Essays of Michel de Montaigne: The Philosophy Classic
With an Introduction by Philippe Desan and Edited by Tom Butler-Bowdon
Capstone/A Wiley Brand (July 2022)

“The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.” Aldous Huxley

This is one of the latest volumes to be added to the Capstone Classics Series. Each is edited by Tom Butler-Bowdon and includes an introduction by a world-renowned scholar on the given subject, in this instance the essays of Michel de Montaigne.

As Butler-Bowdon points out, “This selected edition, based on the popular Charles Cotton translation. includes many of the classic essays along with some lesser known ones. It includes an insightful Introduction by Montaigne scholar Philippe Desan which reveals how the Essays transformed literature by elevating the familiar over the abstract. In the process, Montaigne created a template for the modern, questioning self.”

According to Desan, “The Essays resembles a patchwork of personal reflections [i.e. ‘attempts,’ the original meaning of the French term, ‘essais’] which all tend toward a single goal: to live better in the present and to prepare for death.” As Montaigne explains, he attempted to paint himself “in my simple, natural, and ordinary garb, without study or artifice, for it was myself to paint…Thus, reader, I am myself the subject of my book; it is not worth your while to take up your time longer with such a frivolous matter.”

These are among the hundreds of Montaigne’s observations that caught my eye:

o Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

o The thing I fear most is fear.

o Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of soul, impossible.

o I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.

o The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.

o In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk – they are all part of the curriculum.

o Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.

o A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

o We can be knowledgable with other men’s knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.

o A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

o Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

o Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

o Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

o I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

o ‘Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.

o A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.

o If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.

o Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.

o Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.

o Those who have compared our life to a dream were right… we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.

o A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.

o The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

o Stubborn and ardent clinging to one’s opinion is the best proof of stupidity. –

o I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

o It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.

o Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

o It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

o Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages. –

o Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.

o I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

o In nine lifetimes, you’ll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you.

I read or re-read the essays in this volume while also reading another book, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Montaigne immediately establishes a rapport with brilliant use of direct address whereas Nietzsche establishes his rapport with an equally brilliant use of a third-party, an Iranian holy man with which he also makes effective use of direct address. The material in each book — directly or indirectly — is best viewed as a personal journey of self-discovery shared by narrator and reader.

One of my hobbies is to select combinations of guests I would invite to a dinner party. If Michel de Montaigne were involved, who else? My fantasy additions would include (in alpha order) Marcus Aurelius, Catherine the Great, Clayton Christensen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Benjamin Franklin,  and Randy Pausch.

I urge those who share my high regard for this brilliant book to check out another, Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, published by Other Press (2010).