When Being Sober Is Just a Waste of Time.

How To Be A Jerk I Have To Find Better Things To Do Wi...

When Being Sober Is Just a Waste of Time.

Dear Readers, it’s been an ugly Summer, day after day of bad news that breaks your heart 50 ways before breakfast . . . last week it was so bad that I and the 5 o’clock angel kept company every single day.

And now it’s Thursday and my article in The Guardian came out and I want a vat of white wine for breakfast. You can read it here, and then you can Comment on it all you want, but the author of the piece hates it. I want to go on a very serious whine about editing that shreds your Guardian article to shreds, but you and me and the world all have more bigger problems to worry about. See how mature I’m being? And, for being so Zen, I think I know just how to reward myself (see above).

Anyhoo:

Thank you, THANK YOU for the brilliant Comments you all left last week on the post about How To Be A Jerk. I love you all for making me feel that it’s not yet time to hang up the paint brushes and go all florange AGAIN — I really needed that. THANK YOU. You all deserve for me to respond to your brilliance one by one in this blog post, but the timing is off (don’t peek . . . I have a present for you at the very end of this week’s blather) so let me go back and reply in the Comments section of last week, and please allow me to explain this illustration before I give you all the best July prezzie ever:

From Le Road Trip, that’s my illustration of the tower of Michel de Montaigne who, while I’m being so philosophical and all, I want to thank for keeping me company this past week:

“I doubt if I can decently admit at what little cost to the repose and tranquillity of my life I have passed more than half of it amid the ruin of my country.”

If the famous essayist Michel de Montaigne had not died in 1592 . . . wait, let me start over. If the opinionated and always entertaining Michel de Montaigne were alive today he’d be a top lifestyle blogger, and he’d have written the above line more like this:

It might be indecent of me to admit this, but I’ve managed to live these past 30 years happily engrossed with my own inner life at the same time that my country was shitting out its brains in bloody civil war, brutal religious retaliations, and government-sanctioned massacre and assassination of its own citizens.

If you have to be sober these days, and I don’t recommend it, reading Sarah Bakewell‘s charming examination of the life and work of the immortal Michel de Montaigne will give you much-needed mental repose amid the heartbreaking reality of the world we live in.

In How To Live; A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer Miss Bakewell breaks up Montaigne’s life and classic Essais into 20 chapters that each provide an answer the question that preoccupied Montaigne the most ( How To Live? ) with chapter sub-headings/answers such as Don’t Worry About Death; Pay Attention; Survive Love and Loss.

Montaigne’s own words are, thanks to the wit and brilliant scholarship of Miss Bakewell, put in context of his bizarre upbringing (he was the son of a rich man who employed special tutors who only spoke to him in Latin for the first 5 years of his life) and the fashions of the day (the French King Henri III was considered weird because he had outlandish personal hygiene habits, such as washing his hair from time to time) and current events (the above mentioned wars and atrocities) of his time. And lordy, Montaigne lived in terrible times, more terrible than our own.

If Montaigne can do it — retain a personal and philosophical delight with the world while it was beheading Protestants, spreading the plague, and murdering cats — well, my Wonder Ones, so can we. I have to believe that.

That’s Steve (above), on my front wall, chowing down on dinner; and that’s the little Blue Jay feather I found floating in his water bowl when I went out to feed him. What can I say? Life has its moments.

Now for my gift to you all:

This is me (below), walking around our little village of Roslyn the other day, wearing what I thought was a very nifty walking-around outfit until I saw the picture that Top Cat took of it and me:

NO, that’s not the gift.

Helen Mirren turns 71 on July 26 and I’ve been collecting photos of her this past year because it is obvious that I need a mentor in how to look extremely nifty, and Helen’s my It Girl. And because I know that all you Dear Readers are My Kind of People, I know you love Helen Mirren too.

Happy Birthday, dear Helen; you are the human equivalent of a Blue Jay feather.

So here, from me to you, with love, is my photo essay titled

How To Live in Helen Mirren’s World.