Martha Lyon just posted this as her facebook status, and it struck me quite favorably:
Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.
Upon cross examination, she revealed that this quote’s author is Nicolas Chamfort — a French playwright, and a contemporary (and fickle courtier) of Louis XIV. The sentiment is lovely — that the best life is one lived close to the heart, relatively uncontaminated by the cold and exacting influence of logical deliberation, or the alienating effect of metacognition. I find that part of my mind buys into this.
Unfortunately, after his days as a courtier he fell in with the revolutionaries — he was amongst the first to storm into the Bastille in the first, heady days of the Revolution. Unfortunately, his loyalty to revolutionary causes was too sane to follow the fanaticism of the Terror, and his satirical tongue, unrestrainable, got him in trouble. He was imprisoned; then after release, the authorities issued another warrant for his arrest (fie, seditious tongue!). Poor Chamfort decided to take his own life.
Sadly, he was a lousy suicide:
Chamfort is the very exemplar of the botched suicide. Unable to tolerate the prospect of being imprisoned once more, in September 1793 he locked himself into his office and shot himself in the face. The pistol malfunctioned and he did not die even though he shot off his nose and part of his jaw. He then repeatedly stabbed his neck with a paper cutter, but failed to cut an artery. He finally used the paper cutter to stab himself in the chest. He dictated to those who came to arrest him the well-known declaration — “Moi, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, declare avoir voulu mourir en homme libre plutot que d’etre reconduit en esclave dans une maison d’arret” — which he signed in a firm hand and in his own blood. His butler found him unconscious in a pool of blood.
I had to google to find the translation, which is:
“I, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, declare that I wished to die a free man rather than be enslaved in a house of detention.”
Which, when you get down to it, is extremely banal for a so-called “famous” quotation.
Well, so much for lovely thoughts. The contemplation of this one has made me rather pessimistic. In retrospect, I wish that I had spent more time working, and thought less about this quote, and not learned anything at all about how poor Nicolas Chamfort had lived.
