Highlights: How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and 20 Answers

Intro: Q. How to live? loc: 75

a site called "The Oxford Muse," which encourages people to put together brief self-portraits in words, describing their everyday lives and the things they have learned. loc: 83

above all the big question that fascinated him as it did many of his contemporaries. Although it is not quite grammatical in English, it can be phrased in three simple words: "How to live?" loc: 116

This is not the same as the ethical question, "How should one live?" Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. loc: 119

1. Q. How to live? A. Don't worry about death loc: 232

If death could play such tricks, then only the flimsiest membrane separated Montaigne himself from the void at every moment. He became so afraid of losing his life that he could no longer enjoy it while he had it. loc: 240

the most shocking must have been that of his brother Arnaud. At just twenty-seven, Arnaud was struck on the head by a ball while playing the contemporary version of tennis, the jeu de paume. It cannot have been a very forceful blow, and he showed no immediate effect, but five or six hours later he lost consciousness and died, loc: 255

"With such frequent and ordinary examples passing before our eyes," wrote Montaigne of Arnaud, "how can we possibly rid ourselves of the thought of death and of the idea that at every moment it is gripping us by the throat?" loc: 259

If you ran through the images of your death often enough, said his favorite sages, the Stoics, it could never catch you by surprise. loc: 267

But Montaigne found the opposite. The more intensely he imagined the accidents that might befall him and his friends, the less calm he felt. loc: 268

By his forties and fifties, Montaigne was liberated into light-heartedness. loc: 273

He now refused to worry about anything. Death is only a few bad moments at the end of life, he wrote in one of his last added notes; it is not worth wasting any anxiety over. loc: 275

It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go. It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep. loc: 334

Montaigne and life, it seemed, were about to part company with neither regret nor formal farewells, like two drunken guests leaving a feast too dazed to say goodbye. loc: 345

I can't help but compare Montaigne's near death experience with that of Levin's brother, Nicholas. How utterly different. Why?

itIn 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. loc: 360

Dying is not an action that can be prepared for. It is an aimless reverie. loc: 363

In his most mature essays, he wrote admiringly of men such as Petronius and Tigillinus, Romans who died surrounded by jokes, music, and everyday conversation, so that death simply flowed into them amid the general good cheer. loc: 366

This discovery of Montaigne's ran counter to his classical models; it also defied the Christian ideal which dominated his own era. For Christians, one's last thought should be the sober commending of one's soul to God, not a blissful "Aaaaah . . ." Montaigne's own experience apparently included no thoughts of God at all. Nor did it seem to occur to him that dying inebriated and surrounded by wenches might jeopardize a Christian afterlife. He was more interested in his purely secular realization that human psychology, and nature in general, were the dying man's best friends. And it now seemed to him that the only people who regularly died as bravely as philosophers should were those who knew no philosophy at all: loc: 374

Nature took care of them. It taught them not to think about death except when they were dying, and very little even then. Philosophers find it hard to leave the world because they try to maintain control. So much for "To philosophize is to learn how to die." Philosophy looked more like a way of teaching people to unlearn the natural skill that every peasant had by birthright. loc: 382

"Don't worry about death" became his most fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live. It made it possible to do just that: live. loc: 390

Montaigne's most fundamental insight

From now on, he tried to import some of death's delicacy and buoyancy into life. "Bad spots" were everywhere, he wrote in a late essay. We do better to "slide over this world a bit lightly and on the surface." 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. loc: 400

2. Q. How to live? A. Pay attention loc: 408

The great Stoic Seneca repeatedly urged his fellow Romans to retire in order to "find themselves," as we might put it. In the Renaissance, as in ancient Rome, it was part of the well-managed life. You had your period of civic business, then you withdrew to discover what life was really about and to begin the long process of preparing for death. loc: 512

Seneca, in advising retirement, had also warned of dangers. 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 loc: 517

Seneca would have approved. If you become depressed or bored in your retirement, he advised, just look around you and interest yourself in the variety and sublimity of things. Salvation lies in paying full attention to nature. Montaigne tried to do this, but he took "nature" primarily to mean the natural phenomenon that lay closest to hand: himself. loc: 537

"How does one achieve peace of mind?" On the latter point, Plutarch's advice was the same as Seneca's: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it. loc: 552

Writing had got Montaigne through his "mad reveries" crisis; it now taught him to look at the world more closely, and increasingly gave him the habit of describing inward sensations and social encounters with precision. He quoted Pliny on the idea of attending to such elusive fragments: "Each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up." loc: 559

he mused on how we are carried along by our thoughts, "now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm . . . every day a new fancy, and our humors shift with the shifts in the weather." loc: 588

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. loc: 593

It seems that Montaigne was onto the Buddhist doctrine of Anicca without knowing any Buddhism. Edit

What was unusual in him was his instinct that the observer is as unreliable as the observed. The two kinds of movement interact like variables in a complex mathematical equation, with the result that one can find no secure point from which to measure anything. loc: 598

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. loc: 602

In the end, the oddity of the human mind is all we can be sure of—an extraordinary conclusion which seems to bear no relation to the topic he was originally aiming at. loc: 611

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." loc: 635

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. loc: 638

As Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out. The only one who can keep you mindful of this is you: loc: 645

The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm. loc: 652

If I ever had just one more lesson to teach, it would be to follow Montaigne's example: to "open your eyes to how marvelous...things are."

