Michel de Montaigne is often upheld as a model of the examined life. In her introduction to What Do I Know? (the latest selection of Montaigne’s essays, translated by David Coward and published in 2023 by Pushkin Press), Yiyun Li writes: “For me, his writing serves as a reminder, a prompt, even, a mandate: a regular meditation on selfhood, like daily yoga, is a healthy habit.” And in M.A. Screech’s introduction to his translation of the Essays, he describes it as “one of Europe’s great bedside books.” Alain de Botton likewise included Montaigne in his book The Consolations of Philosophy as a helpful guide for thinking about the problem of self-esteem, and in his book The School of Life, he writes that the Essays “amounted to a practical compendium of advice on helping us to know our fickle minds, find purpose, connect meaningfully with others and achieve intervals of composure and acceptance.”
Pieces that seek to assert why Montaigne matters and why we should read him tend to proceed along these lines: he is useful because he teaches us “how to think,” and thus, as the title of Sarah Bakewell’s biography of Montaigne suggests, How to Live. Such takeaways are not necessarily wrong, but they are typical of the easy, low-resolution readings that characterize attempts to make thinkers more appealing to the public. Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that the Essays can be found on Amazon by applying the filter for “motivational self-help.”
That Montaigne has been susceptible to this treatment is perhaps due to his accessibility: he is not a systematic thinker, and he wrote short pieces on a variety of subjects, which means he can be easily picked up and put down. And since he is locatable within the tradition of skepticism, he can be read as having an emphasis similar to that of Stoic or Epicurean philosophers (whom it should be said Montaigne repeatedly cites): that a good life rests upon the tranquility of the mind, which we can arrive at through the examination of our thoughts and the recognition that we cannot know everything. (This is the spirit, it seems, in which many popularizers read him.) But Montaigne famously offers no finished opinions and presumes to have no wisdom, and he certainly didn’t regard himself as someone to be modeled. He also never suggests at any point that his nearly thousand pages of self-investigation have yielded any tangible results. In his opening address to the reader, he advises us not to squander our leisure on “so frivolous and vain a subject” as himself. And in “Of Vanity,” he even goes so far as to liken his writing to brain farts, mental excrement: “Here you have, a little more decently, some droppings of an aged mind, now hard, now loose, and always undigested.”
I first encountered the essays at the age of twenty, when I was scarcely prepared to read them: I knew little to nothing about the time in which Montaigne lived; most of his references were lost on me, nor had I read many of the thinkers and poets he’s inclined to cite. The experience that I had in reading him was like being guided along the counters of someone else’s consciousness. If the essays indeed show us “how to think,” they do so because of the way in which Montaigne’s intellectual process inheres in the act of composition itself. Popularizers are right that there is relatable wisdom in the essays, but it is inadequate to attend only to what Montaigne tells us—and not how he tells it.
●
Barely a century into the age of print, Montaigne attempted to put everything into a book—all of himself and his intellectual life. Such indulgent maximalism is lost on us today, when sharing oneself with the world is a normal activity, accustomed as we are to the incessant production of commentary and the airing of opinion for public consumption. It’s easy enough for us to recognize this as a kind of decadence in our own time, but Montaigne regarded it as equally true of his own: “Scribbling seems to be one of the symptoms of an age of excess,” he writes. “What must prattle produce, when the stammering and loosening of the tongue smothered the world with such a horrible load of volumes? So many words for the sake of words alone!” The commodification of text and a culture increasingly afflicted by overproduction were preconditions for the essays as a project. Innovative as they are, they were the result of the new culture of books. The idea that one could cram every subject (“all subjects are linked to each other,” Montaigne says) and article of daily life into a text was a novelty of the Gutenberg epoch, when suddenly anything, on any topic, could be printed.
The form of the essays emerged partly out of the tragedy of personal circumstance. Montaigne’s friend and great love, Étienne de la Boétie, died in 1563, leaving him with no one to write to when he retired from public service in 1571 at the age of 38 and retreated to the south tower of his estate. Robbed of correspondence, Montaigne resigned to write to himself:
Letter writing … is a kind of work in which my friends think I have some ability. And I would have preferred to adopt this form to publish my sallies, if I had had someone to talk to. … For to talk to the winds, as others do, is beyond me except in dreams … I would have been more attentive and confident, with a strong friend to address, than I am now, when I consider the various tastes of a whole public.
