Category: 2020 Essays

My psyche is not happy with me walking away from this project. Actually, it’s probably just not willing to give up the activity. The surest signal of what you want in life is what you actually do when presented with the freedom to do whatever you want. So here I am, on an August Sunday…

Two days ago, I wrote about Montaigne’s eloquent call for taking the middle path in life and avoiding the edges and boundaries. Today I want to dig a bit deeper into what Montaigne means by moderation, because there’s a fascinating oxymoron within it — Montaigne is a moderation zealot. By that I mean, if you…

One of my daily habits of late has been to write about the election in this space. It’s a way of rationalizing the irrational and putting voice to my greatest fears about what’s around the corner, in part to be a warning to people, but mostly to self soothe. I feel a little bit better…

My original plan today was to write some caveats about Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation theory — and I will certainly get around to those soon, because they are significant. But in preparing that story, I found a really interesting piece by a Russian subject of the documentary that piqued my interest, so I’m going to write…

I don’t normally quote sources other than Montaigne in my essays, but today I’m going to lead off with M.E. Screech, a Montaigne scholar and perhaps his most famous English language interpreter. Screech writes that Montaigne first conceived of his essays as a project of quiet, joyful contemplation. That did not last long: Montaigne’s project…

The stats tell me that no one reads my blog on Mondays, which makes this the perfect opportunity to drop an essay about sex while no one is looking. Montaigne was considered a groundbreaking writer on the subject, one who introduced many risqué subjects into French literature long before it became synonymous with bawdiness.  His…

It is time for me to return to the essays of Michel de Montaigne, this time not with a frantic, headlong project, but rather an attempt to find new insights from the sage in a time of uncertainty and upheaval. Having written extensively about Montaigne in the past, I sense that he has something especially…

Having squeezed some insights about mental health and moderation out of Montaigne’s closing essay On Experience yesterday, I have decided to stay on that piece to discuss physical health today. It is basically all that anyone can think and talk about now. The news about the COVID-19 pandemic grows more grim every day. With more…

I check my Google Analytics once or twice a day, just to see how many people have logged on and which stories are being read. I just checked and noticed that no one — absolutely no one — has stopped by today. I’m a little hesitant to upset the zen perfection of that. I don’t…

Someone suggested to me last week that perhaps this project is a way of creating emotional distance from people, that I go alone to my computer to reveal my thoughts now rather than to talk to people face to face. There is truth to this observation, perhaps even more than that person understood at the…

The thing about this blog is that everything here is a first draft, for better or worse. I would never present professional work in the manner that I dash it off here, although I used to do exactly that. I’ve learned over time that writing is rewriting. Rereading is also reading, which creates a special…

After focusing briefly on the negative, reactive reasons for withdrawing from the world, Montaigne concluded that same essay On Vanity with the positive, by focusing on what there is to gain by muting the outside world. First, he lets out one of his most endearing bits of self criticism: Being a citizen of no city,…

I’ll never forget the first thing an employee at the dog shelter told me after he brought Dollie out to meet out family in May 2014– he said Dollie was obviously a very intelligent dog because she made great eye contact. I have no idea if there’s an actual correlation between eye contact and canine…

So maybe this will become an everyday thing after all … Let me take a moment to recap. In the first post of this series, I laid out Montaigne’s very stark case for solitude and how we need to create rooms for ourselves, where we can make the many facets of our personalities express themselves…

Before I begin, a hat tip is in order to one of my readers for pointing a recent story in Wired from Virginia Heffernan that quotes Montaigne. Finding Montaigne stories in the wild and commenting on them isn’t a bad future use for this blog, so I thank the reader for pointing it out and encourage others…

I think there is way too much self blaming in our culture right now. Reading a spate of 9/11 remembrance stories today, I can’t shake the tone of “look at all we’ve lost” that hangs over all of them. There’s so much derision of our culture and our divides and our inability to grieve and…

Today is one of those days where good news gets mitigated by bad news and vice versa. There’s a lot of noise in the polls … the good news seems to be that Biden is doing so well in the Great Lake/Upper Midwest states that Ohio and Iowa are looking increasingly positive for him. The…

Yesterday’s post detailed my ideas for a book project. It was built on a simple premise: I have a better handle now on my recent experiences in therapy and even find some of it comical. Maybe I can make something constructive out of the experience. The last post detailed the numerous ways this made me…

I have taken a few days off from the project to digest what is happening in the U.S. a bit. There’s a sense of terror in the air now that seems partly in jest, but plays out in a deadly serious way. Several years ago, I remarked to friends that I no longer recognized or…