Merleau-Ponty called Montaigne a writer who put "a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence." loc: 655

3. Q. How to live? A. Be born loc: 679

Montaigne's region of Guyenne (also known as Aquitaine) loc: 732

For a long time, it had been English territory. The English were driven out only in 1451, loc: 735

much influenced by the Protestant court of Navarre, loc: 740

kept up ties with England, which developed a taste for Bordeaux wine. An English wine fleet called there regularly to top up supplies—good news for local suppliers, not least the Eyquem family of Montaigne. loc: 741

If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. loc: 753

His whole philosophy is captured in this paragraph. Yes, he says, we are foolish, but we cannot be any other way so we may as well relax and live with it. loc: 757

Montaigne's mother was undoubtedly a strong character, but convention kept her powerless and frustrated. loc: 770

Legal documents surviving from various periods of her life create a picture of someone fierce, opinionated, and very able. loc: 777

Reading the frequent confessions of indolence and ineptitude that fill Montaigne's book, it is easy to see why Antoinette thought the estate was neglected during the time he was in charge of it. He found practical affairs a bore and avoided them as much as possible. loc: 796

French forces had been regularly attacking and conquering states on the peninsula since 1494, and would continue doing so until 1559, when the Peace of Cateau Cambresis stopped France's foreign invasions and thus opened the way to its real sixteenth-century catastrophe: the civil wars. loc: 807

Between sieges, Frenchmen encountered exciting ideas about science, politics, philosophy, pedagogy, and fashionable manners. The high Italian Renaissance had petered out by now, but Italy was still by far the most advanced civilization in Europe. French soldiers learned new ways of thinking about almost everything, and when they came home they brought their discoveries with them. loc: 819

Having described how Pierre loved to build up the estate, Montaigne gives us an almost comically exaggerated picture of his own lack of either skill or interest in such work. loc: 873

All right, so Pierre could bounce over the table on one manly thumb, Montaigne seems to say, but in matters of the intellect he was an embarrassment. He worshiped books without understanding them. His son would always try to do the opposite. loc: 882

What Montaigne neglected to observe was that he himself was just as typical of his era in rejecting the book-learning fetish. The fathers filled their sons with literature and history, trained them in critical thinking, and taught them to bandy around classical philosophies like juggling balls. By way of thanks, the sons dismissed it all as valueless and adopted a superior attitude. loc: 885

There was a tiredness and a sourness in Montaigne's generation, along with a rebellious new form of creativity. If they were cynical, it is easy to see why: they had to watch the ideals that had guided their upbringing turn into a grim joke. loc: 889

By the time of Montaigne's death, France was economically feeble, and ravaged by disease, famine, and public disorder. loc: 895

The ideals of his father survived in him after all, but in mutant form: softened, darkened, and with the certainty knocked out of them. loc: 903

From the start, Montaigne had the impression at once of being a peasant among peasants, and of being very special and different. loc: 923

He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary. loc: 924

Living with strangers, Micheau must have failed to "bond" (as we might now say) with his real parents. loc: 926

Back in his family home, little peasant Micheau was now to be brought up as a native speaker of Latin. loc: 934

This was an astounding project for anyone even to think of, let alone put into effect, and it presented a practical difficulty. Pierre himself had minimal command of Latin; his wife and the servants knew none at all. loc: 938

Step one was to engage a tutor who, though no native, did have near-flawless Latin. loc: 941

Step two was to ban everyone else in the household from speaking to Micheau in any living language. loc: 945

Command of beautiful and grammatically perfect Latin was the highest goal of a humanistic education: it unlocked the door to the ancient world—considered the locus of all human wisdom—as well as to much of modern culture, since most scholars still wrote Latin. loc: 958

It was anything but a cruel experiment, at least in obvious respects. The new theories of education emphasized that learning should be pleasurable, and that the only motivation children needed was their inborn desire for knowledge. loc: 966

But, in general, the hedonistic approach to education did make a difference to him. Having been guided early in life by his own curiosity alone, he grew up to be an independent-minded adult, following his own path in everything rather than deferring to duty and discipline—an outcome perhaps more far-reaching than his father had bargained for. loc: 970

It set him apart from his household and from his whole contemporary world. This gave him independence of mind, but may have inclined him to a certain detachment in relationships. It gave him great expectations, since he grew up in the company of the greatest writers of antiquity rather than the provincial French of his neighborhood. Yet it also cut off other, more conventional, ambitions, because it led him to question everything that other people strove for. loc: 995

Still, French was his language of choice—not Latin. In the Essays he gives an odd reason for this. French could not be expected to last as long as the classical languages, he said; thus, his writings were doomed to ephemerality, and he could write in any way he liked without worrying about his reputation. loc: 1002

Often, books need not be used at all. One learns dancing by dancing; one learns to play the lute by playing the lute. The same is true of thinking, and indeed of living. Every experience can be a learning opportunity: loc: 1023

The child should learn to question everything: to "pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust." loc: 1025

Traveling is useful; so is socializing, which teaches the child to be open to others and to adapt to anyone he finds around him. loc: 1026

Whatever you do, he says, you cannot really change inborn disposition. You can guide it or train it, but not get rid of it. In another essay he wrote, "There is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a pattern all his own, a ruling pattern, which struggles against education." loc: 1031

The following year, upheavals broke out in Bordeaux itself: the salt-tax riots, which would cause such stress to Montaigne's father during his term as mayor. The southwest had traditionally been exempt from this tax. Now, suddenly, the new king Henri II tried to impose it, with inflammatory results. loc: 1078

mobs roamed the streets setting fire to tax collectors' houses. loc: 1081

Tristan de Moneins, the town's lieutenant-general and governor—thus the king's official representative—was lynched. loc: 1083

He witnessed the killing of Moneins, a scene he never forgot. loc: 1088

Ten thousand royal troops were sent there in October under the Constable de Montmorency; loc: 1103

The troops remained for over three months, with Montmorency conducting a reign of terror. He encouraged his men to loot and kill like an occupying force in a foreign country. loc: 1105

4. Q. How to live? A. Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted loc: 1124

Plutarch was to Montaigne what Montaigne was to many later readers: a model to follow, and a treasure chest of ideas, quotations, and anecdotes to plunder. loc: 1159

He loved the way Plutarch assembled his work by stuffing in fistfuls of images, conversations, people, animals, and objects of all kinds, rather than by coldly arranging abstractions and arguments. His writing is full of things, Montaigne pointed out. loc: 1165

Plutarch leaves no neat endings, but he sows seeds from which whole worlds of inquiry can be developed. loc: 1170

