The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

In doing so, Montaigne found that he had to abandon altogether one of Lucretius’ most cherished dreams: the dream of standing in tranquil security on land and looking down at a shipwreck befalling others. There was, he grasped, no stable cliff on which to stand; he was already on board the ship. Montaigne fully shared Lucretius’ Epicurean skepticism about the restless striving for fame, power, and riches, and he cherished his own withdrawal from the world into the privacy of his book-lined study in the tower of his château. But the withdrawal seems only to have intensified his awareness of the perpetual motion, the instability of forms, the plurality of worlds, the random swerves to which he himself was as fully prone as everyone else.