Of Grotesques Fortuitous or Otherwise

Though struggling this week to find things worthwhile to say, 20,347 words have, in spite of myself sometimes, been written in this particular volume of grotesques; a Montaigne excerpt still rings true in defining my purpose here:

“I was watching an artist on my staff working on a painting when I felt a desire to emulate him. The finest place in the middle of a wall he selects for a picture to be executed to the best of his ability; then he fills up the empty spaces all round it with grotesques, which are fantastical paintings whose attractiveness consists merely in variety and novelty. And in truth, what are these Essays if not monstrosities and grotesques botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous?”

Michel de Montaigne, “On Affectionate Relationships.”

Purpose further cemented in M.A. Screech’s (still among the greatest names ever) summation of Montaigne’s purpose:

“For Montaigne gives his readers the fruits of his own reading and of his own reflections upon it, all measured against his personal experience during a period of intellectual ferment and of religious and political disarray. As husband, father, counsellor, mayor, he kept a critical corner of himself to himself from which he could judge in freedom and seek to be at peace with himself.”

M.A. Screech

(I think I hear a mouse rustling a bag on the other side of the wall of books.)

… 20,567 words.