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Montaigne points out that, in the Bible, we were kicked out of Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge. Montaigne quotes Cicero rhapsodizing about the bliss of scholarship and asserting that he had learned to see the measure of things, and to be a generous man, from books about “the infinity of things, the immense grandeur of nature, the heavens in this very world.” Such books, Cicero continues, “furnish us with means to live well and happily, and guide us to pass our age without displeasure and without pain.” Cicero is claiming that knowledge and wisdom have made him happy: knowledge, meaning learned information about how the world works; and wisdom, meaning insight, generosity, and discernment. Montaigne can’t bear the arrogance. He never describes himself as this sort of hero and seems to really dislike it when others do it. He writes of Cicero that “a thousand little women in their villages have lived a more equable, sweeter, and more consistent life than his.” Montaigne cannot get over how much we do not know and how much we think we know. I doubt plowmen and village women lived happier lives than Cicero, but what is important is Montaigne’s point that for all that we praise wisdom, it is not well associated with happiness. “Man’s knowledge cannot make him happy,” he tells us, because we are not equipped with the senses and the intelligence to understand much, so that even if there were happiness in knowing what is going on, we don’t. Wisdom also fails because, in our attempt to offer wise solace, we find that thoughts, no matter how philosophical and pleasing, can only moderately affect the emotions. “Of the same sort is that other advice that philosophy gives, to keep in our memory only past happiness…as if the science of forgetfulness were in our power.”7 But Cicero, Boethius, and Stanton make a good case for book learning as a source of happiness, like a friend.

Let me tell you one more thing about learning and happiness. In 1930, Bertrand Russell wrote that happiness is of two sorts, “plain and fancy.” He explains: “Perhaps the simplest way to describe the difference between the two sorts of happiness is to say that one sort is open to any human being, and the other only to those who can read and write.” Russell’s gardener seemed siblimely happy in his eternal war against “they rabbits”; nevertheless, for Russell, “The secret to happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and personas that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.” In the world, a full 82 percent of the population today is literate. In the developed countries 99 percent can read, and thus have access to job ads, letters, magazines, and possibly even the vast ocean of words and ideas.8 Welcome to paradise. Seriously. Fancy paradise.

With all three versions of knowing yourself—Socratic questions, Freudian couch, and Boethian prison—the most difficult thing is that any sense of arrival must be preceded by years of difficult and often frustrating effort. Why is this so depressing? Doesn’t the Ivy League med student know she is on a great path to a rich life? Why is she weeping into her locker at four A.M.? The process of becoming is a strain. Indeed, if it isn’t agony some of the time, you are probably not doing it right. Plato’s Republic is a proposal for a more perfect world. In it, when Plato metaphorically drags his fellows from their cave, the sun temporarily blinds them. They get used to it.

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Control Your Desires

Montaigne lamented that for all their wisdom, some philosophers had lives that were famously blemished. The same can be said of many who have given reams of advice in modern America, from homemaking guru Martha Stewart to religious guru Jim Bakker. It’s not just that their desires got them in trouble; it is that a person ought to be able to make decisions that are contrary to their desires but otherwise obviously the right thing. If one cannot manage that,