producing another unexpected evolution.

I rather hope so.

For now, the horse is still running.

And I have no particular desire to catch it.

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