Michel de Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer 1. Q. How to live? A. Don’t worry about death Hanging by the tip of his lips 2. Q. How to live? A. Pay attention Starting to write Stream of consciousness 3. Q. How to live? A. Be born Micheau The experiment 4. Q. How to live? A. Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted Reading Montaigne the slow and forgetful The young Montaigne in troubled times 5. Q. How to live? A. Survive love and loss La Boétie: love and tyranny La Boétie: death and mourning 6. Q. How to live? A. Use little tricks Little tricks and the art of living Montaigne in slavery 7. Q. How to live? A. Question everything All I know is that I know nothing, and I’m not even sure about that Animals and demons A prodigious seduction machine 8. Q. How to live? A. Keep a private room behind the shop Going to it with only one buttock Practical responsibilities 9. Q. How to live? A. Be convivial: live with others A gay and sociable wisdom Openness, mercy, and cruelty 10. Q. How to live? A. Wake from the sleep of habit It all depends on your point of view Noble savages 11. Q. How to live? A. Live temperately Raising and lowering the temperature 12. Q. How to live? A. Guard your humanity Terror Hero 13. Q. How to live? A. Do something no one has done before Baroque best seller 14. Q. How to live? A. See the world Travels 15. Q. How to live? A. Do a good job, but not too good a job Mayor Moral objections Missions and assassinations 16. Q. How to live? A. Philosophize only by accident Fifteen Englishmen and an Irishman 17. Q. How to live? A. Reflect on everything; regret nothing Je ne regrette rien 18. Q. How to live? A. Give up control Daughter and disciple The editing wars Montaigne remixed and embabooned 19. Q. How to live? A. Be ordinary and imperfect Be ordinary Be imperfect 20. Q. How to live? A. Let life be its own answer Not the end

Montaigne presents himself as someone who jotted down whatever was going through his head when he picked up his pen, capturing encounters and states of mind as they happened. He used these experiences as the basis for asking himself questions, above all the big question that fascinated him as it did many of his contemporaries.

Montaigne questioned himself again and again, and built up a picture of himself—a self-portrait in constant motion, so vivid that it practically gets up off the page and sits down next to you to read over your shoulder.

Montaigne was the first writer to create literature that deliberately worked in this way, and to do it using the plentiful material of his own life rather than either pure philosophy or pure invention.

the Essays has no great meaning, no point to make, no argument to advance. It does not have designs on you; you can do as you please with it. Montaigne lets his material pour out, and never worries if he has said one thing on one page and the opposite overleaf, or even in the next sentence.

Having created a new genre by writing in this way, Montaigne created essais: his new term for it.

To essay something is to test or taste it, or give it a whirl.

He may never have planned to create a one-man literary revolution, but in retrospect he knew what he had done. “It is the only book in the world of its kind,” he wrote, “a book with a wild and eccentric plan.” Or, as more often seemed the case, with no plan at all. The Essays was not written in neat order, from beginning to end. It grew by slow encrustation, like a coral reef, from 1572 to 1592. The only thing that eventually stopped it was Montaigne’s death. Looked at another way, it never stopped at all. It continued to grow, not through endless writing but through endless reading. From the first sixteenth-century neighbor or friend to browse through a draft from Montaigne’s desk to the very last human being (or other conscious entity) to extract it from the memory banks of a future virtual library, every new reading means a new Essays.

The Essays is thus much more than a book. It is a centuries-long conversation between Montaigne and all those who have got to know him: a conversation which changes through history, while starting out afresh almost every time with that cry of “How did he know all that about me?” Mostly it remains a two-person encounter between writer and reader. But sidelong chat goes on among the readers too; consciously or not, each generation approaches Montaigne with expectations derived from its contemporaries and predecessors. As the story goes on, the scene becomes more crowded. It turns from a private dinner party to a great lively banquet, with Montaigne as an unwitting master of ceremonies.

Montaigne, the long party—that accumulation of shared and private conversations over four hundred and thirty years.

he usually responded to questions with flurries of further questions and a profusion of anecdotes, often all pointing in different directions and leading to contradictory conclusions. The questions and stories were his answers, or further ways of trying the question out.

