As he wrote of Cézanne in a beautiful essay, ‘Only one emotion is possible for this painter — the feeling of strangeness — and only one lyricism — that of the continual rebirth of existence.’ In another essay, he wrote of how the Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne put ‘not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence’. One could say the same of Merleau-Ponty himself.
