The ninth essay is supposedly about lying, but that never felt right to me. He entered the essay opining about his poor memory, then shifts to discussing how people believed him to be a poor friend or a self-absorbed person because he routinely forgot details about them. But Montaigne insists this is not true, he just has a poor memory — and that’s a good thing, because a poor memory makes it difficult to keep lies straight and he hates liars.

But back up to the start and you see that what Montaigne was upset about was being misunderstood as uncaring. I think being misunderstood is also highly misunderstood. The main reason for this is that people form opinions about other people based on quite a bit of internal and external data, much of it having nothing to do with the person they are judging.

People project their own feelings and disappointments onto others all the time. If you are feeling colder towards someone, it’s common to project that same lack of warmth onto them. Feel uneasy about your own honesty? That can lead people to exaggerate the shortcomings of others and hold them accountable for dishonesty that could be unintentional.

So, the people drawing the conclusion that Montaigne was a poor friend might have harbored those true feelings about themselves. And given that they were trashing that friend, it’s not an unlikely scenario.

But I don’t want to let Montaigne off the hook so easily on the memory issue. Having a poor memory is no excuse for not putting some work into your deficiency. My whole life I’ve had a terrible time with names. The only way I’ve been able to overcome it is to make a habit of saying hello and goodbye to the people I see regularly by name, and getting to know them a bit.

I’m not a naturally friendly person who wants everyone to like him. For the most part, I’m content to stick to myself most of the time. But if people are going to be in my life, I figure I could at least give them the courtesy of kindness.

As for lying, what takes up the bulk of Montaigne’s essay, I’m not a zealot on the subject. Why people grow to distrust others often has very little to do with how honest they are. Trust is more often a feeling of safety around people — can they keep something in confidence? If they seem warm and open to me, is that genuine or are they like that with everyone?

The people I mistrust most are fawners, people-pleasers who seem to make everyone feel important. It’s very common for me to fall under the spell of a fawner and believe that I’m more important than I really am. Watching a fawner put on a show for someone else in your presence can be highly disorienting and destroy trust.

This would probably confuse or even anger the fawner, because in most cases they aren’t being openly dishonest. They’re just acting in a way that creates considerable misunderstanding.

In a sense, they are taking advantage of that human tendency to misjudge that I mentioned at the start. Someone who has fallen under the fawner’s spell may eventually feel disoriented and saddened by the experience, and can start to wonder what they did wrong to misunderstand the person so deeply.

I’d like to tie this all back into an optimistic reading, but I’m feeling a bit low emotionally today. Ending on some notes in the minor key might not feel good — or even resolved — but it feels more honest. So here we are.