Following his father’s death, he had inherited full responsibility for the family château and estate in the Dordogne. It was beautiful land, in an area covered, then as now, by vineyards, soft hills, villages, and tracts of forest. But for Montaigne it represented the burden of duty. On the estate, someone was always plucking at his sleeve, wanting something or finding fault with things he had done. He was the seigneur: everything came back to him.

In dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there. You die in the same way that you fall asleep: by drifting away. If other people try to pull you back, you hear their voices on “the edges of the soul.” Your existence is attached by a thread; it rests only on the tip of your lips, as he put it. Dying is not an action that can be prepared for. It is an aimless reverie.

When he revived fully, after two or three hours, it was to find himself assailed with aches, his limbs “battered and bruised.” He suffered for several nights afterwards, and there were longer-term consequences. “I still feel the effect of the shock of that collision,” he wrote, at least three years later.

Through this discovery of gliding and drifting, he lost much of his fear, and at the same time acquired a new sense that life, as it passed through his body—his particular life, Michel de Montaigne’s—was a very interesting subject for investigation. He would go on to attend to sensations and experiences, not for what they were supposed to be, or for what philosophical lessons they might impart, but for the way they actually felt. He would go with the flow. This was a new discipline for him, one which took over his daily routine, and—through his writing—gave him a form of immortality. Thus, around the middle of his life, Montaigne lost his bearings and found himself reborn.

the experience made him try a new kind of writing, barely attempted by other writers: that of re-creating a sequence of sensations as they felt from the inside, following them from instant to instant. And there does seem to be a chronological link between the accident and another turning point in his life, which opened up his path into literature: his decision to quit his job as magistrate in Bordeaux.

The shelves presented all Montaigne’s books to his view at a single glance: a satisfying sweep. He owned around a thousand volumes by the time he moved into the library, many inherited from his friend La Boétie, others bought by himself. It was a substantial collection, and Montaigne actually read his books, too.

Montaigne’s library was not just a repository or a work space. It was a chamber of marvels,

a treasure-house stuffed with books, papers, statuettes, pictures, vases, amulets, and ethnographic curiosities, designed to stimulate both imagination and intellect.

an arrière-boutique: a “room behind the shop.” He could invite visitors there if he wished—and often did—but he was never obliged to. He loved it. “Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!”

In a dialogue called “On Tranquillity of Mind,” he wrote that idleness and isolation could bring to the fore all the consequences of having lived life in the wrong way, consequences that people usually avoided by keeping busy—that is, by continuing to live life in the wrong way. The symptoms could include dissatisfaction, self-loathing, fear, indecisiveness, lethargy, and melancholy. Giving up work brings out spiritual ills, especially if one then gets the habit of reading too many books—or, worse, laying out the books for show and gloating over the view.

in a simile borrowed from Virgil, he described his thoughts as resembling the patterns that dance across the ceiling when sunlight reflects off the surface of a water bowl. Just as the tiger-stripes of light lurch about, so an unoccupied mind gyrates unpredictably and brings forth mad, directionless whimsies. It generates fantasies or reveries—two words with less positive associations than they have today, suggesting raving delusions rather than daydreams.

The idea of publication may have crossed his mind early on, though he claimed otherwise, saying he wrote only for family and friends. Perhaps he even began with the intention of composing a commonplace book: a collection of thematically arranged quotations and stories, of a kind popular among gentlemen of the day.

A decade would pass from his retirement in 1570 to the day after his forty-seventh birthday, March 1, 1580, when he signed and dated the preface to the first edition of the Essays and made himself famous overnight.

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

The mind flows on and on, in a ceaseless “stream of consciousness”—a phrase coined by the psychologist William James in 1890,

Looking at the landscape around his house, Montaigne could imagine it heaving and boiling like porridge. His local river, the Dordogne, carved out its banks as a carpenter chisels grooves in wood. He had been astonished by the shifting sand dunes of Médoc, near where one of his brothers lived: they roamed the land and devoured it. If we could see the world at a different speed, he reflected, we would see everything like this, as “a perpetual multiplication and vicissitude of forms.” Matter existed in an endless branloire: a word deriving from the sixteenth-century peasant dance branle, which meant something like “the shake.” The world was a cosmic wobble: a shimmy.

