This is really more of an essay about virtue than it is about cruelty, although we’ll get around to that subject a bit later in the essay. I wanted to start out, though, by noting an interesting synchronicity I came across this week between Montaigne and something by Carl Jung that I read: Virtue rejects…

I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing. I feel much the same about Montaigne. Going through these essays feels extremely familiar to me, but I barely remember the details Montaigne wrote, never mind what I did. Last time I touched on this subject, I went on a long digression…

Not feeling in my depth writing about armor, the best I could come up with today was something about emotional armor. Montaigne didn’t like the fact that French noblemen of his time didn’t don their armor until shortly before the battle was engaged: The vile and thoroughly enervating practice of our noblemen today is never…

Since I am a father of three boys, I tend to jump right into the parental advice parts of this essay, but perhaps I have paid too little attention to the introduction and Montaigne’s vulnerable self reveal: It was a melancholy humour (and therefore a humour most inimical to my natural complexion) brought on by…

Montaigne’s essay starts off making what seems like an obvious point that, I think, is no longer true: We do not pick out for praise a man who takes trouble over the education of his children, since however right that is it is not unusual, no more than we pick out a tall tree in…

Storytelling isn’t always a strength of Michel de Montaigne. He designs disjointed narratives. He prefers to use quotes and anecdotes to illustrate his points. This essay stands out as an example of Montaigne’s flexibility as a writer. He, in fact, can write in the personal narrative style of which contemporary readers are most familiar. The…