A few years ago I visited Montaigne’s chateau in south west France and took this photo. I have a copy of his Essays and it’s one of the few books on my “special books shelf” in my library. (That’s the place I keep the books which have made the biggest impact on my thinking)
I thought I’d just take another moment today to promote Montaigne’s work. The complete “Essays” is a BIG book and I suspect a lot of people are put off by that, so the book I’m recommending today is Sarah Bakewell’s “How to live”.
The full title is “How to live: or a life of Montaigne in one question and Twenty attempts at an answer”. Isn’t that a brilliant title? Sarah Bakewell’s book is a biography of Montaigne which explores his essays in the context of his life. The Essays have stood the test of time and hundreds of years later are still cited by many people as a book which has influenced them. It’s not a self help book. It doesn’t teach you how to live but it’s the author’s attempt to record and make sense of his thinking, of his mind, his life and the world he was living in. He approached his attempts to understand in many ways and Sarah Bakewell explores a number of them in her book.
People identify with what Montaigne wrote. One of the commonest experiences readers have is to think “this could be about me”!
I love Montaigne’s humility and curiosity. Perhaps those are his two key characteristics which impress me most.
Why not see if his writing opens something up for you? If you’d like to, you could do worse than start with “How to live”.
Heroes Not Zombies 
Leave a Reply