This was what Montaigne looked for in a book, just as people later looked for it in him: the feeling of meeting a real person across the centuries. loc: 1173

He preferred to converse with the ancients in a tone of camaraderie, sometimes even teasing them, loc: 1184

There is no man who has less business talking about memory. For I recognize almost no trace of it in me, and I do not think there is another one in the world so monstrously deficient. loc: 1206

Montaigne's admission of such failings was a direct challenge to the Renaissance ideal of oratory and rhetoric, which held that being able to think well was the same as being able to speak well, and being able to speak well depended upon remembering your flow of argument together with sparkling quotations and examples to adorn it. loc: 1227

Montaigne was attuned to the kind of "involuntary" memory that would one day fascinate Proust: those blasts from the past that irrupt unexpectedly into the present, perhaps in response to a long-forgotten taste or smell. Such moments seem possible only if they are surrounded by an ocean of forgetfulness, as well as a suitable mood and sufficient leisure. loc: 1251

"Forget much of what you learn" and "Be slow-witted" became two of Montaigne's best answers to the question of how to live. They freed him to think wisely rather than glibly; they allowed him to avoid the fanatical notions and foolish deceptions that ensnared other people; and they let him follow his own thoughts wherever they led—which was all he really wanted to do. loc: 1287

La Boetie thought him brilliant and full of promise, but in danger of wasting his talents. He needed guidance from some calmer, wiser mentor— loc: 1315

He was too susceptible to pretty young women, and too pleased with himself. loc: 1317

The one good thing about the law was that it made human failings so obvious: a good philosophical lesson. loc: 1382

This sideways step into self-doubt, self-awareness, and acknowledgement of imperfection became a distinctive mark of Montaigne's thought on all subjects, not just the law. loc: 1385

Henri II's weakness was partly to blame for France's later problems, as rival factions sensed an opportunity and began a power struggle that would dominate the country for decades. The competition centered on three families: the Guises, the Montmorencys, and the Bourbons. loc: 1395

While Lutherans tend to stay aloof from worldly affairs, living according to their private conscience, Calvinists are supposed to engage with politics, and work to bring about God's will on earth. In the sixteenth century, accordingly, Calvinists were trained in Switzerland in a special academy, and sent to France armed with arguments and forbidden publications to convert the natives and destabilize the state. At some point in the 1550s, the name "Huguenot" became attached to Calvin's followers both inside and outside the country. loc: 1407

A fiercer, less intellectual movement, arising in France from the 1550s, was loosely grouped under the name of the "Leagues." Their aim was not to outwit the heretics by fancy argument but to wipe them from the face of the earth by force. loc: 1416

For less fortunate classes, the economic crisis fed extremism. loc: 1427

It was from this religious, economic, and political anguish that the civil wars would arise—wars which dominated France through most of the rest of the century, from 1562, when Montaigne was twenty-nine, to 1598, well after his death. loc: 1429

in April 1559 the treaty of Cateau Cambresis ended several of the foreign wars at a blow. By removing distractions and filling the country with unemployed ex-soldiers amid an economic depression, this peace almost immediately brought about the outbreak of a much worse war. loc: 1431

throne now passed successively to three of his sons: loc: 1439

All were weak, all were dominated by their mother Catherine de' Medici, and all were inept at handling the religious conflict. loc: 1440

The situation at the beginning of the 1560s, the decade during which Montaigne developed his career in Bordeaux, was thus marked by a weak throne, greedy rivalries, economic hardship, and rising religious tensions. loc: 1443

The trigger came on March 1, 1562, at the town of Vassy, or Wassy, in the Champagne area of the northeast. Five hundred Protestants gathered to worship in a barn in the town, loc: 1458

The national Protestant leader, Louis I de Bourbon, prince de Conde, urged Protestants to rise up to save themselves from further attacks. loc: 1466

Increasing clashes between the two sides escalated into outright battles, and these became the first of the French civil wars. loc: 1473

A second war would be set off on September 30, 1567, by another massacre, this time of Catholics by Protestants, at Nimes. loc: 1476

Montaigne and his contemporaries often referred to outbreaks of fighting as "troubles." The consensus is that there were eight of these, loc: 1478

The end of one foreign conflict had made the civil wars possible in the first place, and the beginning of another would ultimately bring them to a close, after Henri IV declared war on Spain in 1595. loc: 1496

To teach a lesson to a city that seemed incapable of running its own affairs, the king sent in a new lieutenant-general named Blaise Monluc, and ordered him to "pacify" the troublesome area. Monluc understood "pacification" to mean "mass slaughter." He set to work hanging Protestants in large numbers without trial, or having them broken on the wheel. loc: 1509

5. Q. How to live? A. Survive love and loss loc: 1571

It started a great friendship: one "so entire and so perfect that certainly you will hardly read of the like loc: 1578

They seemed to think of their relationship above all by analogy with one particular classical model: that of the philosopher Socrates and his good-looking young friend Alcibiades—to whom La Boetie overtly compared Montaigne in his sonnet. loc: 1623

His attachment to moderation in all things fails him when it comes to La Boetie, and so does his love of independence. He writes, "Our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again." loc: 1635

La Boetie believes that tyrants somehow hypnotize their people—though this term had not yet been invented. To put it another way, they fall in love with him. loc: 1664

Tyranny creates a drama of submission and domination, rather like the tense battle confrontation scenes often described by Montaigne. The populace willingly gives itself up, and this only encourages the tyrant to take away everything they have—even their lives, if he sends them to war to fight for him. Something in human beings drives them to a "deep forgetfulness of freedom." loc: 1678

The "quiet refusal" aspect of On Voluntary Servitude's politics had an obvious appeal for Montaigne. He agreed that the most important thing in confronting political abuse was to maintain one's mental freedom—and that could mean opting out of public life rather than engaging with it. loc: 1712

La Boetie was dying the perfect Stoic death, full of courage and rational wisdom. Montaigne was expected to do his part: to help his friend to maintain this courage, and then to act as witness, recording the details so others could learn from the story. loc: 1841

