Brilliant original funny and moving — a vivid portrait of Montaigne showing how his ideas gave birth to our modern sense of our inner selves from Shakespeares plays to the dilemmas we face today.
How to get on well with people how to deal with violence how to adjust to losing someone you love — such questions arise in most peoples lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honourable thing while flourishing and feeling happy?
This question obsessed Renaissance writers none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92) perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman public official and wine-grower he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience unlike anything written before. He called them essays meaning attempts or tries. Into them he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food his childhood memories the way his dogs ears twitched when it was dreaming as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller and over four hundred years later Montaignes honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship wisdom and entertainment — and in search of themselves.
This book a spirited and singular biography (and the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years) relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing (made to speak only Latin) youthful career and sexual adventures his travels and his friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boétie and with his adopted daughter Marie de Gournay. And as we read we also meet his readers — who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question how to live?
From the Hardcover edition.
