How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

by Sarah Bakewell

wars Montaigne remixed and embabooned

thousands of individuals fascinated by their own personalities and shouting for attention.

Even as bloggers and networkers delve into their private experience, they communicate with their fellow humans in a shared festival of the self.

The historian Theodore Zeldin has founded a site called “The Oxford Muse,” which encourages people to put together brief self-portraits in words, describing their everyday lives and the things they have learned.

For Zeldin, shared self-revelation is the best way to develop trust and cooperation around the planet, replacing national stereotypes with real people.

By describing what makes them different from anyone else, the contributors reveal what they share with everyone else: the experience of being human.

This idea—writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity—has not existed forever.

And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Périgor...

Montaigne created the idea simply by doing it. Unlike most memoirists of his day, he did not write to record his ...

He weathered the disorder, oversaw his estate, assessed court cases as a magistrate, and administered Bordeaux as the most easygoing mayor in its history. All the time, he wrote exploratory, free-floating pieces to which he gave simple titles: Of Friendship Of Cannibals Of the Custom Of Wearing Clothes How we cry and laugh for the same thing Of Names Of Smells Of Cruelty Of Thumbs How our mind hinders itself Of Diversion Of Coaches Of Experience

They rarely offer to explain or teach anything. Montaigne presents himself as someone who jotted down whatever was going through his head when he picked up his pen, capturing encounters and states of mind as they happened.

He used these experiences as the basis for asking himself questions, above all the big question that fascinated him as it did many of his contemporaries. Although it is not quite grammatical in English, it can be phrased in three simple words: “How to live?”

This is not the same as the ethical question, “How should one live?”

he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did.

He wanted to know how to live a good life—meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human...

He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself.

In place of abstract answers, Montaigne tells us what he did in each case, and what it felt like when he was doing it. He provides all the details we need to make it real, and sometimes more than we need.

Exploring such phenomena over twenty years, Montaigne questioned himself again and again, and built up a picture of himself—a self-portrait in constant motion, so vivid that it practically gets up off the page and sits down next to you to read over your shoulder.

recognizable. Yet to read Montaigne is to experience a series of shocks of familiarity,

which make the centuries between him and the twenty-first-century reader collapse to nothing.

The journalist Bernard Levin, writing an article on the subject for The Times in 1991, said, “I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: ‘How did he know all that about me?’ ”The answer is, of course, that he knows it by knowing about himself.

As one of his most obsessive early readers, Blaise Pascal, wrote in the seventeenth century: “It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there.”

As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror … And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue.

Montaigne was the first writer to create literature that deliberately worked in this way, and to do it using the plentiful material of his own life rather than either pure philosophy or pure invention. He was the most human of writers, and the most sociable.

A sixteenth-century admirer, Tabourot des Accords, said that anyone reading the Essays felt as if they themselves had written it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing in almost the same phrase. “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life.”

“Here is a ‘you’ in which my ‘I’ is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished.”

“not so much a book as a companion for life,”

All this can happen because the Essays has no great meaning, no point to make, no argument to advance. It does not have designs on you; you can do as you please with it. Montaigne lets his material pour out, and never worries if he has said one thing on one page and the opposite overleaf, or even in the next sentence. He could have taken as his motto Walt Whitman’s lines:

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Every few phrases, a new way of looking at things occurs to him, so he changes direction. Even when his thoughts are most irrational and dreamlike, his writing follows them. “I cannot keep my subject still,” he says. “It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.”

Having created a new genre by writing in this way, Montaigne created essais: his new term

Essayer, in French, means simply to try. To essay something is to test or taste it, or give it a whirl.

He may never have planned to create a one-man

literary revolution, but in retrospect he knew what

he had...

It grew by slow encrustation, like a coral reef, from 1572 to 1592.

The only thing that eventually stopped it was Montaigne’s death.

Looked at another way, it never st...

Readers approach him from their private perspectives, contributing their own experience of life. At the same time, these experiences are molded by broad trends, which come and go in leisurely formation.

It is a centuries-long conversation between Montaigne and all those who have got to know him: a conversation which changes through history, while starting out afresh almost every time with that cry of “How did he know all that about me?” Mostly it remains a two-person encounter between writer and reader.

This book is about Montaigne, the man and writer. It is also about Montaigne, the long party—that accumulation of shared and private conversations over four hundred and thirty years.

Montaigne’s book has not slid smoothly through time like a pebble in a stream, becoming ever more streamlined and polished as it goes.

As one of his favorite adages had it, there is no escaping our perspective: we can walk only on our own legs, and sit only on our own bum.

Don’t read him as children do, for amusement, nor as the ambitious do, to be instructed. No, read him in order to live.

Impressed by Flaubert’s command, I am taking the Renaissance question “How to live?” as a guide-rope for finding a way through the tangle of Montaigne’s life and afterlife. The question remains the same throughout, but the chapters take the form of twenty different answers—each an answer that Montaigne might be imagined as having given. In reality, he usually responded to questions with flurries of further questions and a profusion of anecdotes, often all pointing in different directions and leading to contradictory conclusions. The questions and stories were his answers, or further ways of trying the question out.

will take the form of something anecdotal: an episode or theme from Montaigne’s life, or from the lives of his readers.