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»Quelque diversité d’herbes qu’il y ait, tout s’enveloppe sous le nom de salade. » (p.491)

Calling Michel de Montaigne’s Essais a dish of salad � after all, they offer a diversity of texts and thoughts � would be utterly disrespectful, even though I most certainly like salad. Nevertheless, what you are in for when you decide to pick up any of the three volumes of essays Montaigne wrote between 1572 and 1592, the year of his death, is a vast range of discussions on a plethora of subjects and the adventure of listening to a well-read, highly intelligent person talking to himself. The first of these volumes, which I am going to present here, starts which the question of how different procedures may lead to the same result and ends with reflections on growing old and on using one’s youth properly, and in between we learn about how philosophy teaches us to die a dignified death, on human customs, on education, on sleep, on scents, on cannibals, on friendship, on fear, on cowardice, on moderation, on how one piece of advice may result in different outcomes � which counterpoises the first of the essais, obviously � as well as on a load of other subjects.

While reading these texts, you will get a more and more subtle idea of Montaigne himself, of his shortcomings and strengths, although he never deigns to expose his private life to you in a way that would be awkward either to you as a reader or to him as a writer, as has become the fashion of our day and age � but what is more, you will also feel inclined to think about all these subjects on your own. To keep my text within the boundaries of the fairly readable, I will focus on three topics that were of vast importance to Montaigne and that always crop up in his reflections.

One of them is the importance of education. Montaigne is quite modern in his view that proper education cannot merely consist in hoarding knowledge and in learning it by heart but that whatever knowledge is acquired has to support a learner in schooling their power of judgment, of coming to sensible conclusions and that education should help a learner to explore and improve their own mind. Occasions of learning can be gleaned from life and its everyday situations much better than solely from books, and teaching a pupil to ask questions, to develop a spirit of intellectual curiosity ought to be one of the foremost tasks of a good teacher. Montaigne says,

»Savoir par cœur n’est pas savoir : c’est tenir ce qu’on a donné en garde à sa mémoire. Ce qu’on sait droitement, on en dispose, sans regarder au patron, sans tourner les yeux vers son livre. » (p.322)

And a little later,

»En cette école du commerce des hommes, j’ai souvent remarqué ce vice, Qu’au lieu de prendre connaissance d’autrui, nous ne travaillons qu’� la donner de nous : et sommes plus en peine d’emploiter nos marchandise, que d’en acquérir de nouvelle. Le silence et la modestie, sont qualités très commodes à la conversation. » (p.324f.)

Montaigne himself often claims that his own memory is a mere sieve, which is very difficult to believe seeing how many quotations he cites in order to illustrate or support his own musings. His erudition can hardly have been based on just an enormous slip box. Be that as it may, Montaigne’s insistence that education ought to expand a human being’s mind and make him a more emphatic but also critical person could serve as a reminder to us, who live in times when education is only said to be meant to stimulate critical thinking, whereas in reality it rewards those students who are most ready to parrot what is supposed to be criticism, and when education has often degenerated into standardizing young minds for working life and market requirements.

Also in another respect, Montaigne will strike us as quite curious. Let’s listen to him,

»Il est incertain où la mort nous attende, attendons-la partout. La préméditation de la mort, est préméditation de la liberté. Qui a appris à mourir, il a désappris à servir. » (p.229)

Or,

»Le premier jour de votre naissance vous achemine à mourir comme à vivre […] » (p.236)

Or,

»Je me garderai si je puis que ma mort dit chose que ma vie n’ait premièrement dit. » (p.289)

One of the philosophers most quoted and referred to by Montaigne is, you might have guessed it, Seneca, and in this light it can hardly be surprising to find the author voice Stoic sentiments about death. Still, they might seem disconcerting and unusual to many modern readers, who more often than not tend to avoid facing the consciousness of our finiteness or regard it as the strongest source of misery imaginable. In fact, many of us might have spent the last few years in such a constant obsession with evading death that we have forgotten to be alive over this our first and foremost concern. There are probably far greater things to lose, our integrity, our empathy, our autonomy, our joy of life, than life itself, which is something we will inevitably lose eventually. Saying that, with two children to watch growing up and lots of books on my to-read-pile, I will not be the first one to cry, Come in, when Death knocks on the door � but still, reading Montaigne’s thoughts helped me put some fears into place.

