Michel de Montaigne, Travel Journal ***

In order to read the preferred translation of Montaigne's Essays (by Donald M. Frame),  I bought the Everyman's Library edition of The Complete Works.  In addition to the essays, this volume includes Montaigne's posthumously published journal from his trip to Italy in 1580-1581 and a few dozen letters. The extra items serve as bonus features like you would find on the special edition DVD of a classic film. The Travel Journal in particular feels like a behind-the-scenes featurette for Book III of the Essays. 

During his travels (through France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy), Montaigne pays particular attention to the unique customs of each place he visits. He records differences in the amenities at lodgings, such as the type of linens they provide, and notes variations in the content and order of courses. He invariably notes whether their inn serves meals on pewter, wood, or earthenware plates, and comments on the quality of the wine. Particularly in Germany, he investigates the distribution of Catholics and Protestants, the differences between their churches, and how they live together. He regretted not having his chef along to learn to prepare the local dishes he enjoyed. He complains about the prices. He was not impressed with the beauty of Italian women.

One impetus for his trip was to visit health spas to see how they might help his issue with kidney stones. He tries the local treatments, drinking and bathing in the healing waters, with diverse effects. He describes in detail his stay and treatment at the baths near Lucca, learning about the consistency of his urine and about the ball he held for the local peasantry at which he mishandles the awarding of prizes in cringe-worthy fashion.

Montaigne's wit and style show through every once in a while, where a long passage about his health or the wonders of a palace's fountains ends with an epigram ("Curiosity often gets in its own way, as do greatness and power") or funny non-sequitur ("This town is most abundant in pigeons, hazelnuts, and mushrooms.")

Andrea Barrett, Natural History ***

The stories is Natural History have the quietly relaxing and optimistic feel of Andrea Barrett's previous books, but most of them lack a clear narrative purpose. Over the years Barrett has become increasingly interested in building a shared universe for her work, with recurring characters and themes –– Natural History has an appendix with an extensive family tree diagram and a statement of purpose from the author. These stories felt to me like studies sketching in details for small corners of a larger canvas. Barrett counts on the reader being aware of the whole picture to feel the meaning of the events.

With the exception of the title story, Natural History takes place in Crooked Lake, New York in the period between the Civil War and the First World War (inclusive). This roughly corresponds to the lifetime of Henrietta Atkins, and the stories center on her and her sister's children. The title story takes place in 2018 and features Rose Marburg, a descendant of that family and a character in Barrett stories since 1994.

My favorite story was the first, "Wonders of the Shore." It felt most like a self-contained narrative, meaningful even to someone who hasn't read any other Barrett books. It's also the oldest story in the book, from 2016, which reinforces my sense that Barrett is now filling in the gaps in her shared universe rather than expanding it.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays *****

I found Montaigne's Essays every bit as entertaining and inspiring as Sarah Bakewell's biography led me to expect! It took awhile to make it through all 1,047 pages, but one of the book's virtues is that you can dip in and read one or a few of the 107 essays at a time.

The most notable aspect of the essays is that they are not intended to convince you of any point of view but only to describe Montaigne's point of view. As he says in his introduction, "I have dedicated it to the private convenience of my relatives and friends, so that when they have lost me (as soon they must), they may recover here some features of my habits and temperament."

A typical Montaigne essay starts with a broad maxim ("Valor has its limits like the other virtues, and those limits once transgressed, we find ourselves on the path of vice") followed by quotes and illustrative stories from antiquity, then Montaigne's opinions on the matter. Not infrequently he also relates how other cultures think or act differently: he rarely misses an opportunity to describe shocking customs of "barbarous" people and declare them no worse than contemporary French customs. The titles can't tell you what to expect. "On Some Verses of Virgil," for example, is about sex; even when Montaigne starts on the announced subject he soon wanders away from it.

The seemingly aimless form gives the pieces a conversational quality, as if you are chatting with Montaigne at a dinner party. You learn a lot about his temperament and personal habits, and the winding tangents give a sense of how his mind works. It's remarkable how little it matters that five hundred years have passed since he wrote them. The main barrier to understanding is my near total lack of a classical education.

I am not blind to the shortcomings of this collection. Montaigne uses complicated sentence structures and takes too long to get to his point. Some of his attitudes have aged badly, notably his low opinion of women and medical science. Many people would find him too retiring, equivocal, or unfocused, and they wouldn't care to hear about his kidney stones or the type of bed he prefers. For me I love the book not despite its flaws but because of them.

I believe that Essays may be a book that I return to periodically for inspiration, the way some people return to the Bible or to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I can say for sure that Montaigne inspired me to start writing formless disquisitions of my own as a form of self-therapy as I approach retirement.