By dying, La Boetie changed from being Montaigne's real-life, flawed companion to being an ideal entity under Montaigne's control. He became less a person than a sort of philosophical technique. loc: 1920

"He is still lodged in me so entire and so alive that I cannot believe that he is so irrevocably buried or so totally removed from our communication." loc: 1925

6. Q. How to live? A. Use little tricks loc: 1932

he showed an endless fascination for another tradition in philosophy: that of the great pragmatic schools which explored such questions as how to cope with a friend's death, how to work up courage, how to act well in morally difficult situations, and how to make the most of life. loc: 1935

Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism: loc: 1939

All the schools had the same aim: to achieve a way of living known in the original Greek as eudaimonia, often translated as "happiness," "joy," or "human flourishing." This meant living well in every sense: thriving, relishing life, being a good person. They also agreed that the best path to eudaimonia was ataraxia, which might be rendered as "imperturbability" or "freedom from anxiety." Ataraxia means equilibrium: the art of maintaining an even keel, so that you neither exult when things go well nor plunge into despair when they go awry. loc: 1943

Buddhism in the East is Stoicism in the West. Compare what McEvilley has to say on this comparison.

Stoics and Epicureans shared a great deal of their theory, too. They thought that the ability to enjoy life is thwarted by two big weaknesses: lack of control over emotions, and a tendency to pay too little attention to the present. loc: 1955

Isn't this what Kornfield is saying about vipassana?

The Epicurean writer Lucretius suggested picturing yourself at the point of death, and considering two possibilities. Either you have lived well, in which case you can go your way satisfied, like a well-fed guest leaving a party. Or you have not, but then it makes no difference that you are losing your life, since you obviously did not know what to do with it anyway. loc: 1968

The key is to cultivate mindfulness: prosoche, another key Greek term. loc: 1985

Anyone who clears their vision and lives in full awareness of the world as it is, Seneca says, can never be bored with life. loc: 1987

Another practice of the Stoics was to visualize time circling around on itself, over eons. . ..it showed one's own fleeting troubles at a reduced size. At the same time, because everything you had ever done would come back to haunt you, everything mattered. Nothing was flushed away; nothing could be forgotten. Meditating on this forced you to pay more attention to how you lived your everyday life. It posed a challenge, but also led to a kind of acceptance: to what the Stoics called amor fati, or love of fate. loc: 2008

Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen, and your life will be serene. loc: 2012

Stoics were especially keen on pitiless mental rehearsals of all the things they dreaded most. Epicureans were more inclined to turn their vision away from terrible things, to concentrate on what was positive. loc: 2024

But most of the time he found it more helpful to divert his attention to something else altogether: A painful notion takes hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it. loc: 2040

Later in his life, Montaigne used the trick of diversion against his own fear of getting old and dying. The years were dragging him towards death; he could not help that, but he need not look at it head-on. Instead, he faced the other way, and calmed himself by looking back with pleasure over his youth and childhood. loc: 2062

the best antidote to fear was to rely on nature: "Don't bother your head about it." loc: 2072

A split opened up between his own point of view and the one he imagined La Boetie might take, so that, at any moment, he could slip from one to the other. loc: 2094

he had to stage his and La Boetie's dialogue within himself. loc: 2099

La Boetie became Montaigne's imaginary master, commanding him to work, while Montaigne became the willing slave who sustained them both through the labor of writing. It was a form of "voluntary servitude." Out of it emerged the Essays, almost as a by-product of Montaigne's trick for managing sorrow and solitude. loc: 2100

Montaigne now became his friend's posthumous editor—a demanding role, which gave a push to his own literary career. loc: 2106

The whole undertaking confirms the sense that he was now in a literary partnership with La Boetie's memory, and that the two of them could expect a great future together. loc: 2118

The debate centered on the claim that truths of religion could be proved through rational arguments, or by examination of evidence found in nature. Sebond thought they could be so proved: this put him at the opposite extreme both from Montaigne and, for a while, from the Church. Montaigne inclined more towards a position known as Fideism, which placed no reliance at all on human reason or endeavor, and denied that humans could attain knowledge of religious truths except through faith. Montaigne may not have felt a great desire for faith, but he did feel a strong aversion to all human pretension—and the result was the same. loc: 2143

Thus Montaigne found himself with the job of translating 500 pages of theological argumentation designed to prove an assertion he deplored. loc: 2148

he was commissioned a few years later (probably by Marguerite de Valois, the king's sister and wife of the Protestant Henri de Navarre) to write an essay defending the book; that is, to defend a work he considered indefensible. loc: 2155

How, then, can he call it an "apology"? Montaigne's trick is simple. He purports to defend Sebond against those who have tried to bring him down using rational arguments. He does this by showing that rational arguments, in general, are fallible, because human reason itself cannot be relied on. loc: 2165

7. Q. How to live? A. Question everything loc: 2176

Like the others, Skepticism amounted to a form of therapy. This, at least, was true of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, the type originated by the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who died about 275 BC, and later developed more rigorously by Sextus Empiricus in the second century AD loc: 2185

The key to the trick is the revelation that nothing in life need be taken seriously. Pyrrhonism does not even take itself seriously. Ordinary dogmatic Skepticism asserts the impossibility of knowledge: it is summed up in Socrates's remark: "All I know is that I know nothing." Pyrrhonian Skepticism starts from this point, but then adds, in effect, "and I'm not even sure about that." loc: 2197

epokhe. It means "I suspend judgment." loc: 2203

The epokhe trick makes you laugh and feel better because it frees you from the need to find a definite answer to anything. loc: 2210

One cannot know the answer and feels it doesn't matter, so one's nonengagement causes no distress. loc: 2226

The Pyrrhonians did this, not to unsettle themselves profoundly and throw themselves into a paranoid vortex of doubt, but to attain a condition of relaxation about everything. It was their path to ataraxia—a goal they shared with the Stoics and Epicureans—and thus to joy and human flourishing. loc: 2232

This was what really interested Montaigne in the Skeptical tradition: not so much the Skeptics' extreme approach to warding off pains and sorrows (for that, he preferred the Stoics and Epicureans, who seemed more closely attuned to real life), but their desire to take everything provisionally and questioningly. This was just what he always tried to do himself. loc: 2265

"Even if all that has come down to us by report from the past should be true and known by someone, it would be less than nothing compared with what is unknown." How puny is the knowledge of even the most curious person, he reflected, and how astounding the world by comparison. loc: 2281

And of all that was mysterious, nothing amazed him more than himself, the most unfathomable phenomenon of all. loc: 2285

for Montaigne, philosophy is incarnate. It lives in individual, fallible humans; therefore, it is riddled with uncertainty. loc: 2294

"We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses; but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or ten senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence." loc: 2299

Is this Kant's problem of knowing the world?