This suggests that the essays were initially seen as self-addressed epistles. The early pieces are mostly anecdotal and thick with quotes (Montaigne was an incontinent quoter). As the essays progress, however, Montaigne’s voice begins to flourish: the pieces get longer, baggier, more self-referential and strung with more “deliberate irrelevances” (in Stuart Hampshire’s phrase). Montaigne sometimes fails to get around to his title theme and occasionally abandons it altogether. The first few essays feel staid and scholastic, but they soon become playfully unrestrained: whereas one of the early essays would take no more than a paragraph or two to address its subject, by the time we get to “Of Physiognomy” (one of the last), it takes Montaigne 26 pages to get around to it, in an essay that has a total of 28 pages.
The first piece I read was “Of Cannibals”—an exemplary essay, full of distractions, diversions and double-backs. Montaigne opens by recounting Plato’s description of Atlantis and speculates about the separation of the continents by a great flood; he quotes Virgil and Horace and remarks how in foreign territories people often mistake rivers for seas and seas for oceans; he insists that topographers should stick to the places they know instead of concerning themselves with far-off lands—how everybody should stick to writing about what they know, how they should write less, and how there are too many books altogether. Then (four pages later), he finally gets to his subject: the ceremonies and practices of the Tupinambá people of Brazil, who ritually cannibalized their dead. What most people remember about the essay occurs here, where Montaigne says that “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice,” and that Europeans “surpass [the Tupinambá] in every kind of barbarity,” for there is more barbarity in mutilating people while alive than consuming them once they’re dead—at which point, Montaigne gets sidetracked and goes off on a tangent about martial virtue and honorable defeat, before reminding himself once again to return to his subject. He then recounts a story about meeting one of these men, who’d been taken prisoner, tells us that he had a bad interpreter and, anyway, can’t remember what they talked about, before deflating his whole effort with a shrug: “All this is not too bad—but what’s the use? They don’t wear breeches.”
Not for nothing does Montaigne describe his essays as “monstrosities” and “grotesques” that are “botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order, sequence and proportion which are purely accidental.” Like most pieces, “Of Cannibals” contains far more digression than argument, and as usual, when Montaigne feels himself foundering, he simply stops instead of attempting to amend his work. All of this is to say that Montaigne had no grand plan or design. His writing resists summary and is impossible to condense into packaged bits of wisdom. Even having to explain the progression of his essays often feels tedious. Yet these are the very qualities that, when we shift our focus from content to form, continue to make the essays so “instructive.”
●
In her celebratory essay, Virginia Woolf praises Montaigne for his ability to depict the movements of his mind so authentically (that Woolf loved Montaigne is not surprising, for in the essays we see a prototype for stream of consciousness). In writing, one must always confront the “difficulty of expression”—that is, to think and to write what one thinks are two different things: “the pen is a rigid instrument; it can say very little; it has all kinds of habits and ceremonies of its own … changing the natural stumbling trip of human speech into the solemn and stately march of pens.”
The proximity between what happens in the mind and what happens on the page is sometimes widened by the act of writing: the clumsy rhythms of consciousness are coerced, beaten into shape, formalized. Writing occasions its own kind of thinking, certainly, but it often fails to capture the way ideas appear in the mind unannounced, seize it for some time and then shuffle off. Montaigne remains unique, Woolf claims, because of his apparent ability to collapse the distinction between his mind and his prose. “We can never doubt for an instant,” she writes, “that his book was himself.”
At times, Montaigne likens his writing to portraiture. In his address to the reader, he says, “c’est moi que je peins” (“it is myself that I portray”). It is from peins that we get “to paint.” In “Of Friendship,” he says again that he is borrowing his approach from painting: “As I was considering the way a painter I employ went about his work, I had a mind to imitate him.” And in “Of Vanity,” he writes: “let this essay of myself run on, and this third extension of the other parts of my painting.” Pascal, who was indelibly influenced by Montaigne and adopted a similar form for his Pensées, described this technique as “la peinture de la pensée” (“the painting of thought”).
