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Bits and Pieces
I want to focus on a singular Montaigne quote, my favorite of his, perhaps my favorite saying from anyone: We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us…
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107. “On Experience” and Meaning
Last week I took another look at Montaigne’s final essay “On Experience” from a practical viewpoint — what personal need was Montaigne fulfilling through his project, especially as expressed in that work. Today, I’m going to take a few steps further back and look at that project and the essay from the vantage of meaning….
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107. On Experience, An Act of Memory
There is nobody less suited that I am to talk about memory. I can hardly find a trace of it in myself; I doubt if there is any other memory in the world as grotesquely faulty as mine is! From “On Liars” I concern myself in this piece with Montaigne’s final essay, On Experience, but…
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107. On Experience (2011)
12 May 2011 About a year ago, I came across some lines from American philosopher Richard Rorty in his book “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,” that had a big impact on me. I was being treated for depression and had been on Cymbalta for about nine months. I couldn’t stand the drug and wanted to get…
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107. On Experience (2020)
20 September 2020 Now in the heart of another Presidential election, this one in 2024, I’m tempted to just delete this essay from my collection, given that I’ve covered On Experience in so many different ways. But the essay that follows is an interesting artifact from my 2020 version of the Montaigne Project, so I’ll…
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105. On the Lame
I’ve been mulling over a wholesale revision of this essay for about a week. And then my country goes out and decides to decisively return Donald Trump to the presidency. So, many of the ideas I’ve been trying on seem newly relevant. In this essay, Montaigne takes on mass delusions, tying them to hysteria over…