How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

by Sarah Bakewell

Montaigne was willing to try any trick of this kind, if it promised consolation. As he wrote in one of his dedications to La Boétie’s posthumous books: ‘he is still lodged in me33 so entire and so alive that I cannot believe that he is so irrevocably buried or so totally removed from our communication.’ Letting La Boétie live on within himself was a way of fulfilling his friend’s dying wish, and easing his own loneliness. Meanwhile, he used techniques of distraction and diversion to get himself through the immediate shock of loss. Best of all, he discovered the therapeutic benefits of writing. By passing on La Boétie’s death narrative and farewell to the world in written form, he helped himself to relive the scene, and thus outlive it. He never fully got over La Boétie, but he learned to exist in the world without him, and, in so doing, to change his own life. Writing about La Boétie eventually led him to write the Essays: the best philosophical trick of all.