Whether the Essays are generative or mimetic isn’t clear: Do they actually occasion a certain mode of thinking—a way of perceiving that is unique to them—or just allow one to capture what that thinking looks like? Montaigne never gives us any indication that he recognized such a distinction. In likening his process to painting he was surely reaching for an apt metaphor for the kind of writing he was doing, for which there was no word at the time. The analogy of painting, however, suggests that his process is simultaneously generative and imitative; it is auto-mimetic, like the Escher sketch of the hand drawing itself.
Montaigne’s depiction of his mind “from day to day, from minute to minute” is sometimes regarded as his method (i.e. his intellectual process), but it is also and equally the formation of a literary style: in letting his mind wander freely in the act of writing, he spontaneously creates a form that allows him to depict that wandering. Therefore, if Montaigne goes off track, so does his style: “My style and my mind alike go roaming.” Tellingly, he seems to have not regarded his style as a style at all, partly because he made no distinction between himself and his process: “I want people to see my natural and ordinary pace,” he tells us, “however off the track it is. I let myself go as I am.” In “Of Presumption,” he says, with typical self-effacement: “Everything I write is crude; it lacks distinction and beauty.” He describes his style as “formless and undisciplined” and “a way of proceeding without definitions, without divisions, without conclusions, and confused…” He also describes it as “free and unruly,” and he claims that, try as he might, he cannot attain the “smooth and orderly” texture favored by others. Even his likening of his words to droppings is revealing, for it suggests that there is no artifice in his prose. His form is not crafted, but excreted.
But these protestations notwithstanding, Montaigne had a style, insofar as he faithfully portrayed the nature of his perception. And his style—in which thinking is at once a cognitive and an aesthetic act—suggests an intrinsic connection between episteme and form, between the intellectual process and the shape that process takes on. In “On Style,” Susan Sontag points out that “every style embodies an epistemological decision, an interpretation of how and what we perceive.” All styles, that is, have different evaluative qualities; they reveal things specific to their gaze. This implies that certain discoveries are only possible through certain literary forms, and that those forms are not just delivery systems––they also play an active role in those discoveries. One wonders, for example, if Plato could have written in any form other than dialogues or ethical allegories.
It is certainly difficult to imagine Montaigne writing in any genre other than the one he wrote in, especially since he is regarded as its founder. Only the freedom and elasticity of the essays could accommodate Montaigne’s bottomless self-investigation. They are an epistemological experiment, perfectly expressive of the skeptical mind, for which all claims—especially those to knowledge—are provisional. They are all-accommodating, embracing all interests, contradictions, revisions, distractions, irrelevances; they permit one to explore everything and release one from the burden of having to conclude anything.
●
Setting oneself down in a book is an attempt to fix oneself, but Montaigne can never fix himself (“Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two”). This is because he can never settle what he knows: “I distrust my present thoughts hardly less than my past ones and my second or third thoughts hardly less than my first.” He and his consciousness are always in motion, which reflects as much the capture of thought as what it is like to be captured by thought. The “I” in Montaigne is therefore always unstable: the mind is constantly chasing itself down, straining for self-definition. This leads him to write in one of the final essays, nearly at the end of his project: “I do not depict being. I depict passage.”
Montaigne’s technique is, by his own admission, unmeditated and associative; he never knows where he and his pen are going. The Montaignian amble, as it were, exhibits the “perpetual flux, change, and variation” of his thoughts. A little later, he says: “My ideas follow one another”—and crucially, adds—“and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance.” The essays therefore have a specular aspect to them: they allow ideas to look at themselves. In his essay “Coleridge as Artist,” Marshall McLuhan argues that Montaigne was preoccupied with “literary techniques for arresting and projecting some phase of the human mind: to arrest in order to project, and to project in order to contemplate.” This technique is an attempt to capture what knowing might look like so that one can look upon it.
But to capture knowledge is not, for Montaigne, to still it. If Montaigne could settle what he thinks, there would be no need to write it down: “If my soul could only find a footing I would not be assaying myself but resolving myself.” The essays therefore enable him not to settle. “This is a register of varied and changing occurrences,” he writes in “Of Repentance,” “of ideas which are unresolved and, when needs be, contradictory, either because I myself have become different or because I grasp hold of different attributes or aspects of my subjects.” As a project, the essays are infinitely malleable, and as we see in the history of their publication, inherently endless.