Olga Ravn, The Employees ***

The Employees advertises itself as "a workplace novel of the 22nd century." The workplace in question is the space vessel Six Thousand Ship, in orbit around a planet far from Earth named New Discovery. The crew consists of humans and humanoid members, both of whom react strangely to a collection of enigmatic objects taken from the surface of New Discovery. The story is told as a series of short interviews with crew members.

It's an experimental narrative that doesn't quite work but doesn't quite fail either. There are several intriguing things about it: the emphasis on the scent of the mysterious objects, the interpersonal dynamics between the humans and humanoids, the role of memories in our lives, what it means to be human. I felt like the objects were attempting to communicate with the crew in a way they didn't understand, like the planet in Solaris. Ultimately, though, I found it all too abstract. I couldn't follow exactly what happened on the ship nor how much of the conflict derived from the objects.

I learned after reading The Employees that the book was originally inspired as a companion to an art installation. It does have the chilly vibe of an art project.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Individuality ****

As a person nearing retirement, I have been thinking a lot about the question of personal identity. It's often noted that we derive a large portion of our identity from the work that we do. How will my identity change when I'm no longer a technical writer or a Googler? My mother's friends know me only as "Google Mike"!

I was attracted to The Ethics of Identity by the final word of the title, but as the second word makes clear it is a work of philosophy not of psychology or self-help.

The (small L) liberal conception is that each person should be free to autonomously craft their individuality, and that the state should support each person's flourishing according to their freely chosen definition of flourishing. The first complication is clarifying what the terms. What is "individuality" and how "autonomous" are we?

It may be helpful to consider two rival pictures of what is involved in shaping one's individuality. One, a picture that comes from romanticism, is the idea of finding one's self –– of discovering, by means of reflection or a careful attention to the world, a meaning for one's life that is already there, waiting to be found. This is the vision we can call authenticity: it is a matter of being true to who you already are, or would be if it weren't for distorting influences. … The other picture, the existentialist picture, let's call it, is one in which, as the doctrine goes, existence precedes essence: that is, you exist first and then decide what to exist as.

Either way, we don't construct our identities ex nihilo. Rather, we use values and experiences that flow from our membership in groups.

For many critics, the language of autonomy reflects an arrogant insularity; all that talk of self-fashioning, self-direction, self-authorship suggests a bid to create the Performance Art Republic.

The rhetoric of authenticity proposes not only that I have a way of being that is all my own, but that it developing it I must fight against … all the forces of convention. This is wrong… My identity is crucially constituted through concepts and practices made available to me by religion, society, school, and state, and mediated to varying degrees by family. … They are not constraints on the shaping; they are its materials. …

Given the diversity of concepts and practices that define people's values, how can –– and how should –– the state support everyone's inevitably conflicting definition of flourishing? This is where the ethical questions come in.

The book offers compelling insights throughout. I really appreciate Appiah's conclusion about how we can best reach each other across cultures and value systems: through specific situations rather than disputed abstractions. 

We often don't need robust theoretical agreement in order to secure shared practices… The humanism I have caricatured was right in thinking that what we humans share is important. It was wrong about the contours of what we share. Far from relying on a common understanding of our common human nature or a common articulation (through principles) of a moral sphere, we often respond to situations of others with shared judgments about particular cases. It isn't principle that brings the missionary doctor and the distressed mother together at the hospital bedside of a child with cholera: it is a shared concern for this particular child.

I share the view that there is a "basic level" of experience that we share as human beings. Different groups extract different abstractions (like autonomy) from those experiences, but we can bridge the gap between them by returning to the basic level.

To make sense of inequality or injustice, we often suppose that we need a positive account of equality and justice, taking those terms as conceptually primary. We may do better to accept that inequality and injustice are, in fact, the primary concepts. "No fair!" your four-year-old protests, and you see her point, even if you still can't offer a pervasive account of fairness…

I also found Appiah's thoughts about diversity thought provoking.

The rhetoric of diversity has risen as its demographic reality has declined… There are still seders and nuptial masses, still gefilte fish and spaghetti. But how much does an Italian name tell you, these days, about church attendance, or knowledge of Italian, or tastes in food or spouses? …

You might wonder, in fact, whether there isn't a connection between the thinning of the cultural content of identities and the rising stridency of their claims. Those European immigrants, with their richly distinct customs, were busy demanding the linguistic Americanization of their children, making sure they learned America's official culture. One suspects they didn't need to insist on public recognition of their culture, because they simply took it for granted. Their middle-class descendants, whose domestic lives are conducted in English and extend eclectically from MTV to Chinese takeout, are discomfited by a sense that their identities are somehow shallow by comparison… 

Spectator-sport diversity would seem to have more aesthetic than moral force. I may fervently want there to be Amish driving buggies, Mennonites milking cows, and Shakers shaking on their exquisitely crafted furniture; but it would be a moral error to take measures, therefore, to discourage members of these picturesque communities from leaving and joining others.