Liars, of the non-pathological sort, almost always give themselves away with little details or aside comments that betray their main narrative. I like to think that their unconscious is surfacing this incongruent information as a way of fighting back against a runaway ego. Montaigne assigns the same phenomenon to conscience:

Montaigne begins this short essay with some talk about gossip—and he dislikes it as much as I do: I not only never open any letter entrusted to me but not even any which Fortune may pass through my hands; I feel guilty if, when standing beside some great man, my eyes inadvertently thieve some knowledge…

Montaigne goes to great length in this essay to treat suicide as dispassionately as possible. That gives his essay a strange distance right from the start, and that sense of strangeness builds through too many anecdotes to count concerning ancients who took their lives. This, for example, is an icy cold thought: The fairest death…

This very strange Montaigne essay appears to take contradictory opinions about drinking, and then turns out not to be about drinking at all. To begin, Montaigne makes it clear that he considers drinking to be a vice and to partake in it to the point of drunkenness is a nasty habit: Now drunkenness, considered among…

This is one of my favorite Montaigne essays, and it only grows more powerful upon a return and some reflection. Montaigne, returning to his essays after publishing volume one, makes the case here that readers should not be expecting similar thoughts in these new essays. We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven…

This essay closes Montaigne’s first volume, and it’s another about death. I have to admit, his death discussions make me uncomfortable. Death scarred him. The clocks tick for us all. To be alive and aware is to notice them. I want to take on his thoughts vigorously, but I almost feel like I’d be tempting…