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

by Sarah Bakewell

Death is only a few bad moments at the end of life, he wrote in one of his last added notes; it is not worth wasting any anxiety over.

If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off—though I don’t know.

As Nietzsche could have warned Montaigne: Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober, and consequently ugly-looking.

Their predicament must already have been dire before he left, for he wrote in the Essays of having seen people dig their own graves and lie down in them to wait for death.