A human being's perspective may not merely be prone to occasional error, but limited by definition, in exactly the way we normally (and arrogantly) presume a dog's intelligence to be. loc: 2302

it can also open up a new way of living. It makes everything more complicated and more interesting: the world becomes a vast multidimensional landscape in which every point of view must be taken into account. loc: 2311

There was only one exception to his "question everything" rule: he was careful to state that he considered his religious faith beyond doubt. He adhered to the received dogma of the Catholic Church, and that was that. loc: 2317

The idea that the human mind could find things out for itself was the very thing Skeptics were likely to be most skeptical about. And the Church currently favored faith over "rational theology," so it naturally saw Pyrrhonism as an ally. loc: 2322

The seventeenth century would cease to accept Montaigne as a sage; it would begin to see him as a trickster and a subversive. Montaigne's animal stories and his debunking of human pretensions would prove particularly irksome to two of the greatest writers of the new era: Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal. loc: 2418

"When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?" loc: 2429

It captures his belief that all beings share a common world, but that each creature has its own way of perceiving this world. loc: 2433

In Descartes's case, the problem was that his whole philosophical structure required a point of absolute certainty, which he found in the notion of a clear, undiluted consciousness. loc: 2446

I think, therefore I am. From this secure point he proceeded to establish, using nothing but deduction, that God must exist, that his own "clear and distinct" idea of God's existence must have come from God himself, and thus that anything else he had a clear and distinct idea about must be true as well. loc: 2462

These were, above all, the two great traditions transmitted to his generation by Montaigne: Skepticism, which took everything apart, and Fideism, which put it all together again on the basis of faith. Descartes did not want to end up at this point. loc: 2470

Uncertainty was not a way of life, as it was for Montaigne and the original Pyrrhonians. For Descartes, it was a crisis stage. loc: 2476

the nightmare side of Skepticism. loc: 2481

The thought that such a spirit might be systematically fooling us as to the nature of the entire physical world—and of ourselves—was enough to send anyone mad. The only thing worse was the possibility that God Himself might be such a deceiver, loc: 2491

For Pascal, fallibility is unbearable in itself: "We have such a high idea of man's soul that we cannot bear to think that this idea is wrong and therefore to be without this esteem for it. The whole of man's happiness lies in this esteem." For Montaigne, human failings are not merely bearable; they are almost a cause for celebration. Pascal thought limitations should not be accepted; Montaigne's whole philosophy revolves around the opposite view. loc: 2581

Montaigne places everything in doubt, but then he deliberately reaffirms everything that is familiar, uncertain, and ordinary—for that is all we have. His Skepticism makes him celebrate imperfection: loc: 2620

It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump. loc: 2625

8. Q. How to live? A. Keep a private room behind the shop loc: 2726

He showed no shame about revealing such things: "Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it." loc: 2757

We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh as if without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them. loc: 2883

The phrase about the "back shop," or "room behind the shop" as it is sometimes translated—the arriere boutique—appears again and again in books about Montaigne, but it is rarely kept within its context. He is not writing about a selfish, introverted withdrawal from family life so much as about the need to protect yourself from the pain that would come if you lost that family. Montaigne sought detachment and retreat so that he could not be too badly hurt, but in doing so he also discovered that having such a retreat helped him establish his "real liberty," the space he needed to think and look inward. loc: 2888

He seems to have found almost anything manageable other than the death of La Boetie: that was the one thing that knocked him off balance and made him unwilling to become so attached again. loc: 2920

Montaigne deserved some of this: he was, as he admitted, useless around the house. He preferred to leave its management to his wife, who, like his mother, was skilled in such affairs. loc: 2952

Montaigne did what he had to, but he confessed that he did not enjoy it, and that therefore he kept it to a minimum. loc: 2963

"Having had neither governor nor master forced on me to this day, I have gone just so far as I pleased, and at my own pace. This has made me soft and useless for serving others, and no good to anyone but myself." This passage reveals some of his true motivation: it was his life he wanted to live. Being impractical made him free. "Extremely idle, extremely independent, both by nature and by art," was the way he summed up his character. He was ruled by "freedom and laziness." loc: 2983

9. Q. How to live? A. Be convivial: live with others loc: 3026

"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." loc: 3037

For Montaigne, "relaxation and affability" were not merely useful talents; they were essential to living well. He tried to cultivate what he called a "gay and sociable wisdom"— loc: 3052

I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself. We become habituated to anything strange by use and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself. loc: 3087

far better to win the enemy over by behaving with generosity and honor. loc: 3111

Montaigne's openness protected him from violence. loc: 3115

Montaigne's view, on balance, was that both victim and victor should take the path that entailed placing maximum trust in the other—that loc: 3161

Montaigne found furor appalling, as he did most extreme states. loc: 3174

Above all, he deplored the holy zeal of religious fanatics, who believed that God demanded such extreme, unreasoning violence as proof of devotion. loc: 3186

