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

by Sarah Bakewell

Montaigne hovered over Pascal’s writing as his ever-present enemy and co-author. At the same time, Pascal knew that the real drama was taking place in his own soul. He admitted: ‘It is not in Montaigne41 but in myself that I find everything I see there.’ He could just as well have looked at his own notebook and said, ‘It is not from myself but from Montaigne that I have taken everything I see here’ – for he was in the habit of transcribing quantities of material almost word for word. Montaigne: How we cry and laugh42 for the same thing. Pascal: Hence we cry and laugh at the same thing. Montaigne: They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts. Pascal: Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast. Montaigne: Put a philosopher in a cage of thin iron wire in large meshes, and hang it from the top of the towers of Notre Dame of Paris: he will see by evident reason that it is impossible for him to fall, and yet (unless he is used to the trade of the steeplejacks) he cannot keep the sight of this extreme height from terrifying and paralysing him … Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground. Pascal: If you put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank wider than he needs, but with a...