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.