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

by Sarah Bakewell

‘Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!’

How can you think yourself a great man, when the first accident that comes along can wipe you out completely? (Euripides)

The symptoms could include dissatisfaction, self-loathing, fear, indecisiveness, lethargy and melancholy. Giving up work brings out spiritual ills, especially if one then gets the habit of reading too many books – or, worse, laying out the books for show and gloating over the view.

Seneca would have approved. If you become depressed or bored in your retirement, he advised, just look around you and interest yourself in the variety and sublimity of things. Salvation lies in paying full attention14 to nature.

The mind flows on and on, in a ceaseless ‘stream of consciousness’