Another Mountain
Montaigne and I
Over the last few months - exactly how many is foggy because lots of things are that way for me these days - I’ve been slowly re-reading the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. I was about halfway up this particular mountain (pun intended) when I realized that I really should have been taking notes on the ascent, as per my usual process of working through authors I’d like to encounter and write books about. Thus I’ve gone back down to the trailhead and I’m reading again from the beginning, but this time with pen in hand.
Montaigne’s qualities as a writer, thinker, and human being have continued to grow on me over the years - especially his limpid style, his sparkling intelligence, his wry sense of humor, his casually worn erudition, his love of wisdom, his lack of dogmatism, and his dedication to learning from his experience of life. Reading and re-reading the Essays is like going on a long, fascinating journey with the most insightful and delightful of conversationalists: the moment you return home, you’re ready to start out all over again!
This time through I’m focusing primarily on Montaigne’s dedication to what I call the private, the personal, the practical, the passionate, and the particular. I am wondering how he resisted the philosopher’s siren call of the public, the general, the abstract, the detached, and the universal - all the while avoiding the self-absorption that is all too common among those who’ve inherited the essay form he invented. There are some secrets here to good writing, good thinking, and good living, which I aim to discover with a little help from my ancient friend Michel de Montaigne.
After you traverse the landscape, you then join the exclusive club of what I call the “philosophers of multiplicity” - those you named and including Lin yutang, Santayana, Whitehead, Cioran, Deleuze, and poets Pessoa and Stevens. It’s a very special club not yet fully appreciated. 😁
Montaigne is perhaps the best exemplar of beautiful wisdom, for his insights are based on personal experience and prosaic living, not hifalutin a priori speculation deemed Truth revealed and dogmatically asserted. He understood best that ancient aphorism that “perhaps the Truth depends upon a walk around the lake.” He doesn’t climb a mountain to seek the “highest” POV, but meanders along the creek. He is our greatest Sage.