Montaigne repeatedly revised the first two books, making hundreds of alterations over successive editions. These were not edits in the way we might think of them. He rarely corrected himself, or crossed out his thoughts, but inserted more—often contradictory—thoughts (“I add, but I do not correct”). These additions sometimes rival the size of the original pieces; sometimes they overtake them. Montaigne would scribble riffs and addenda in the margins, which were then incorporated into the text without any indication to the reader (later editions of the essays would represent these layers via superscript letters ABC, which mark where the passages were inserted). More still, since there were no paragraph breaks or indentations in the original version, one would have read each chapter as an unbroken slab of text, in which quotes, thoughts, sub-thoughts and afterthoughts would have run together in an indistinguishable stream and any sense of temporality would have been obliterated—a reflection of our own mental lives, in which our modified thoughts are never stamped with a date, nor accompanied with daggers or asterisks.
●
Montaigne continued to expand the essays until his death in 1592, by which point they were hugely popular. Three years later, a third volume was published. This has given rise to a debate among scholars about which edition should be considered the definitive version. Of course, there is no definitive version. If the goal of the essays was to capture (necessarily unsuccessfully) the ever-shifting nature of one’s perspective and the provisionality of what one knows, it is appropriate that Montaigne never regarded them as complete: “Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?” The essays are, in effect, a never-ending work-in-progress.
I see this reflected in the overlapping notes that riddle my own wrist-weakening, door-stopping edition of the essays—its white space crammed with marginalia, made at different times, in different interpretive moods. I see once again my first, second and successive reactions to things; in some cases, not recognizing myself in my own hand, cringing at my comments and the things I once thought profound. Reading Montaigne again now, from the vantage of my mid-thirties, I recognize more the sense of passage that characterizes intellectual life: each one of my readings has been essentially different, and each time I appear semi-alienated from my past self, making my mind—as Montaigne himself says he hopes to accomplish in writing the essays—“ashamed of itself.”
For me, the unique pleasure of the essays has always been that they capture, with astonishing accuracy, the life of the mind. To be an essayist is to conduct part of one’s intellectual life in public—to dramatize one’s own intellectual process in front of others. Montaigne, who was arguably the first to do this, understood that the epistemic task one undertakes in the essay—to figure out what one knows—is inherent to its form. If I have found him instructive, which I have, it is not because he has taught me “how to think,” but that how to think and how one thinks are different versions of the same thing. Beyond this, I hesitate to say anything definitive, for that would be very un-Montaignian indeed.
Michel de Montaigne is often upheld as a model of the examined life. In her introduction to What Do I Know? (the latest selection of Montaigne’s essays, translated by David Coward and published in 2023 by Pushkin Press), Yiyun Li writes: “For me, his writing serves as a reminder, a prompt, even, a mandate: a regular meditation on selfhood, like daily yoga, is a healthy habit.” And in M.A. Screech’s introduction to his translation of the Essays, he describes it as “one of Europe’s great bedside books.” Alain de Botton likewise included Montaigne in his book The Consolations of Philosophy as a helpful guide for thinking about the problem of self-esteem, and in his book The School of Life, he writes that the Essays “amounted to a practical compendium of advice on helping us to know our fickle minds, find purpose, connect meaningfully with others and achieve intervals of composure and acceptance.”
Pieces that seek to assert why Montaigne matters and why we should read him tend to proceed along these lines: he is useful because he teaches us “how to think,” and thus, as the title of Sarah Bakewell’s biography of Montaigne suggests, How to Live. Such takeaways are not necessarily wrong, but they are typical of the easy, low-resolution readings that characterize attempts to make thinkers more appealing to the public. Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that the Essays can be found on Amazon by applying the filter for “motivational self-help.”
That Montaigne has been susceptible to this treatment is perhaps due to his accessibility: he is not a systematic thinker, and he wrote short pieces on a variety of subjects, which means he can be easily picked up and put down. And since he is locatable within the tradition of skepticism, he can be read as having an emphasis similar to that of Stoic or Epicurean philosophers (whom it should be said Montaigne repeatedly cites): that a good life rests upon the tranquility of the mind, which we can arrive at through the examination of our thoughts and the recognition that we cannot know everything. (This is the spirit, it seems, in which many popularizers read him.) But Montaigne famously offers no finished opinions and presumes to have no wisdom, and he certainly didn’t regard himself as someone to be modeled. He also never suggests at any point that his nearly thousand pages of self-investigation have yielded any tangible results. In his opening address to the reader, he advises us not to squander our leisure on “so frivolous and vain a subject” as himself. And in “Of Vanity,” he even goes so far as to liken his writing to brain farts, mental excrement: “Here you have, a little more decently, some droppings of an aged mind, now hard, now loose, and always undigested.”
