Where Montaigne’s memory did seem to work well, if he wanted it to, was in reconstructing personal experiences such as the riding accident. Instead of resolving them into neat, superficial anecdotes, he could recover feelings from the inside—not perfectly, because the Heraclitan stream kept carrying him away, but very closely. The nineteenth-century psychologist Dugald Stewart speculated that Montaigne’s lack of control of his memory made him better at such tasks. Montaigne was attuned to the kind of “involuntary” memory that would one day fascinate Proust: those blasts from the past that
...more
