What I've Been Reading

In short, seeking wisdom in solitude, Montaigne instead flirted with madness. He saved himself, cured himself of his delusions and hallucinations, by writing them down. Writing the Essays, then allowed him to regain mastery of his own self.  

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Thus, the Essays offer us lessons in the art, not just of war or peace, but peace in wartime, and a peaceful life amidst the worst kind of war. 

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I have no more made my book than my book has made me: 'tis a book consubstantial with the author, and who touches the one, touches the other. Man and book have become one. 

A Summer with Montaigne: On the Art of Living Well by Antoine Compagnon.

• What he detests above all are people who are so arrogant that they take offense when someone else contradicts them. If there is one thing Montaigne loathes, it is smugness, conceit. 
• Life is about becoming, rather than being. The world can change in an instant, and so can I. The world moves, and I move, it is up to me to find my seat in the world. 
• Thanks to a fall from a horse, Montaigne - before Descartes, before phenomenology, before Freud - anticipates by several centuries the tendency to wonder uneasily about subjectivity and intention, and conceives his own theory of identity; it is precarious, disjointed. 
• Montaigne learns a more important, more modern lesson from the incident. It causes him to reflect on identify, on relationship between the mind and the body. 
• Mother nature, is always a good thing for Montaigne, who, setting it against artifice, praises it endlessly. The closer we are to nature, better off we are. He was one of colonialism's earliest critics. 
• Like Cicero, Montaigne believed that man could never really be himself in public life, in the world of society and work, but only in solitude, meditation and reading. 
• Montaigne spent as much of his time in this tower as he could, retreating there to read, think, and write; the library was his refuge from domestic and civil life, from worldly strife and the century's violence. 
• Here again, Montaigne returns to the idea that we do our best thinking when in motion. 
• If Montaigne, who spoke Latin before he spoke French, writes in French here, it is because that is the language of the readers he desires to reach. The language in which he writes is the language of the reader for whom he is writing. Montaigne is saying, I am not writing for the centuries to come, but for the people around me now. 
• Montaigne is no stranger to contradictions. 
• Montaigne and La Boetie were predestined for one another before they even met. Montaigne is undoubtedly idealizing their friendship. Later in Book One, in the chapter entitled "A Consideration upon Cicero," he is clearly thinking of La Boetie when he acknowledges that he would have not written the Essays if he had still had a friend to whom he could have written letters. We have La Boetie to thank for the Essays, in his presence as much as his absence. 
• Montaigne's withdrawal to his estates was never intended as a rejection of other people, but rather a way of improving his ability to interact with them. His life was not made up of two separate parts, one active and the second idle; it was composed of intermittences, periods of retirement and contemplation followed by well thought-out returns to civil life and public action. 
• We should rather examine, who is better learned, than who is learned, We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void. 
• "Knowledge without Conscience is but the ruin of the soul." Conscience - that is honesty and morality - is indeed the end goal of all teaching. It is what remains when digestion is complete and we have forgotten almost everything else. 
• Montaigne detest authority. 
• Montaigne did not choose to become a Stoic, or a skeptic, or an epicurean - the three philosophies with which he is most often associated - but he has recognized now, late in life, that his behaviour conformed naturally to one or another of these doctrines, by chance, and spontaneously, without planning or deliberation. 
• The companionship of books is always available. Old age, loneliness, idleness, boredom, grief, anxiety - all of these hardships we encounter in the ordinary course of life can be alleviated by reading, if our distress is not too acute. Books soothe our worries, offering aid and assistance. 
• Even when dealing with something as personal as his kidney stones, Montaigne never stops doubting, observing, and wondering. 
• Montaigne enjoys a good play on words: death is the end, not the aim of life. Life must be aimed at living, and death will take care of itself. 
• Montaigne does not like transitions or ornamentation; he prefers to go straight to the point and rejects all stylistic effects. 
• Montaigne's profession of humility regarding his memory is also claim to originality. 
• Montaigne has multiple points of view; he contradicts himself, but this is because the world itself full of paradoxes and inconsistencies. 

Of what use are the Essays? What makes Montaigne so human, so much like us, is doubt - including self-doubt. He hesitates frequently, caught between laughter and sadness. At the Essays' conclusion, this man who has dedicated the greater part of his life to them is still wondering if he wasted his time.

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We sense that he feels a certain sense of pride at having succeeded in an unprecedented undertaking; no author before him had ever attempted such complete identification between man and book.

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The moral code of life proposed by Montaigne is also an aesthetic; it is the art of living in beauty. The seizure of a moment becomes a way of being truly present in the world; modest, natural, simply and completely human.