I first encountered the essays at the age of twenty, when I was scarcely prepared to read them: I knew little to nothing about the time in which Montaigne lived; most of his references were lost on me, nor had I read many of the thinkers and poets he’s inclined to cite. The experience that I had in reading him was like being guided along the counters of someone else’s consciousness. If the essays indeed show us “how to think,” they do so because of the way in which Montaigne’s intellectual process inheres in the act of composition itself. Popularizers are right that there is relatable wisdom in the essays, but it is inadequate to attend only to what Montaigne tells us—and not how he tells it.
●
Barely a century into the age of print, Montaigne attempted to put everything into a book—all of himself and his intellectual life. Such indulgent maximalism is lost on us today, when sharing oneself with the world is a normal activity, accustomed as we are to the incessant production of commentary and the airing of opinion for public consumption. It’s easy enough for us to recognize this as a kind of decadence in our own time, but Montaigne regarded it as equally true of his own: “Scribbling seems to be one of the symptoms of an age of excess,” he writes. “What must prattle produce, when the stammering and loosening of the tongue smothered the world with such a horrible load of volumes? So many words for the sake of words alone!” The commodification of text and a culture increasingly afflicted by overproduction were preconditions for the essays as a project. Innovative as they are, they were the result of the new culture of books. The idea that one could cram every subject (“all subjects are linked to each other,” Montaigne says) and article of daily life into a text was a novelty of the Gutenberg epoch, when suddenly anything, on any topic, could be printed.
The form of the essays emerged partly out of the tragedy of personal circumstance. Montaigne’s friend and great love, Étienne de la Boétie, died in 1563, leaving him with no one to write to when he retired from public service in 1571 at the age of 38 and retreated to the south tower of his estate. Robbed of correspondence, Montaigne resigned to write to himself:
This suggests that the essays were initially seen as self-addressed epistles. The early pieces are mostly anecdotal and thick with quotes (Montaigne was an incontinent quoter). As the essays progress, however, Montaigne’s voice begins to flourish: the pieces get longer, baggier, more self-referential and strung with more “deliberate irrelevances” (in Stuart Hampshire’s phrase). Montaigne sometimes fails to get around to his title theme and occasionally abandons it altogether. The first few essays feel staid and scholastic, but they soon become playfully unrestrained: whereas one of the early essays would take no more than a paragraph or two to address its subject, by the time we get to “Of Physiognomy” (one of the last), it takes Montaigne 26 pages to get around to it, in an essay that has a total of 28 pages.
The first piece I read was “Of Cannibals”—an exemplary essay, full of distractions, diversions and double-backs. Montaigne opens by recounting Plato’s description of Atlantis and speculates about the separation of the continents by a great flood; he quotes Virgil and Horace and remarks how in foreign territories people often mistake rivers for seas and seas for oceans; he insists that topographers should stick to the places they know instead of concerning themselves with far-off lands—how everybody should stick to writing about what they know, how they should write less, and how there are too many books altogether. Then (four pages later), he finally gets to his subject: the ceremonies and practices of the Tupinambá people of Brazil, who ritually cannibalized their dead. What most people remember about the essay occurs here, where Montaigne says that “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice,” and that Europeans “surpass [the Tupinambá] in every kind of barbarity,” for there is more barbarity in mutilating people while alive than consuming them once they’re dead—at which point, Montaigne gets sidetracked and goes off on a tangent about martial virtue and honorable defeat, before reminding himself once again to return to his subject. He then recounts a story about meeting one of these men, who’d been taken prisoner, tells us that he had a bad interpreter and, anyway, can’t remember what they talked about, before deflating his whole effort with a shrug: “All this is not too bad—but what’s the use? They don’t wear breeches.”
Not for nothing does Montaigne describe his essays as “monstrosities” and “grotesques” that are “botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order, sequence and proportion which are purely accidental.” Like most pieces, “Of Cannibals” contains far more digression than argument, and as usual, when Montaigne feels himself foundering, he simply stops instead of attempting to amend his work. All of this is to say that Montaigne had no grand plan or design. His writing resists summary and is impossible to condense into packaged bits of wisdom. Even having to explain the progression of his essays often feels tedious. Yet these are the very qualities that, when we shift our focus from content to form, continue to make the essays so “instructive.”
