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

Slowness and forgetfulness were good responses to the question of how to live, so far as they went. They made for good camouflage, and they allowed room for thoughtful judgments to emerge. But some experiences in life brought forth a greater passion, and called for a different sort of answer.

“Bad spots” were everywhere, he wrote in a late essay. We do better to “slide over this world a bit lightly and on the surface.” Through this discovery of gliding and drifting, he lost much of his fear, and at the same time acquired a new sense that life, as it passed through his body—his particular life, Michel de…

Out on the forest paths, Montaigne’s thoughts could wander as widely as he wished, although even here he was invariably accompanied by servants and acquaintances. People rarely went around alone in the sixteenth century. But he could spur his horse away from boring conversations, or turn his mind aside in order to…

Tyranny creates a drama of submission and domination, rather like the tense battle confrontation scenes often described by Montaigne. The populace willingly gives itself up, and this only encourages the tyrant to take away everything they have—even their lives, if he sends them to war to fight for him. Something in human…

Whenever Montaigne did exert himself to flick through a book, according to him, he promptly forgot almost everything he had read. “Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgment does its work with difficulty,” he wrote, before adding, “it is entirely lacking in me.”

One unsuitable text which Montaigne discovered for himself at the age of seven or eight, and which changed his life, was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This tumbling cornucopia of stories about miraculous transformations among ancient gods and mortals was the closest thing the Renaissance had to a compendium of fairy tales. As…

Eventually most of Europe would fall into two camps: those who kept loyal to the Church, and those who backed Luther’s rebellion. There was never anything geographically or ideologically neat about this division. Europe fell apart like a crumbling loaf, not like an apple halved by a knife. Almost every country was…

He [Montaigne] wrote: “Let us cut loose from all the ties that bind us to others; let us win from ourselves the power to live really alone and to live that way at our ease.”

The great Stoic Seneca repeatedly urged his fellow Romans to retire in order to “find themselves,” as we might put it. In the Renaissance, as in ancient Rome, it was part of the well-managed life. You had your period of civic business, then you withdrew to discover what life was really about and to begin the long process…

Having committed himself to what he hoped would be a contemplative new life, Montaigne went to great trouble to set it up just as he wanted it. After his retirement, he chose one of two towers at the corners of his château complex to be his all-purpose retreat and center of operations; the other tower was reserved for his…