Cruelty nauseated Montaigne: loc: 3187

The same perspective-leaping tendency that enabled him to borrow his cat's point of view made it impossible for him to see a hare being ripped apart without feeling it in his own guts. loc: 3190

visceral rapport with others. loc: 3197

For Montaigne, all humans share an element of their being, and so do all other living things. "It is one and the same nature that rolls its course." Even if animals were less similar to us than they are, we would still owe them a duty of fellow-feeling, loc: 3199

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. loc: 3217

10. Q. How to live? A. Wake from the sleep of habit loc: 3244

Habit makes everything look bland; it is sleep-inducing. Jumping to a different perspective is a way of waking oneself up again. Montaigne loved this trick, and used it constantly in his writing. His favorite device was simply to run through lists of wildly divergent customs from all over the world, marveling at their randomness and strangeness. loc: 3255

He does not want to show that modern civilization is corrupt, but that all human perspectives on the world are corrupt and partial by nature. loc: 3425

Montaigne, by contrast, saw himself as a thoroughly ordinary man in every respect, except for his unusual habit of writing things down. He "bears the entire form of the human condition," as everyone does, and is therefore happy to cast himself as a mirror for others—the loc: 3449

11. Q. How to live? A. Live temperately loc: 3467

"Transcendental humors frighten me," he said. The qualities he valued were curiosity, sociability, kindness, fellow-feeling, adaptability, intelligent reflection, the ability to see things from another's point of view, and "goodwill"—none of which is compatible with the fiery furnace of inspiration. loc: 3549

Montaigne even went so far as to claim that true greatness of the soul is to be found "in mediocrity" loc: 3552

There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; loc: 3565

12. Q. How to live? A. Guard your humanity loc: 3580

Those living through the present assume that things are worse than they are, he says, because they cannot escape their local perspective: loc: 3755

Astrologers now warn of "great and imminent alterations and mutations," writes Montaigne, but they forget the simple fact that, however bad things are, most of life goes on undisturbed. "I do not despair about it," he added lightly. loc: 3762

More often, he is admired for his stubborn insistence on maintaining normality in extraordinary circumstances, and his refusal to compromise his independence. loc: 3777

In a time such as that of the Second World War, or in civil-war France, Zweig writes, ordinary people's lives are sacrificed to the obsessions of fanatics, so the question for any person of integrity becomes not so much "How do I survive?" as "How do I remain fully human?" loc: 3825

Zweig knew that Montaigne disliked preaching, yet he managed to extract a series of general rules from the Essays loc: 3832

Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate; be master of your own life. Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will. loc: 3835

13. Q. How to live? A. Do something no one has done before loc: 3867

in 1580, he presented the king with a copy, as was conventional. Henri told him that he liked the book, to which Montaigne is said to have replied, "Sir, then Your Majesty must like me"—because, as he always maintained, he and his book were the same. loc: 3890

This, in fact, should have been an obstacle to its success. By writing so openly about his everyday observations and inner life, Montaigne was breaking a taboo. You were not supposed to record yourself in a book, only your great deeds, if you had any. loc: 3892

Montaigne, the political conservative, proved himself a literary revolutionary from the start, writing like no one else and letting his pen follow the natural rhythms of conversation instead of formal lines of construction. loc: 3923

The coming ten years doubled the size of the Essays, and took Montaigne from being a nonentity to being a star. At the same time, the 1580s removed him from his quiet position in rural Guyenne, sent him on a long trip around Switzerland, Germany, and Italy as a feted celebrity, and made him mayor of Bordeaux. They enhanced Montaigne's stature as a public figure as well as a literary one. They ruined his health, exhausted him, and made him a man who would be remembered. loc: 3950

14. Q. How to live? A. See the world loc: 3954

in the summer of 1580, the renowned forty-seven-year-old author left his vines and set off to cure his ailment and see the world, or at least selected areas of the European world. The trip would keep him away until November 1581: seventeen months. loc: 3987

What he loved above all about his travels was the feeling of going with the flow. He avoided all fixed plans. loc: 4016

This was the great destination, the center of European culture; Venice and Rome had called to him all his life. But he now discovered that he preferred less well known places. loc: 4104

15. Q. How to live? A. Do a good job, but not too good a job loc: 4226

it informed him that he had been elected, in his absence, to be the next mayor of the city. He must return immediately to fulfill his duties. loc: 4230

the "king's command" figured in the matter. loc: 4244

Montaigne would be the city's mayor for four years, from 1581 to 1585. loc: 4259

Montaigne had long since learned that much of what passed for passionate public commitment was just showing off. People involve themselves because they want to have an air of consequence, or to advance their private interests, or simply to keep busy so that they don't have to think about life. loc: 4335

Other people, far less conscientious than he, were praised because they pretended to be committed and energetic. Montaigne warned his employers that this would not happen with him: he would give Bordeaux what duty commanded, no more and no less, loc: 4338

The source of the problem, just as in the seventeenth century, was a distaste for his Skepticism. Nineteenth-century readers were disturbed by it loc: 4412

They did not mind Montaigne doubting facts, but they did not like him applying Skepticism to everyday life and showing emotional detachment from agreed standards. The Skeptic epokhe, or "I hold back," seemed to show an untrustworthiness in his nature. It sounded very much like the greatest bugbear of the new era: nihilism. loc: 4413

for many, he became once again what he had been for Pascal and Malebranche: a trickster who was bad for the soul. loc: 4430

A less serious moral problem also troubled Montaigne's nineteenth-century readers: his openness about sex. loc: 4447

The country had stayed technically at peace through his time as mayor, but by the time he retired again to his estate the Catholic Leagues were doing all they could to provoke another war. loc: 4485

The next stage of the war would become known as the War of the Three Henris, because it revolved around the three-cornered, crazily spinning pinwheel of Henri III, Henri of Navarre, and Henri of Guise. loc: 4493

Catholic extremists thought you might as well put the Devil himself on the throne as have a Protestant king. loc: 4497

the Leaguists—now very powerful, especially in Paris—to introduce anti-Protestant legislation that would cut Navarre off from the throne altogether. Feeling he had no support in his own city, Henri III gave in to them, and, in October 1585, issued an edict giving Huguenots three months to abjure their faith or go into exile. loc: 4513

open war broke out. This would be the last of the wars, but also by far the longest and worst of them. It lasted until 1598, which meant that Montaigne would never see peace again, loc: 4519

