On February 28, 1571, on the morning of his thirty-eighth birthday, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne decided to make a radical change in his life’s trajectory. He quit his career in public life, set up a library with one thousand books in a tower at the back of his large estate, and spent the rest of his life writing essays about the complex, fleeting, protean subject that interested him the most: himself. His first conclusion was that a search to know oneself is a fool’s errand, because the self continuously changes and keeps ahead of a firm description. That didn’t stop him from
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