This is why Montaigne’s book flows as it does: it follows its author’s stream of consciousness without attempting to pause or dam it. A typical page of the Essays is a sequence of meanders, bends, and divergences. You have to let yourself be carried along, hoping not to capsize each time a change of direction throws you off balance.

your imagination can make you believe you are experiencing enhanced pleasure whether you “really” are or not. In the end, the oddity of the human mind is all we can be sure of—

Virginia Woolf. Her own purpose in her art was to immerse herself in the mental river and follow wherever it led. Her novels delved into characters’ worlds “from minute to minute.” Sometimes she left one channel to tune in elsewhere, passing the point of view like a microphone from one individual to another, but the flow itself never ceased until the end of each book. She identified Montaigne as the first writer to attempt anything of this sort, albeit only with his own single “stream.” She also considered him the first to pay such attention to the simple feeling of being alive. “Observe, observe perpetually,” was his rule, she said—and what he observed was, above all, this river of life running through his existence.

Yes, he says, we are foolish, but we cannot be any other way so we may as well relax and live with it.

“commonplace books”: notebooks in which to write down snippets one encountered in one’s reading, setting them in creative juxtaposition.

“I leaf through now one book, now another,” he wrote, “without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments.”

Sunday La Boétie was overcome with weakness and suffered hallucinations. When the crisis passed, he said “that he had seemed to be in some great confusion of all things and had seen nothing but a thick cloud and a dense fog in which everything was pell-mell and without order.” Montaigne reassured him: “Death has nothing worse about it than that, my brother,” to which La Boétie replied that, indeed, nothing could be worse than that. From this point on, he admitted to Montaigne, he lost hope of a cure. He decided to set his affairs in order, asking Montaigne to watch his wife and uncle in case grief

The work for which Pascal is best remembered, the Pensées (“ Thoughts”), was never meant to terrify anyone except himself: it was a collection of disorderly notes for a more systematic theological treatise which he never managed to write. Had he completed this work, it would probably have become less interesting. Instead, he left us one of the most mysterious texts in literature, a passionate outpouring largely written to try to ward off what he saw as the dangerous power of Montaigne’s Essays.

the Essays appeared on the Index on January 28, 1676. Montaigne stood condemned, as much by association as anything else—for by now he was the favorite reading of a disreputable crew of fops, wits, atheists, skeptics, and rakes.

“Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men. We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose.”

He also tried to wriggle out of the indoor amusements of the period, including poetry games, cards, and rebus-like puzzles—perhaps because, by his own admission, he was not good at them.

Leonard Woolf. In his memoirs, he held up Montaigne’s “On Cruelty” as a much more significant essay than people had realized. Montaigne, he wrote, was “the first person in the world to express this intense, personal horror of cruelty. He was, too, the first completely modern man.” The two were linked: Montaigne’s modernity resided precisely in his “intense awareness of and passionate interest in the individuality of himself and of all other human beings”—and nonhuman beings, too.

In the view of William James, as of Leonard Woolf and Montaigne, we do not live immured in our separate perspectives, like Descartes in his room. We live porously and sociably. We can glide out of our own minds, if only for a few moments, in order to occupy another being’s point of view. This ability is the real meaning of “Be convivial,” this chapter’s answer to the question of how to live, and the best hope for civilization.

Jumping to a different perspective is a way of waking oneself up again. Montaigne loved this trick, and used it constantly in his writing.

French colonists had a particular tendency to undo their enterprises through religious conflict, which they imported with them.

Montaigne wanted his readers to open their eyes and see.

Montaigne’s project of self-portraiture.

readers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries found it easy to like the Montaigne they constructed for themselves.

they responded to his openness about himself, his willingness to explore the contradictions of his character, his disregard for convention, and his desire to break out of fossilized habits. They liked his interest in psychology, especially his sense of the way different impulses could coexist in a single mind. Also—and they were the first generation of readers to feel this way in great numbers—they enjoyed his writing style, with all its exuberant disorder. They liked the way he seemed to blurt out whatever was on his mind at any moment, without pausing to set it into neat array.

