Review of The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne

A great bedside companion book for weighing down your overburdened nightstand.

Good for audiobook as well, for picking up at random places. Amusing musings, profound quotations, and rambling essays on odd and useful topics.
Montaigne retired at 38, which in the 16th century was old, and decided he would do little else but read and write. He sets out complaining about his memory and ability, downplaying his invention, and admittedly proceeding without aim or purpose. This is more than a diary, and less than a collection of treatises. We don’t learn much about his life from the Essays. He mentions the books he read, a bit about his daughter, whom he lost, and almost nothing about his wife and mistress. A few friends are referred to in passing, but the main characters of his writings are Plutarch, Cicero, Plato, Lucretius, Cato, Xenophon, etc. Once, he recounts being robbed at knife-point, which was an unusual anecdote for how it ended. One wonders why he refrained from including more details of his daily experience. Instead he seems to have focused solely on intellectual pursuits, his interests in the eccentric behavior of foreign ‘savages,’ as the newly discovered inhabitants of the New World were called, of the ‘barbarians’ and the nature of human beings and their behavior, of alchemists, artists and conquerors, historians and surgeons, sportsmen and men of letters. He tends much more to side with outmoded beliefs and classical morality. I doubt his contemporaries considered him progressive, if they read him at all. He seems to have published little or nothing before embarking on his essays, and scarcely to have picked up a pen. But his style is immediately intriguing. Well-formed sentences unfold with vivid evocations to elaborate each point. Without context, most of the time, one might have guessed he was writing from the year 200 A. D. not around 1600. The Middle Ages and early Renaissance seems to have passed without his notice.

After finishing this I went on to read Plutarch’s Moralia and realized he copped whole passages from that ancient. Taken together, it is often difficult to discern what Montaigne pilfered and what he thought up himself, especially when he often questions his method and recall, doubting he is an apt philosopher or able cataloguer of human affairs. Can I be a philosopher if I have no memory? he wonders. The conclusion he reaches is, yes. Because he possesses the faculty of reason, memory is less important. Indeed, he complains that he could never memorize Greek or Latin verses. I understand that sentiment. But that does not stop him from quoting the likes of Virgil and emptying the contents of his library into his essays. Homer he considered an ideal author, though he didn’t appear to know the works of poet as well as most scholars should.
Purposely, he read few authors from his native country, and admits that Plutarch was his all-time favorite. He seems quite ignorant or uninterested in English-language authors. Translations probably didn’t find their way into his hands. He references Boccaccio and other European authors, but his main reference materials are from the Greek and Latin.
On my shelf alongside Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, this sits now, elbowing for room. It was by far the easier tome to traverse and perhaps the only one I will feel the need to revisit frequently. It’s organization is casual and appropriate for perusal. Reading huge chunks at a time may not reward the reader with a sense of cohesiveness. For that, go looking in Plutarch’s Moralia, which covers much of the same territory, but with more rigor. I agree with Montaigne that Plutarch is far more engrossing than Cicero. Like him, I favor the flow of Plato over the precision of Aristotle.
“When I play with my cat how do I know he is not playing with me.” A good quote to whip out at parties.
You can also try: “Laws are made to maintain order, not to achieve justice.”

“Habit is a second nature, and not only masks our true nature, but also usurps it.”
He was concerned with building up individual worth through discipline, through study forming character, but was wary of losing one’s opinion through seductive rhetoric. This strikes me as a Grecian sentiment.

“I have seen men flee from their own shadow as from a monster.”
Know thyself. Wisdom lies in inner exploration. Montaigne considered himself the only subject worthy of his discourse and analysis. He turned the microscope on his own psyche and recognized when men could not face their inner demons or reveal their true selves.

“Each man bears the entire form of the human condition.”
This quote bears the hallmarks of contradiction. He elsewhere consigns women to their traditional roles of the time. He short-sheets them, short-shrifts and hardly acknowledges their contributions to history. They are useful, in his mind, for a few key components of household order, for bringing forth progeny, but not much else, in his estimation. Unfortunately, he could’ve benefited from wider experience in conversing with people outside his social circle, which seemed rather limited.

“There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject.”
What would he say now with the current billion books available to every corner of the globe at all times?