There is no education that can surpass a lived life. That is the core message of Montaigne’s final essay. And so it should be unsurprising that this is the essay I have observed most frequently in time. Curiously, it’s one that I feel comfortable sitting in its time and place as well. While I freely plow over previous versions of all other essays, I don’t wish to destroy or diminish my past attempts at this one. To do so would contradict the spirit of the piece. My view of On Experience should shift with everything I learn and live through.
As mentioned in previous takes of this essay, Montaigne seems to dare me in the early pages not to attempt an explanation of this piece. Rather, he seems to want all those who have followed him to the end to take up their own journey, not to retrace his:
Can anyone deny that glosses increase doubts and ignorance, when there can be found no book which men toil over in either divinity or the humanities whose difficulties have been exhausted by exegesis? The hundredth commentator dispatches it to his successor prickling with more difficulties than the first commentator of all had ever found in it. Do we ever agree among ourselves that ‘this book already has enough glosses: from now on there is no more to be said on it?’
Clearly not, because I cannot even bring myself to admit having nothing more to say on this one book. Montaigne believed that the longer we look at any work, the more we invite the mind to lose itself in the maze of words:
Men fail to recognize the natural sickness of their mind which does nothing but range and ferret about, ceaselessly twisting and contriving and, like our silkworms, becoming entangled in its own works: ‘Mus in pice.’ [A mouse stuck in pitch.] It thinks it can make out in the distance some appearance of light, of conceptual truth: but, while it is charging towards it, so many difficulties, so many obstacles and fresh diversions strew its path that they make it dizzy and it loses its way.
This is certainly true for me about Montaigne, but it concerns me not. If I had a definite end or goal in mind, that entanglement might feel frustrating. But I feel a great deal of comfort being stuck in that silk, the more twisted I become in it, the more wonder I feel towards his project and mine.
This may sound like Montaigne being disdainful of the inquiring mind, but it’s never true that Montaigne lands in one place. One foot lands in a place of folly, another in admiring astonishment:
No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty, as Apollo made clear enough to us by his speaking (as always) ambiguously, obscurely and obliquely, not glutting us but keeping us wondering and occupied.
And then Montaigne gets to why all of this toil and retracing is worth it, why his project does, in the end, have greater validity than most works:
How often and perhaps stupidly have I extended my book to make it talk about itself: stupidly, if only because I ought to have remembered what I say about other men who do the same: namely that those all-too-pleasant tender glances at their books witness that their hearts are a-tremble with love for them, and that even those contemptuous drubbings with which they belabour them are in fact only the pretty little rebukes of motherly love (following Aristotle for whom praise and dispraise of oneself often spring from the same type of pride). For I am not sure that everyone will understand what entitles me to do so: that I must have more freedom in this than others do since I am specifically writing about myself and (as in the case of my other activities) about my writings.
It’s Montaigne’s unique perspective of himself that gives his project weight. So much of life is taken up with words that have been overextended and overinterpreted. We have too many laws, all trying to specify behavior of human beings that cannot be justly tied down with the letter of law. Only subjectivity of wise jurists can apply the law correctly—so why not just leave it to those jurists hands to determine proper fate, why add law and precedent to the process?
And so, Montaigne takes up most of his essay recapping all that has come before. He makes a case for customs over laws, for acting moderately but enjoying all of life’s pleasures, for having an understanding of health and medicine that is particular to you, not generalized for all humanity. As should be expected, there are pieces of stoicism, Pyrrhonism and Epicureanism sprinkled within, none ever taking the final victory prize for his philosophical soul.
In addition, Montaigne in the final essay makes his strongest, clearest case for the body as the site of experience and knowledge. His turn to experience is rooted not in abstract theorizing but in the physical, lived reality of being-in-the-world. Montaigne’s reflections on pleasure, moderation, and the flux of human thought are deeply embodied, foreshadowing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view that knowledge arises through the interplay of body and world. When Montaigne writes, “When I dance, I dance,” he is affirming what Merleau-Ponty would call the primacy of perception: the idea that our most authentic understanding comes not from detached analysis but from full participation in life’s moments.