In July 1586, a Leaguist army of twenty thousand men laid siege to Castillon on the Dordogne, about five miles away; the fighting spread over the borders of Montaigne's estate. Some of the army camped on his land. The soldiers pillaged his crops and robbed his tenants. loc: 4528

Anyone who could avoid remaining in a plague zone would certainly do so. Very few peasants had this option, but Montaigne did, and so he left. He interrupted work on the essay he was writing at the time, "On Physiognomy," and took to the road with his family. loc: 4537

Now converted into homeless wanderers, they would be obliged to stay away for six months, until they heard that the plague had subsided in March 1587. It was not easy to find six months' worth of hospitality. loc: 4547

During these wandering months, Montaigne also resumed his political activity. Perhaps, in some cases, it was the price he had to pay for accommodation. He played an increasingly major role in attempts by politiques and others to defuse the crisis and secure a future for France. loc: 4553

Early in 1588, Montaigne met Navarre again; shortly afterwards, Navarre sent him on a top-secret mission to the king in Paris. Suddenly, everyone in the capital seemed to be talking about this mission loc: 4569

It seems that Montaigne and Corisande had succeeded in maneuvering Navarre into some sort of a compromise, perhaps a preliminary agreement to renounce Protestantism if necessary, and that Montaigne was there to convey this message to the king. loc: 4579

The sensitivity of the affair meant that both the Leaguists and Navarre's Protestant followers had every reason to want to stop Montaigne ever reaching Paris. loc: 4583

Yet, once again, despite all that Montaigne had risked, and despite all the excitement about him, nothing came out of the deal. loc: 4594

Having abandoned his city without a fight, Henri III was now a king in exile. He had virtually abdicated, though his supporters still recognized him as their monarch. loc: 4614

While Montaigne was resting in bed one afternoon, still very unwell, armed men burst in and seized him on League orders. loc: 4622

They took him, mounted on his own horse, to the Bastille, and locked him up. loc: 4625

Montaigne had, to some extent, come to terms with his mortality since the days of his riding accident. He had been through a great deal since then, and his kidney-stone attacks had forced him into close encounters with death on a regular basis. loc: 4649

the death of Guise radicalized Leaguists further, and a new revolutionary body in Paris, the Council of Forty, pronounced Henri III tyrannical. loc: 4678

the preachers did not call for passive resistance and peaceful withdrawal of consent. They unleashed a fatwa. If Henri was the Devil's agent on earth, as a flood of propaganda publications now proclaimed, killing him was a holy duty. loc: 4682

It did not help matters for someone like Montaigne to point out, in cool and measured tones, that the League and the radical Huguenots had now become virtually indistinguishable from each other: loc: 4694

At some point during this period, Montaigne lost what remained of his taste for politics. He left Blois around the beginning of 1589. By the end of January, he was back in his estate and his library. There, he remained active, liaising with Matignon—still lieutenant-general of the area as well as the new mayor of Bordeaux—but he appears to have sworn off diplomatic traveling from now on. loc: 4702

But slowly, patiently, Navarre won out. He became the undisputed king of France as Henri IV: the monarch who would eventually find a way of ending the civil wars and imposing unity, mostly through sheer power of personality. He was the king the politiques had always hoped for. loc: 4715

Allegiance was all right in theory, but Montaigne was determined not to travel, especially as his health was now worse than ever. loc: 4722

His letter to Henri IV shows that he was as good as his word. Indeed, he comes across in both letters exactly as he does in the Essays: blunt, unimpressed by power, and determined to preserve his freedom. loc: 4741

In early 1595, too late for Montaigne to know about it, Henri IV successfully managed to start a war against an external enemy, Spain, and thus begin to drain off the energies of the civil wars, which ended at last in 1598. France started to build up a real collective identity, though still a fragile one, mostly centered on the person of Henri himself. Many were passionately loyal to him, but others hated him just as passionately. He too was eventually assassinated, stabbed to death by the fanatical Catholic Francois Ravaillac in 1610. loc: 4749

Among his contributions to history was the Edict of Nantes, loc: 4753

16. Q. How to live? A. Philosophize only by accident loc: 4763

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. loc: 4790

On one of the rare occasions when Montaigne referred to himself as a philosopher at all, it was to say that it happened only by chance: he was an "unpremeditated and accidental philosopher." loc: 4797

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. The Shakespearean scholar J. M. Robertson believed that all literature since these two authors could be interpreted as an elaboration of their joint theme: the discovery of self-divided consciousness. loc: 4849

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. loc: 4928

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. In other words, the essay is the genre that—more than any novel or biography—helps us to learn how to live. loc: 4932

Sterne and Montaigne both engage constantly with a world which always generates more things to write about—so why stop? This makes them both accidental philosophers: naturalists on a field trip into the human soul, without maps or plans, and having no idea where they will end up, or what they will do when they get there. loc: 4970

17. Q. How to live? A. Reflect on everything; regret nothing loc: 4973

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. loc: 4982

Montaigne knew that some of the things he had done in the past no longer made sense to him, but he was content to presume that he must have been a different person at the time, and leave it at that. His past selves were as diverse as a group of people at a party. Just as he would not think of passing judgment on a roomful of acquaintances, all of whom had their own reasons and points of view to explain what they had done, so he would not think of judging previous versions of Montaigne. "We are all patchwork," he wrote, "and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game." loc: 4987

the 1588 Essays was almost twice as long as the 1580 version. Book III added thirteen long chapters, and, of the existing essays in the first two books, hardly any remained untouched. loc: 5009

Having given himself a free rein with his 1588 edition, he now galloped away completely. He added no more chapters, but he did insert about a thousand new passages, some of which are long enough to have made a whole essay in the first edition. The book, already nearly twice its original size, now grew by another third. loc: 5029