●
In her celebratory essay, Virginia Woolf praises Montaigne for his ability to depict the movements of his mind so authentically (that Woolf loved Montaigne is not surprising, for in the essays we see a prototype for stream of consciousness). In writing, one must always confront the “difficulty of expression”—that is, to think and to write what one thinks are two different things: “the pen is a rigid instrument; it can say very little; it has all kinds of habits and ceremonies of its own … changing the natural stumbling trip of human speech into the solemn and stately march of pens.”
The proximity between what happens in the mind and what happens on the page is sometimes widened by the act of writing: the clumsy rhythms of consciousness are coerced, beaten into shape, formalized. Writing occasions its own kind of thinking, certainly, but it often fails to capture the way ideas appear in the mind unannounced, seize it for some time and then shuffle off. Montaigne remains unique, Woolf claims, because of his apparent ability to collapse the distinction between his mind and his prose. “We can never doubt for an instant,” she writes, “that his book was himself.”
At times, Montaigne likens his writing to portraiture. In his address to the reader, he says, “c’est moi que je peins” (“it is myself that I portray”). It is from peins that we get “to paint.” In “Of Friendship,” he says again that he is borrowing his approach from painting: “As I was considering the way a painter I employ went about his work, I had a mind to imitate him.” And in “Of Vanity,” he writes: “let this essay of myself run on, and this third extension of the other parts of my painting.” Pascal, who was indelibly influenced by Montaigne and adopted a similar form for his Pensées, described this technique as “la peinture de la pensée” (“the painting of thought”).
Whether the Essays are generative or mimetic isn’t clear: Do they actually occasion a certain mode of thinking—a way of perceiving that is unique to them—or just allow one to capture what that thinking looks like? Montaigne never gives us any indication that he recognized such a distinction. In likening his process to painting he was surely reaching for an apt metaphor for the kind of writing he was doing, for which there was no word at the time. The analogy of painting, however, suggests that his process is simultaneously generative and imitative; it is auto-mimetic, like the Escher sketch of the hand drawing itself.
Montaigne’s depiction of his mind “from day to day, from minute to minute” is sometimes regarded as his method (i.e. his intellectual process), but it is also and equally the formation of a literary style: in letting his mind wander freely in the act of writing, he spontaneously creates a form that allows him to depict that wandering. Therefore, if Montaigne goes off track, so does his style: “My style and my mind alike go roaming.” Tellingly, he seems to have not regarded his style as a style at all, partly because he made no distinction between himself and his process: “I want people to see my natural and ordinary pace,” he tells us, “however off the track it is. I let myself go as I am.” In “Of Presumption,” he says, with typical self-effacement: “Everything I write is crude; it lacks distinction and beauty.” He describes his style as “formless and undisciplined” and “a way of proceeding without definitions, without divisions, without conclusions, and confused…” He also describes it as “free and unruly,” and he claims that, try as he might, he cannot attain the “smooth and orderly” texture favored by others. Even his likening of his words to droppings is revealing, for it suggests that there is no artifice in his prose. His form is not crafted, but excreted.
But these protestations notwithstanding, Montaigne had a style, insofar as he faithfully portrayed the nature of his perception. And his style—in which thinking is at once a cognitive and an aesthetic act—suggests an intrinsic connection between episteme and form, between the intellectual process and the shape that process takes on. In “On Style,” Susan Sontag points out that “every style embodies an epistemological decision, an interpretation of how and what we perceive.” All styles, that is, have different evaluative qualities; they reveal things specific to their gaze. This implies that certain discoveries are only possible through certain literary forms, and that those forms are not just delivery systems––they also play an active role in those discoveries. One wonders, for example, if Plato could have written in any form other than dialogues or ethical allegories.
It is certainly difficult to imagine Montaigne writing in any genre other than the one he wrote in, especially since he is regarded as its founder. Only the freedom and elasticity of the essays could accommodate Montaigne’s bottomless self-investigation. They are an epistemological experiment, perfectly expressive of the skeptical mind, for which all claims—especially those to knowledge—are provisional. They are all-accommodating, embracing all interests, contradictions, revisions, distractions, irrelevances; they permit one to explore everything and release one from the burden of having to conclude anything.