The last topic that Montaigne likes recurring to is that of subjectivity, as can be well expected of anyone who is generally considered a sceptic. In 1571, after quite successful a public life, Montaigne decided to retire into his Tower, where he had a large library and ample time, in order to dedicate his remaining years to writing down his essays. It was finally time for him to come to terms with himself and fathom the depths of his mind:

»La plus grande chose du monde, c’est de savoir être à soi. » (p.447)

»Il se faut réserver une arrière-boutique, toute nôtre, toute franche, en laquelle nous établissons notre vrai liberté et principale retraite et solitude. » (p.445)

The preference to spend time with yourself and your own thoughts is something not only hard to bear by those who have given up themselves entirely to social media and the chance to exhibit their own pathetic selves to anonymous masses, but it has also become quite suspicious in times when the private is said to be political, and when you must go with the indignant crowd in order to avoid becoming their next target of finger-pointing. And yet, time spent with yourself should be quality time � if it ain’t, blame yourself. Yet, there are also push factors that drove Montaigne towards his self-imposed exile, in that he clearly saw the essence of what is commonly called social life:

»Je ne pense point qu’il y ait tant de malheur en nous, comme il y a de vanité, ni tant de malice comme d’inanité : nous ne sommes pas si misérables, comme nous sommes vils. […] Notre propre et particulière condition, est autant ridicule que risible. » (p.528f.)

And yet, Montaigne never gives up his optimistic belief in humans as single persons, in the dignity of the individual mind. Even when in his essay “Des prières� he seems to be voicing the staunchest Catholic orthodoxy, if you read between the lines, you can see him make a distinction here between the religious and the non-religious spheres, and claiming with regard to the latter, the right to develop one’s own ideas and thoughts � thus anticipating Kant. All in all, Montaigne’s text will probably strike you as partly conservative, partly surprisingly revolutionary � and sometimes paradoxical, as when he spends a lot of time showing how most of our customs and beliefs have grown out of circumstances rather than of higher truth, and then comes to the conclusion that it is better not to change old customs and laws lest they should lead to greater problems than the ones one intended to tackle �, and this is probably also partly because Montaigne tended to amend and rewrite his essays over and over again, making them the task of the remainder of his life and simultaneously imbuing each essay with new life and new thoughts through every single one of his re-readings and re-workings. Since these texts were constantly growing and changing, I was very happy to come across the folio Classique edition undertaken by Emmanuel Naya, Delphine Reguig and Alexandre Tarrête because this edition uses different fonts according to different versions of the original text. Reading the essays in this edition is therefore a bit like doing archaeology, and can be highly recommended. Page references in this review are based on this edition, of course.

One other thing I would like to mention in conclusion of this review of mine is Montaigne’s irresistible sense of humour. Not only does he spice up his essays with quotations and anecdotes, or even include a passage on farting � I am not going to tell you in which essay � but every now and then he also comes up with passages like this one:

mais quand je suis malade […] je […] réponds à ceux, qui me pressent de prendre médicine, qu’ils attendent au moins que je sois rendu à mes forces et à ma santé, pour avoir plus de moyens de soutenir l’effort et le hasard de leur breuvage. » (p.286)

By the way, some of the things Montaigne wrote got him into trouble with Rome, e.g. his admiring words on poets whose works were on the index, his idea that education should be founded on individual experience as well, his preference for praying on his own, or his denouncement of torture. Today, the Internet is mightier than Rome, and I’m sure that if Montaigne lived today, he would get into trouble for others of his views.