But most of all, Montaigne’s description of his life invites us to look at our journeys and to draw similar conclusions about the wisdom we’ve taken from everything, the challenges and triumphs. In my 2011 take on this essay, I noted how my turn to Montaigne began with a short-term bout of depression and my first experience with an antidepressant drug. The antidepressant almost immediately pulled me out of my funk and, for a short period, gave me tremendous energy, propelling me toward taking up distance running again, which I had set aside for several years.
But months later, the positive aspects of the drug started to wear off on me. I was still left with a sense of dull calm, but my drive was diminished. Instead of feeling energized, I became lethargic in body and mind.
Both Montaigne and Merleau-Ponty remind us that our sense of self cannot be separated from our bodily experiences. During my time on Cymbalta, I felt disconnected from the person I wanted to be—a writer, a thinker—because my body was dulled, my mind fogged. Montaigne would say, as Merleau-Ponty does, that this disconnection is not a flaw of my spirit but a consequence of the embodied nature of existence. It is through the body that we engage with the world and forge the narratives that define us.
Nearly a decade later, I relayed a different experience. This time the entire world was sick. The COVID-19 pandemic had ripped the social fabric, forcing us into bunkers and virtual connections. I was in another deep period of exploration, this time deeply engaged in psychotherapy instead of a pharmaceutical solution. My return to Montaigne happened amidst great upheaval in my family life. Looking at the two versions of me from those two essays, you would see some surprising alignments in thinking, but also some differences that bordered on contradiction.
Montaigne and Merleau-Ponty both reject the idea of a stable, essential self. Instead, they embrace the self as a flux of experiences, shaped by memory, emotion, and interaction. In writing these essays, I’ve come to see my narrative not as a fixed story but as an evolving creation, a new metaphor for my life, as Richard Rorty describes it. The process of writing for myself, of exploring my relationship with my father and my struggles with identity, is not about uncovering some hidden truth but about making sense of the moments that shape me, however fleeting or contingent they may be.
But all of that still leaves me with the question of now. As I return to this essay once more, having read more of Montaigne and from those who’ve thought about him deeply, what story do I have to tell of myself?
I have now lived on this earth longer than Michel de Montaigne did. I haven’t become a mayor like him or sold a world defining book. But I haven’t lived a dull life either. I’ve served historically important people and worked at places that helped define the broader culture. I’ve never held a job that disappeared into the woodwork, I’ve always been near the center of power and had the ear of leadership, even if it was only to make them less anxious about getting up in front of a crowd.
Montaigne loved to travel and had a wonderfully open viewpoint about other cultures. But I’ve been fortunate to travel the world more broadly than he ever had the chance to do. I have the ability to read any book that Montaigne had in his incredible library, but also everything that has been published since his death. He moved slowly and was clearly approaching his death by his 50s, while I am fortunate to live in an age of much better nutrition, hygiene and knowledge about health. I feel confident that I have many more decades to go.
One of the great sorrows of our age is that no one in history has ever had such free access to the treasures of human history than this generation of people, but instead we choose to throw away our time on TikTok. All of the great music, art, cinema, philosophy — everything — is at our finger tips. We should be ravenous at the opportunity to soak up as much of it as we can, as too we should hope for nothing more than to see every corner of an earth that is so accessible to us.
I am hesitant to bring more narrative to On Experience this time, because I feel like so little of my life is at the point of wrapping up. We are always in a state of becoming. What Montaigne has helped me understand over these past 13 years is that while our moods and attitudes will remain in flux, while people will drift in and out, while the external world will make demands of us that we sometimes must endure, all we can do is to accept our lives and live them joyfully.
And so I’ll give him the final words:
If you have been able to examine and manage your own life you have achieved the greatest task of all. Nature, to display and show her powers, needs no great destiny: she reveals herself equally at any level of life, both behind curtains or without them. Our duty is to bring order to our morals not to the materials for a book: not to win provinces in battle but order and tranquillity for the conduct of our life. Our most great and glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly.
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