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
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