Written by Sarah Bakewell, and published in 2010, this incredibly rich book deals with the life of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, magistrate, and winemaker, who lived in the Perigord region of France from 1533 to 1592, and wrote 107 "Essays" (a new genre that he created and named).

I read the French version (translated by Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, and published in 2013), because I wanted to read the Montaigne quotes in the original (aided by little notes that help elucidate the 16th-century French).

The book's full subtitle is A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer -- because underlying all Montaigne's Essays was the question of how to live. He wanted to know what makes "a good life... a correct and honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, and flourishing life". And to answer his question, he looks at a plethora of individual facets of life, refusing to take refuge in the abstract, refusing to regard anything as beneath his notice, abjuring the exposition of some grand thesis, but recounting -- in great detail -- what HE did, and what HE felt while he was doing it. It's "a self-portrait in constant motion", says Bakewell; it's vivid and engaging, and it all but defies the reader not to self-identify. He doesn't set out to be systematic, or even consistent; he adds to his thoughts as he goes along. The result has a personal and organic quality that ensures the discussions engendered by the Essays keep growing -- spanning centuries, and drawing in a vast array of viewpoints.

Bakewell makes of this "how to live?" question the common thread that leads her through the skein of Montaigne's life and legacy: "Each of the twenty possible answers in this book will take the form of an anecdote: an episode or a theme from Montaigne's life, or from the lives of his readers. There will be no clear-cut solution, but these twenty 'essays' at a response will allow us to overhear snippets of the long conversation, and enjoy the company of Montaigne himself."

I found what she came up with quite brilliant. Not only is it a really creative way to approach a biography, but it's also a fascinating introduction to the philosophy that informed Montaigne's life and the lives of subsequent generations of readers, and to the history that provided the backdrop to his life.

Perhaps -- just perhaps -- it was a tad too long. Were too many byways pursued, too many hares raised? But they were such profitable byways and such enjoyable hares that this hardly counts as a criticism. I learned an enormous amount from this study.



Today, of course, we're familiar -- overly familiar? -- with people writing about themselves. Yet often when people think they're writing about what makes them different from others, they are also revealing what they share with others: namely, the experience of being human. As Bakewell explains: "This idea -- writing about oneself to hold up a mirror to others in which they recognize their humanity -- has not always existed. It had to be invented." Its inventor was Montaigne, who is regarded by some -- along with Shakespeare (whom he very probably influenced) -- as a pioneer of "modernity", firstly because he expressed "the truly modern feeling of never really knowing where you are, who you are, and what you're supposed to be doing", and secondly (according to Leonard Woolf) because he was the first person to express an intense and personal horror of cruelty. Be that as it may, Montaigne's frank discussion of his daily observations and inner life was revolutionary.

So how did this come about? At the age of 39, Montaigne quit his magistrate's position in Bordeaux, and embarked on a life devoted to reflection (well, almost -- he was later called into the king's service for a while, but managed to not get himself too tied up in all that). Enviably, he did his reflection in one of the towers of his castle. I would love to have a tower... Montaigne's had three levels. On the ground floor was the chapel; on the first his bedroom; and on the second his library (which had no chimney, so that in the winter he would repair to the small side room next door, which was heated). His library boasted about 1,000 volumes, as well as collections of memorabilia. Quotable quotes adorned its beams, among them Pliny's famous words: "The only certitude: nothing is certain."

Of the twenty "answers" Bakewell distills, inevitably some resonated with me more than others. Thinnest of all, I felt, was "being born". It could be a good answer, I suppose, if we contemplate the cosmic unlikelihood that WE -- each unique self -- should come into being. But presumably Montaigne didn't, so Bakewell doesn't draw the argument in this direction. This chapter therefore mainly serves to get some early life out of the way (not least Montaigne's extraordinary education, which saw him first handed over to the care of a peasant family, and then educated solely in Latin...).



Here are the ones I found most productive:

-- Don't worry about death
This is the mainspring for many of the other answers. Montaigne suffered many losses (when he was just 30, his best friend died of the plague), and feared death. But an accident that brought him to death's door (in 1569/70) convinced him that dying may be easier than we think, once we're actually doing it. It may appear as though you're suffering. But actually you die in the same way that you go to sleep -- by drifting. While others had had near-death experiences, and had thought about them, what makes Montaigne unique is that he decided (beginning in 1572) to write down those thoughts.

-- Pay attention
It was Montaigne's experience that thoughts run off unless you write them down. So he started to observe and question what he experienced, and put the outcome into writing. Again, it was not new to observe that everything in the world is unstable (the Pliny quote above shows that). What distinguished Montaigne, however, was his recognition that the observer is as unreliable as the object s/he observes. The result is a book that flows, along the lines of what would later be called the stream of consciousness of its author, who makes no attempt to stop or contain it. Virginia Woolf found these qualities fascinating: "For her, Montaigne was the first writer to have tried something of this sort, albeit only with his own 'flow'. She also regarded him as the first to have paid so much attention to the simple sensation of being alive. His rule, she said, was to 'relentlessly watch and observe' -- and what he observed was, above all, this river of life traversing his existence." Attention stops things seeping away. So we need to "maintain a kind of naive amazement at every moment of experience" -- and capture it by writing. Aging intensified rather than dulled Montaigne's desire to pay this always astonished attention to life. His avoidance of distraction has an almost zen quality: "When I dance, I dance;" he says, "when I sleep, I sleep."