●
Setting oneself down in a book is an attempt to fix oneself, but Montaigne can never fix himself (“Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two”). This is because he can never settle what he knows: “I distrust my present thoughts hardly less than my past ones and my second or third thoughts hardly less than my first.” He and his consciousness are always in motion, which reflects as much the capture of thought as what it is like to be captured by thought. The “I” in Montaigne is therefore always unstable: the mind is constantly chasing itself down, straining for self-definition. This leads him to write in one of the final essays, nearly at the end of his project: “I do not depict being. I depict passage.”
Montaigne’s technique is, by his own admission, unmeditated and associative; he never knows where he and his pen are going. The Montaignian amble, as it were, exhibits the “perpetual flux, change, and variation” of his thoughts. A little later, he says: “My ideas follow one another”—and crucially, adds—“and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance.” The essays therefore have a specular aspect to them: they allow ideas to look at themselves. In his essay “Coleridge as Artist,” Marshall McLuhan argues that Montaigne was preoccupied with “literary techniques for arresting and projecting some phase of the human mind: to arrest in order to project, and to project in order to contemplate.” This technique is an attempt to capture what knowing might look like so that one can look upon it.
But to capture knowledge is not, for Montaigne, to still it. If Montaigne could settle what he thinks, there would be no need to write it down: “If my soul could only find a footing I would not be assaying myself but resolving myself.” The essays therefore enable him not to settle. “This is a register of varied and changing occurrences,” he writes in “Of Repentance,” “of ideas which are unresolved and, when needs be, contradictory, either because I myself have become different or because I grasp hold of different attributes or aspects of my subjects.” As a project, the essays are infinitely malleable, and as we see in the history of their publication, inherently endless.
Montaigne repeatedly revised the first two books, making hundreds of alterations over successive editions. These were not edits in the way we might think of them. He rarely corrected himself, or crossed out his thoughts, but inserted more—often contradictory—thoughts (“I add, but I do not correct”). These additions sometimes rival the size of the original pieces; sometimes they overtake them. Montaigne would scribble riffs and addenda in the margins, which were then incorporated into the text without any indication to the reader (later editions of the essays would represent these layers via superscript letters ABC, which mark where the passages were inserted). More still, since there were no paragraph breaks or indentations in the original version, one would have read each chapter as an unbroken slab of text, in which quotes, thoughts, sub-thoughts and afterthoughts would have run together in an indistinguishable stream and any sense of temporality would have been obliterated—a reflection of our own mental lives, in which our modified thoughts are never stamped with a date, nor accompanied with daggers or asterisks.
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Montaigne continued to expand the essays until his death in 1592, by which point they were hugely popular. Three years later, a third volume was published. This has given rise to a debate among scholars about which edition should be considered the definitive version. Of course, there is no definitive version. If the goal of the essays was to capture (necessarily unsuccessfully) the ever-shifting nature of one’s perspective and the provisionality of what one knows, it is appropriate that Montaigne never regarded them as complete: “Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?” The essays are, in effect, a never-ending work-in-progress.
I see this reflected in the overlapping notes that riddle my own wrist-weakening, door-stopping edition of the essays—its white space crammed with marginalia, made at different times, in different interpretive moods. I see once again my first, second and successive reactions to things; in some cases, not recognizing myself in my own hand, cringing at my comments and the things I once thought profound. Reading Montaigne again now, from the vantage of my mid-thirties, I recognize more the sense of passage that characterizes intellectual life: each one of my readings has been essentially different, and each time I appear semi-alienated from my past self, making my mind—as Montaigne himself says he hopes to accomplish in writing the essays—“ashamed of itself.”
For me, the unique pleasure of the essays has always been that they capture, with astonishing accuracy, the life of the mind. To be an essayist is to conduct part of one’s intellectual life in public—to dramatize one’s own intellectual process in front of others. Montaigne, who was arguably the first to do this, understood that the epistemic task one undertakes in the essay—to figure out what one knows—is inherent to its form. If I have found him instructive, which I have, it is not because he has taught me “how to think,” but that how to think and how one thinks are different versions of the same thing. Beyond this, I hesitate to say anything definitive, for that would be very un-Montaignian indeed.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.