Henri III was extremist in other ways, showing no understanding of Montaigne’s sense of moderation. Montaigne, who met him several times, did not like him much. On the one hand, Henri filled his court with fops, and turned it into a realm of corruption, luxury, and absurd points of etiquette. He went out dancing every night and, in youth, wore robes and doublets of mulberry satin, with coral bracelets and cloaks slashed to ribbons. He started a fashion for shirts with four sleeves, two for use and two trailing behind like wings. Some of his other affectations were considered even stranger: he used forks at table instead of knives and fingers, he wore nightclothes to bed, and he washed his hair from time to time. On the other hand, Henri also put on exaggerated displays of mysticism and penitence. The more perplexed he became by the problems facing the kingdom, the more frequently he took part in processions of flagellants, trudging with them barefoot over cobbled streets, chanting psalms and scourging himself.

Those living through the present assume that things are worse than they are, he says, because they cannot escape their local perspective:

Montaigne reminded his contemporaries of the old Stoic lesson: to avoid feeling swamped by a difficult situation, try imagining your world from different angles or at different scales of significance. This is what the ancients did when they looked down on their troubles from above, as upon a commotion in an ant colony.

he is admired for his stubborn insistence on maintaining normality in extraordinary circumstances, and his refusal to compromise his independence.

The book that had once seemed stuffy and irrelevant now spoke to him with directness and intimacy, as if it were written for him alone, or perhaps for his whole generation.

Bayle St. John observed that all true “relishers of Montaigne” loved his inconsequential “twaddling,” because it made his character real and enabled readers to find themselves in him.

I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself.

Thackeray joked that Montaigne could have given every one of his essays the title of another, or could have called one “Of the Moon” and another “Of Fresh Cheese”: it would have made little difference.

He blushed to see other Frenchmen overcome with joy whenever they met a compatriot abroad. They would fall on each other, cluster in a raucous group, and pass whole evenings complaining about the barbarity of the locals. These were the few who actually noticed that locals did things differently. Others managed to travel so “covered and wrapped in a taciturn and incommunicative prudence, defending themselves from the contagion of an unknown atmosphere” that they noticed nothing at all.

A “free and unruly” writer (as Montaigne described himself) had no place in the new French aesthetics, but the English language welcomed him like a prodigal son.

If they liked the Essays’ style, English readers were even more charmed by its content. Montaigne’s preference for details over abstractions appealed to them; so did his distrust of scholars, his preference for moderation and comfort, and his desire for privacy—the “room behind the shop.”

The English were not born philosophers; they did not like to speculate about being, truth, and the cosmos. When they picked up a book they wanted anecdotes, odd characters, witty sallies, and a touch of fantasy. As Virginia Woolf said à propos Sir Thomas Browne, one of many English authors who wrote in a Montaignean vein, “The English mind is naturally prone to take its ease and pleasure in the loosest whimsies and humors.”

William Hazlitt praised Montaigne in terms guaranteed to appeal to an unphilosophical nation: In taking up his pen he did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or moralist, but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his mind, in its naked simplicity and force.

describes himself with the incoherent torrent of adjectives “bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever, stupid; surly, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant, liberal, miserly, and prodigal,”

Montaigne and Shakespeare have each been held up as the first truly modern writers, capturing that distinctive modern sense of being unsure where you belong, who you are, and what you are expected to do.

what the critic Walter Pater called “the true family of Montaigne”: they showed “that intimacy, that modern subjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque element in literature.”

Hazlitt’s assessment of what makes a good essayist exemplifies what the English now tended to look for in Montaigne. Such writers, says Hazlitt, collect curiosities of human life just as natural history enthusiasts collect shells, fossils, or beetles as they stroll along a forest path or seashore. They capture things as they really are rather than as they should be. Montaigne was the finest of them all because he allowed everything to be what it was, including himself, and he knew how to look at things. For Hazlitt, an ideal essay takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shews us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many-colored scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part.

Montaigne did not smear his words around like Joyce, but he did work by revisiting, elaborating, and accreting. Although he returned to his work constantly, he hardly ever seemed to get the urge to cross things out, only to keep adding more. The spirit of repentance was alien to him in writing, just as it was in life, where he remained firmly wedded to amor fati: the cheerful acceptance of whatever happens.

As befitted someone who rejected the notion of undoing his sins, he was unrepentant about the digressive and personal nature of the book. Nor did he hesitate to make demands on anyone who entered his world. “It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I,” he wrote now, of his tendency to ramble.

How did he know all that about me? (Bernard Levin) It seems he is my very self. (André Gide) Here is a “you” in which my “I” is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished. (Stefan Zweig)

Diderot would make almost the same observation of Montaigne in a later century: “His book is the touchstone of a sound mind. If a man dislikes it, you may be sure that he has some defect of the heart or understanding.”

