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

by Sarah Bakewell

THIS BOOK HAS been, in part, the story of how Montaigne has flowed through time via a sort of canal system of minds. Samples have been taken at each lock: from —Montaigne’s first enthusiastic readers, who praised his Stoic wisdom and his skill in collecting fine thoughts from the ancients; —the likes of Descartes and Pascal, who found him distasteful and fascinating in equal measure for his Skepticism and his blurring of the boundary between humans and other animals; —the libertins of the seventeenth century, who loved him as a daring freethinker; —Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century, who were drawn again to his Skepticism and his liking for New World cultures; —Romantics, who hailed a “natural” Montaigne while wishing he would warm up; —readers whose own lives were disrupted by war and political turmoil, and who made Montaigne a hero and companion; —late nineteenth-century moralists who blushed at his bawdiness and deplored his lack of ethical fiber, but managed to reinvent him as a respectable gentleman like themselves; —some four hundred years of Montaigne-reading English essayists and accidental philosophers; —a not-so-accidental philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who admired Montaigne’s lightness of spirit and reimagined his Stoic and Epicurean tricks of living for a new era; —modernists like Virginia Woolf, who tried to capture the feeling of being alive and conscious; —editors, transcribers, and remixers, who molded Montaigne into different shapes; —...