Carried away is a very interesting term. Montaigne is most stoic in his beliefs about strong emotions and the way they can hijack our lives. But I have a very hard time with the idea that emotions are somehow not part of us. My heart is with Marcel Proust when it comes to matters of…

I feel tinges of sadness throughout Montaigne’s work, and I can’t help but feel that Michel lived a somewhat lonely existence. Everyone who reads Montaigne has a tendency to project themselves onto him, and so maybe I feel a bit of my childhood in his. But when I read about the young Michel, singled out…

I try to imagine Michel de Montaigne, son of the esteemed Mayor of Bordeaux, third generation nobleman, mourning friend of the late Etienne de La Boetie, taking up his odd, impossible to describe project as something brand new. It’s likely that Michel did not sit at a desk and write the first of his 107…

Montaigne famously disavows this essay in name, writing in his last two essays that the point of philosophy is to teach us how to live, not die. Even so, it’s one of his most interesting early essays and not as definitive as the title would suggest. He suggests that philosophy could either be about preparing…

There are a handful of Montaigne’s essays that take time and context to understand, this is one of them. It’s his first essay about Etienne de La Boetie, even though he is not mentioned by name. But this paragraph very near the end is clearly about him: I knew a man whose thread of life…

Montaigne has addressed various emotions in the early essays but here takes on one that can be particularly debilitating. It’s impossible to disagree with this take: Doctors say that there is no emotion which more readily ravishes our judgement from its proper seat. I myself have seen many men truly driven out of their minds…