At a time when many persisted in seeing the book mainly as a collection of Stoic sayings—a valid interpretation so far as it went—she admired it for less usual things: its style, its rambling structure, its willingness to reveal all. It was partly Gournay’s feeling that everyone around her was missing the point that created the long-lasting myth of a Montaigne somehow born out of his time, a writer who had to wait to find readers able to recognize his value. Out of an author who had made himself very popular while barely seeming to exert himself, she made Montaigne into a misunderstood genius.

The preface is not just the earliest published introduction to Montaigne’s canonical work; it is also one of the world’s first and most eloquent feminist tracts.

For Gournay, if men could exert their imagination to see the world as a woman sees it, even for a few minutes, they would learn enough to change their behavior forever. Yet this leap of perspective was just what they never seemed to manage.

Like his, her posthumous reputation was destined to be twisted into bizarre shapes by changing fashions.

“Bordeaux Copy,” as it became known, still did not attract much attention until the late nineteenth century, when scholars developed a taste for poring over the minutiae of such texts.

Armies of rival transcribers and editors attacked the Bordeaux Copy, working at roughly the same time, looking over each other’s shoulders, and doing all they could to block each other’s path to the precious object. Each contrived his own technique for reading the faded ink, and for representing the various levels of addition and augmentation, as well as different hands. Some got so bogged down in methodology that they made no further progress.

Montaigne read only what interested him; his readers and editors do the same to him.

Just as Romantics found a Romantic Montaigne, Victorian moralists found a moralist one, and the English in general found an English Montaigne, so the “deconstructionist” or “postmodernist” critics who flourished throughout the late twentieth century (and just into the twenty-first) fall with delight upon the very thing they are predisposed to see: a deconstructionist and postmodernist Montaigne. This kind of Montaigne has become so familiar to the contemporary critical eye that it takes considerable effort to lean back far enough to see it for what it is: an artifact, or at least a creative remix.

One feature of recent critical theory makes it more than usually prone to this magic-mirror effect: its habit of talking about the text rather than the author. Instead of wondering what Montaigne “really” meant to say, or investigating historical contexts, critics have looked primarily to the independent network of associations and meanings on the page—a network which can be cast like a great fishing net to capture almost anything. This is not only a feature of strict postmodernism. Recent psychoanalytical critics also apply their analysis to the Essays itself rather than to Montaigne the man. Some treat the book as an entity with its own subconscious. Just as an analyst can read a patient’s dreams to get to what lurks beneath, so a critic can probe the text’s etymologies, sounds, accidental slips, and even printing errors in order to discover hidden levels of meaning. It is acknowledged that Montaigne had no intention of putting them there, but that does not matter, since the text has its own intentions.

Montaigne writes in this essay of his being “embabooned” by Roman history—embabouyné, which means “enchanted” or “bewitched,” but can also mean “suckled.” The French word becomes even more suggestive if one reads it as “en bas bou( e) y n( ais),” meaning, “down in the mud I am born.”

As Montaigne said about Plutarch, every line of a rich text like the Essays is filled with pointers indicating “where we are to go, if we like.” Modern critics have taken this very much to heart.

this trend in modern critical theory—the last of the lily pads on this wayward frog-leap tour through the history of Montaigne-reading—seems to be passing into history already.

nature does everything for you, and there is no need to trouble your head about anything. It leads us by the hand, he wrote, as if “down a gentle and virtually imperceptible slope, bit by bit.” We hardly need to look where we are going.

he thought the old were more given to vanities and imperfections than the young. They were inclined to “a silly and decrepit pride, a tedious prattle, prickly and unsociable humors, superstition, and a ridiculous concern for riches.”

life rather than leaving him frozen in perfect remembrance. And his real legacy has nothing to do with his tomb at all. It is found in the turbulent fortunes of the Essays, his endlessly evolving second self. They remained alive, and, for Montaigne, it was always life that mattered. Virginia Woolf was especially fond of quoting this thought from his last essay: it was as close as Montaigne ever came to a final or best answer to the question of how to live.

Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.

his conviction that no vision of heaven, no imagined Apocalypse, and no perfectionist fantasy can ever outweigh the tiniest of selves in the real world.