18. Q. How to live? A. Give up control loc: 5051

MARIE LE JARS DE Gournay, Montaigne's first great editor and publicist— loc: 5053

She became by far the most important woman in his life, more important even than his wife, mother, and daughter, loc: 5055

Gournay felt she had found her other self in Montaigne, the one person with whom she had a true affinity, and the only one to understand her. It was the experience so many of his readers have had over the years: loc: 5084

he chastely invited her to become an adoptive daughter to him—an loc: 5096

Her presence probably helped make this happen; having someone so enthusiastic at his side would have encouraged Montaigne to get back to the Essays almost immediately after publication, and to keep at it even after leaving Picardy. It set the tone for his last few years of writing. loc: 5115

but on the whole she was more meticulous about accuracy than most editors of her time. loc: 5177

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." loc: 5192

this sense of strain and anguish makes her a compelling writer. 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. loc: 5214

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. loc: 5220

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries started to see her as a leech on Montaigne's back. This interpretation had some truth in it, since she did use Montaigne to survive, but it ignored the extent to which she promoted and defended him as well. loc: 5249

To a striking extent, modern critics seem to remix and remake a Montaigne who resembles themselves, not only individually but as a species. 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. loc: 5400

The purpose is to pick out a network of associations: to find in a few apparently straightforward words of text a meaning as atmospheric and revealing as a dream. The result has a dreamlike beauty of its own, and there is no reason to become annoyed because it shows little apparent relation to Montaigne. 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. loc: 5446

Montaigne knew that his own work must keep going through the same mill for as long as it had readers. People would always find things in him that he never intended to say. In doing so, they would actually create those things. "An able reader often discovers in other men's writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects." loc: 5470

Over the centuries, this interpretation and reinterpretation creates a long chain connecting a writer to all future readers—who frequently read each other as well as the original. Virginia Woolf had a beautiful vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how "minds are threaded together—how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's & Euripides . . . It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind." This capacity for living on through readers' inner worlds over long periods of history is what makes a book like the Essays a true classic. As it is reborn differently in each mind, it also brings those minds together. loc: 5475

19. Q. How to live? A. Be ordinary and imperfect loc: 5488

these disparate readings have been transformations of the three great Hellenistic traditions, as transmitted—and altered—by Montaigne. This is natural, since those traditions were the foundation of his thought, and their lines of influence run through the whole of European culture. loc: 5511

They are held together above all by their shared pursuit of eudaimonia or human flourishing, and by their belief that the best way of attaining it is through equanimity or balance: ataraxia loc: 5514

Of course, this is what Montaigne is about and much of the source of his appeal to me. It's also interesting to trace him back to Lucretius, who hadn't been rediscovered all that long ago, so much of Montaigne's appeal and importance can be laid at Poggio's doorstep.

Modern readers who approach Montaigne asking what he can do for them are asking the same question he himself asked of Seneca, Sextus, and Lucretius—and the same question they asked of their predecessors. This is what Virginia Woolf's chain of minds really means: not a scholarly tradition, but a series of self-interested individuals puzzling over their own lives, yet doing it cooperatively. All share a quality that can simply be thought of as "humanity": the experience of being a thinking, feeling being who must get on with an ordinary human life—though Montaigne willingly extended the union of minds to embrace other species too. loc: 5518

This is why, for Montaigne, even the most ordinary existence tells us all we need to know: I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. loc: 5523

He was not yet old, being only in his late fifties, but he knew that his kidney-stone attacks could kill him at any time, and sometimes he longed for it, so great was the agony. But these days the stone did not grab him by the ruff like a bullying strongman and pull him up close to death's tyrannical face. It enticed him "artfully and gently," leaving him plenty of time to think between attacks. Death looked friendly, just as the Stoics said it should be. loc: 5530

What he had first realized after his fall into unconsciousness was now amply confirmed: 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. loc: 5536

This time he really was in agony, unlike the moments when he had been ripping at his doublet. Yet he still felt the same insouciance of soul. The experience seemed to touch him lightly. loc: 5553

But this was the twist, for it was in the adjustment to such flaws that the value of aging lay. Old age provides an opportunity to recognize one's fallibility in a way youth usually finds difficult. Seeing one's decline written on body and mind, one accepts that one is limited and human. By understanding that age does not make one wise, one attains a kind of wisdom after all. loc: 5559

Learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection in this way, and even to embrace it. loc: 5563

It is better to be moderate, modest, and a little vague. Nature will take care of the rest. loc: 5569

20. Q. How to live? A. Let life be its own answer loc: 5577

Instead of the stone passing through and giving him that rush of relief and joy, it stayed where it was. Then an infection set in. loc: 5581

The cynanche in turn led to a quinsy, a serious throat infection, still considered potentially fatal today loc: 5586

The room became the setting for the kind of overcrowded deathbed scene he had always hoped to avoid. Such rituals made death worse than it needed to be; they did nothing but terrify the dying man and everyone around him. loc: 5590

Yet, now that it came to it, he did not attempt to make the crowd go away. loc: 5593

Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself. loc: 5665

Montaigne offers more than an incitement to self-indulgence. The twenty-first century has everything to gain from a Montaignean sense of life, and, in its most troubled moments so far, it has been sorely in need of a Montaignean politics. It could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgment, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict. It needs 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. loc: 5678

when you look at a puppy held over a bucket of water, or even at a cat in the mood for play, you are looking at a creature who looks back at you. No abstract principles are involved; there are only two individuals, face to face, hoping for the best from one another. loc: 5684

Perhaps some of the credit for Montaigne's last answer should therefore go to his cat—a specific sixteenth-century individual, who had a rather pleasant life on a country estate with a doting master and not too much competition for his attention. She was the one who, by wanting to play with Montaigne at an inconvenient moment, reminded him what it was to be alive. They looked at each other, and, just for a moment, he leaped across the gap in order to see himself through her eyes. Out of that moment—and countless others like it—came his whole philosophy. loc: 5686