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Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne · essays, 1580-1595·42 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version42 hrs → 50 sec
  • The editor calls him the most fascinating of all egotists. William Carew Hazlitt's 1877 preface says Montaigne "investigated his mental structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the mechanism of the works," then published the result as literary anatomy.
  • Book One opens by arguing philosophy is death rehearsal. In "That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die," he quotes Cicero that philosophy is "nothing but to prepare one's self to die," then spends the chapter arguing contempt of death is the one benefit that makes every other pleasure possible.
  • A servant who lived years in Brazil reshapes his worldview. In "Of Cannibals," Montaigne interviews a man who spent ten or twelve years in the New World near Villegaignon's "Antarctic France," then concludes barbarism is just a label for "everything that is not in use in his own country," describing a tribe with no words for lying, treachery, or envy: the passage Shakespeare lifted almost verbatim into The Tempest.
  • He refuses to write a finished self-portrait. In "Of Repentance" he insists, "I do not paint its being, I paint its passage," tracking himself "from day to day, from minute to minute" instead of pretending a man holds still long enough to be summed up.
  • He treats his own kidney stones as evidence, not just suffering. In "Of Experience" he reports that since the stone came on he has "never had any fever since," and argues the disease "carries itself clean off" unlike other maladies that leave lingering damage, so he counts it "as physic" rather than simple affliction.
  • The whole project ends on a prayer for wine and music. The final page asks Apollo to let him "enjoy what I have in good health," stay "sound in body and mind," and grow old without losing "the cittern," closing a lifetime of self-examination on a request for an ordinary, sociable old age.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the first book to make personal, contradictory, in-progress thought the whole subject, and Montaigne says so himself: he paints passage, not being.

Montaigne set out to describe one ordinary man completely and honestly, and in doing so invented the essay as a form for thinking out loud.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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