-- Read a lot, forget the essentials of what you've read, and be slow of mind
Read what you enjoy, Montaigne counselled, without getting hung up over difficulties. And don't worry about what you forget (he complained about his poor memory, but experts have speculated that forgetting might mean he was more open to the kind of "involuntary" memory that fascinated Proust). Every time, sound judgement beats quick judgement: "For [Montaigne], slowness opened the way to wisdom, and to a spirit of moderation that counterbalanced the excesses and the fanaticism prevailing in France at that time." (He lived through an appalling series of brutal religious wars, which drew in their wake economic crises and apocalyptic states of mind.) Unlike the many bigots of his era, Montaigne was always aware of multiple perspectives on any issue and of the fallibility of all humans: "Taking a step aside to acknowledge doubt, scruple, and admission of imperfection became a hallmark of Montaigne's thought on all subjects."

-- Question everything
"All I know is that I don't know anything, and I'm not even sure of that." The first bit is Socrates; the second Pyrrho... Montaigne similarly urges the suspension of judgement, using the maxim: "I hold back, I do not budge." This can be the answer to anything: "The Pyrrhonians did this not to profoundly destabilize themselves, and fall into a paranoid spiral of doubt, but to relax, whatever the subject. This was their path to ataraxia [imperturbability, absence of anxiety, balance]... and thus to joy and fulfilment." What Montaigne didn't question (at least not publicly) was his faith. Certainly, that would have been a very dangerous thing to do in his age. But neither did he appear to take it particularly seriously. While Montaigne avoided trouble with the religious authorities during his lifetime, his Essays were entered into the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books in 1676 (and stayed there until 1854).

-- Be convivial (while also making sure you have a "back room" that you can retreat to)
"For Montaigne, relaxation and affability weren't simply useful talents; they were essential for living well. He strove to cultivate what he called 'cheerful and civil wisdom' -- a phrase reminiscent of the Nietzschean definition of philosophy as 'gay science'." I was very struck by this quote from Nietzsche (which reminded me of a poem by Danusha Lameris called Small Kindnesses): "Cordiality, kindness, politeness of heart [...] have contributed much more powerfully to the edifice of civilization than those far more famous manifestations of the same impulses called compassion, mercy, and sacrifice." Montaigne hated extremes, and hated cruelty. Perhaps this was because of his capacity to imagine the world through different eyes (including those of animals).



-- Tear yourself away from the sleep of habit
The capacity to switch perspectives also stirs you up. Partly, this realization derived from Montaigne's encounter with the Tupinamba visitors he met in Rouen (these Indigenous Brazilians travelled to France in 1550, and again in 1562). He became fascinated by the New World. (Later generations picked up his ideas, and rolled them into the "noble savage" idea, but Montaigne would probably have been far less categoric than writers such as Diderot and Rousseau about the corruption inherent in the state of civilization, and is likely to have emphasized that all human perspectives on the world are corrupt, and of course partial...)

-- Live temperately
"The qualities he valued were curiosity, sociability, kindness, compassion, adaptability, intelligent thinking, the ability to embrace the point of view of others, and 'benevolence' -- all of which are incompatible with the burning fire of inspiration. Montaigne even went as far as to claim that true greatness of soul is to be found in 'mediocrity'... Mediocrity... means accepting that we are the same as everyone else, and that we represent the entire shape of the human condition." His views on moderation and mediocrity stand out against the extreme and cruel times he lived in.

-- See the world
Montaigne travelled as he read and wrote -- doing only what was pleasant. He adapted, though. He believed in eating and behaving in the local style; he blushed to see other French citizens falling over themselves when they met a compatriot; he praised the countries he traversed, and downplayed his own; in Italy he spoke Italian, and used Italian for his diary; he always attempted to be a chameleon; he was fascinated by differences; he experienced something akin to the "traveller's gaze" in Rome; and he found Venice a little touristy...



-- Reflect on everything and regret nothing
"The spirit of repentance was foreign to him in writing, as it was in life, where he remained firmly attached to amor fati: the blithe acceptance of what is happening... Some things he had done in the past no longer made sense to him, Montaigne was aware of that, but he wanted to believe he was another man at that point -- full stop, end of story. His past 'I's' were as diverse as a group of guests at a reception. Just as it did not not occur to him to pass judgement on a room full of acquaintances, where everyone had his reasons and points of view to explain what he had done, it would not have occurred to him to judge the previous versions of Montaigne." Indeed, he commented at one point: "If I had my life to live again, I would live again as I have lived now." He did revisit his Essays, though. The 1588 version is twice as long as its 1580 predecessor...

Although Montaigne regarded himself as an "unpremeditated and fortuitous philosopher", Bakewell's book is brimming with ideas and ways of thinking, and therefore an apt contribution to my "read more philosophy" resolution. And there's lots to follow up, given Montaigne's connections with later writers and philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Stefan Zweig.

A wholly recommendable read.