Recently I retired to my estates, determined to devote myself as far as I could to spending what little life I have left quietly and privately; it seemed to me then that the greatest favour I could do for my mind was to leave it in total idleness, caring for itself, concerned only with itself, calmly thinking of itself. I hoped it could do that more easily from then on, since with the passage of time it had grown mature and put on weight. But I find — that on the contrary it bolted off like a runaway horse, taking far more trouble over itself than it ever did over anyone else; it gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities, one after another, without order or fitness, that, so as to contemplate at my ease their oddness and their strangeness, I began to keep a record of them, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.
Michel de Montaigne, On Idleness
This is a book about the process of making a mind ashamed of itself. It took me 13 years of writing about Montaigne to recognize the responsibility and peril in the statement above, that if you aren’t willing, from time to time, to let your mind dart off wildly in the course of reading, thinking and writing about Montaigne, you aren’t experiencing him fully and correctly. To sanitize Montaigne, putting everything he wrote into neat chapters and drawing logical conclusions, is to miss a vital truth about the project. Montaigne, like Hamlet, walks a fine line between detached introspection and brooding rumination. To really get Montaigne, sometime you have to walk it too.
My walk is a collection of essays about essays, and reflections on the act of self reflection. It’s a book about a man who started off in search of himself and eventually concluded that there is no permanent, reliable self to find. And it’s also about my vain attempt to find my own voice through another’s thoughts and words.
If you’re asking who is Michel de Montaigne, then some of explanation is in order. He was a 16th century civil servant, noble scion of an estate, son of the esteemed mayor of Bordeaux, best friend of Etienne de La Boetie, a rising star in France who died suddenly in his 30s, counselor to kings, negotiator of treaties, translator of an odd piece of theology written in pidgin Latin by someone named Raymond Sebond, honorary citizen of Rome and, most prominently, the writer widely considered the inventor of the essay.
Or another way to introduce him is to call him the man who has inspired everyone from Shakespeare to Rousseau to Emerson, Nietzsche and Virginia Wolff. Everyone who reads Montaigne magically sees themselves in him. But somehow none of these explanations seems quite right. And that’s because you can’t understand Montaigne, his influence and his enduring place in literary history without reading him, and neither will casual reading suffice. In all of history, I can’t think of anyone who writes quite like him or who thinks his way in, around and through his seemingly random subjects.
There’s another risk in picking up Montaigne and returning to him frequently over time: once a reader drops the safe distance from Montaigne and starts to empathize with him, it’s difficult to avoid catching his self obsession. To put yourself into Montaigne’s shoes, especially in our narcissistic culture, is to jump on top of that runaway horse and sense it rapidly approaching a cliff.
But how would I know this? Well, I need to back up a little and explain how it began, 13 years ago. The short version: I started reading Michel de Montaigne, the originator of the essay form, for the first time and by the third essay, I was hooked and felt a need to write about my experience of reading them. This is not an unusual reaction to Montaigne.
But what makes me unique? Well, nothing, actually. I’ve spent my career as a speechwriter and ghostwriter to other people. If I have a defining characteristic as a writer, it’s my ability to lose myself in the writing process, to take on others voices and thought processes. I’m a great imitator. And so, for me Montaigne had the appeal of being somewhat like one of my clients, someone I could merge with and start writing in the style of without putting too much of me forward at once.
So going back to 2011, I started reading Montaigne and felt the need to do something that, to my knowledge, no one else who has written about the great essayist has attempted — to follow him essay by essay. At first, I turned it into an intellectual stunt. I read an essay a day and wrote an essay a day, in order, for 107 straight days. Yes, the 180 page Sebond essay was a massive challenge, one that I probably deserved no better than a C+ for the effort. Some of my essays amounted to me trying to figure out Montaigne’s point in the piece. (And that’s not always easy, he loves to digress.) Others were just launching pads for my own opinions, because I didn’t feel like keeping too close to Montaigne. I had a great deal of experience at that point writing political opinion pieces, and that form too found a way into the initial project.
In late spring 2011, I finished the feat. I then pitched the project to an agent, who loved my work but thought the odds of landing a book contract were poor, but we tried anyway and struck out. And so, I put Montaigne aside for a while. But then something interesting happened. What started out as a marathon book report project wouldn’t let go of me. So I periodically came back and rewrote essays. I started collecting multiple versions of each Montaigne gloss.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, I returned to Montaigne and wrote a series of essays focusing on his views of solitude. After running out of material, I tried something new and quite scary for me. I gave up the crutch. I walked away from Montaigne’s selected topics and just grabbed my own, taking inspiration from Montaigne to do what he did and write only about myself.
