While Montaigne does not directly cite Machiavelli in this essay — he will do so in two later essays — this is his first piece to dip a toe into the type of military strategy discussion familiar to readers (and acolytes) of the Italian inventor of realpolitik. Here, Montaigne offers an interesting critique to Machievelli’s…

Especially in his earliest batch of essays, Montaigne covers a significant amount of ground on issues of military strategy and ethics. I asked chatGPT to do a deep dive on the question of whether Montaigne directly addressed the works of Machiavelli and what Montaigne scholars believe his aim was in those examinations.  The following is…

I have noticed a tendency in my projects that when I come across a topic with significant emotional resonance, I need to sit with it awhile, not charge through it. I put my “Severance” blog on hold because I was about to hit a key scene in the series, one where innie Mark shows his…

The unruliness of minds, his own especially, concerned Montaigne a great deal in his early essays. He will soon refer to his mind as a “runaway horse.” Here, he notes how common it is for us to great false objects instead of dealing with the actual things that torment us. These objects can be projections…

This is the first essay in the series that feels like Montaigne. Consequently, it’s impossible to describe without recapping or rewriting, and there’s no point in that — it’s much more interesting and fun to read Montaigne being Montaigne. He digresses here from a brief discussion about anxiety about the future to becoming aware of…

Kieslowski doesn’t give us a lot of time to get to know Weronika. We are thrown right into the plot and given only subtle hints about her inner life. I wrote earlier that there is nothing mysterious about Weronika, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t confusing, especially to a rather simple young man like her…