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

by Sarah Bakewell

Montaigne’s trick of absorbing La Boétie into himself, as a kind of ghost or secret sharer in all he did, might seem to run counter to his plan of distracting himself from grief. But in its way, it was a form of diversion: it led him away from thoughts of loss towards a new way of thinking about his present life. A split opened up between his own point of view and the one he imagined La Boétie might take, so that, at any moment, he could slip from one to the other. Perhaps this is what gave him the idea that, as he wrote elsewhere, “We are, I know not how, double within ourselves.” Montaigne himself remarked that he might not have written the Essays had this space not been opened in himself. Had he had “someone to talk to,” he said, he might only have published letters, a more conventional literary format. Instead, he had to stage his and La Boétie’s dialogue within himself.