The runaway horse analogy is a very accurate reflection of what 2020 was like for me, and it was documented day by day in my Montaigne-inspired essays. The result was wildly uneven, One day I’d write a movie review, the next a sad tribute to our family dog that passed away, then next a dark personal history about my late father. Anything and everything streamed out.
My writing became a strange form of therapy in public, which incidentally became necessary because my personal therapist abruptly terminated my care two days before the pandemic lockdowns began. But that’s another story, part of my long-lost 2020 lore.
By the end of the year, my marriage had ended, my family now split between two households. I was unattached for the first time in 25 years. And when I looked back at the chaos, I felt a need to wipe it out. I destroyed nearly everything I wrote that year and walked away from any kind of personal writing for awhile.
But in the beginning of 2023, I felt another tug to re-examine Montaigne and thought that returning to writing about his essays might pull me out of myself a bit. And so I began another version of the 107 essays, 107 days feat.
About halfway through the new version of the project, I started to drift back into personal storytelling, and the essays started to echo my 2020 work. But more challenging than that, Montaigne was starting to get on my nerves. He felt stodgy and conservative. I thought his take on suicide was appalling and his opinions on sex cringeworthy. I rushed through the project in less than 107 days, took a few days to reflect, then once again nuked months of creative work.
Luckily, I did have backups for most of the pieces, but my attempt to land on a definitive version of the Montaigne Project—one that constituted my best analysis of Montaigne’s work and my most honest personal reflections inspired by the work—had failed once more.
So, how then is there a completed book staring at you now? In 2024, I decided that I needed to bring Montaigne in for a landing, so I took all existing versions of the essays and combined them into my best version of each 107 pieces. And then I started to fine tune them. And then I started to read some outside sources on Montaigne that I’d long neglected and my thinking about him started to shift. I saw greater depth to his relationship with Etienne de La Boetie. The Raymond Sebond essay, which had long intimidated me, suddenly opened up as Montaigne’s grand explanation of Pyrrhonism. I explored the beautiful late career partnership he formed with Marie de Gournay, who I’d read about in Sarah Bakewell’s Montaigne book, but never gave full appreciation. After so many years, I believe that I finally started to get Montaigne.
The most important insight I came to is that, despite Montaigne’s love of classical Western literature, his core philosophy was much closer to something Eastern, out of Buddhism or Taoism. Montaigne very early in his project started to recognize that there is no stable, concrete self to describe, that he and everyone else was nothing more than bits and pieces that cobble together in different ways based on circumstance, need and mood. Montaigne needed 107 different versions of his story because there was no singular narrative to recall. Every essay began the tale of Montaigne anew in some way.
So how could I possibly find a place for me in a work where it was hard enough to find Montaigne? I could just write about Montaigne and his ideas, but this project has never been an academic analysis, it’s my personal reaction to Montaigne, and the whole exercise would be useless without blending my story with his. Time and again I’d find a new approach to tell my story within Montaigne’s but would fail, and I’d make every mistake possible: focusing on other people, which can never work with Montaigne’s model; then declaring solid opinions about myself, which Montaigne would find laughable.
As I became increasingly comfortable with my take on Montaigne, I became just as uncomfortable with everything about me. I considered some gimmicks to create easy page turning, such as an odd fictional love story within the story. But nothing felt right.
And that’s where things stand as this book begins. What follows is my 107 essay analysis of Michel de Montaigne’s work, and sometimes right up front, sometimes hidden in random asides, you will also find me. I will talk about some of the ways my career aligned with Montaigne’s, and with some of his favorite exemplars, Seneca in particular. I’ll also give a bit of my family history. And while I decided that a tacked on love story would be obvious and perhaps somewhat embarrassing, I instead let my unconscious speak, often brought out by my reactions to other people.
I hope you will find this a compelling take on Montaigne’s work and, in a strange way, an unusual autobiography of me. I don’t claim to deserve to stand next to Montaigne. In a sense, I’ve never really deserved full association of the people I’ve written for, so why should it be any different about those I write about? But I have found it useful to lean on him for support to tell stories I might otherwise never let out.
And if the end result is a book that seems even more repetitive and confused than Montaigne’s classic work, I fall back on his motto: What do I know? About Montaigne? I’m not nearly enough of a scholar to be considered an expert. On myself? Even after the completion of this book, discovering my story worth telling remains a work in progress.
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