This is one of those early Montaigne essays that seems highly out of date due to the focus on anxient military tactics. My first time around, I filibustered by ranging over several tangential points, from something Paul Krugman wrote that morning to an observation about Malcolm Lowry’s UNDER THE VOLCANO. What that novel has to…

While this is a long Montaigne essay, it’s surprisingly focused. At the core, he’s making a simple point – because humans are capable of reframing death, pain and poverty as tolerable phenomena, and perhaps even good occurrences in some circumstances, then there is no objective happiness, there is only acts of reframing that bring on…

What kind of behavior does a culture expect of its citizenry and what unspoken rules does it adopt? Montaigne is most interested in this topic in the context of hierarchy and cultural expectations, but I’m going to start by discussing folkways. When in Holland in 1991, I was faced with a cultural dilemma – I…

Sometimes these columns take a great deal of thought and work, and other times they just write themselves. I sense this one will be the latter. I was in a therapy session the day before i wrote this (in late December 2022), when my therapist brought up the matter of the brain making forecasts and…

Forecasts and predictions can seem very frivolous on the surface, but they are very serious things and may have something to do with the evolution of human consciousness. We are pattern seeking beings. We are constantly assessing risk, making forecasts about whether one meal or another will be more satisfying, determining how to best spend our…

So much of Montaigne‘s essays are akin to psychotherapy, with the writer free associating and the reader picking out parts that apply to his or her own life. This essay, which is ostensibly about public speaking–and he has several on that topic–but it seems to me to be more accurately described as an account of…