This is because Montaigne borrows a technique from Plutarch: he constructs his argument by heaping up case studies. Stories and facts spill out in every paragraph like flowers from a cornucopia.
All Montaigne’s skills at jumping between perspectives come to the fore when he writes about animals. We find it hard to understand them, he says, but they must find it just as hard to understand us. “This defect that hinders communication between them and us, why is it not just as much ours as theirs?”
He started with the Skeptical assumption that nothing was real, and that all his previous beliefs had been false. Then he advanced slowly, with careful steps, “like a man who walks alone, and in the dark,” replacing these false beliefs with logically justified ones.
As Friedrich Nietzsche would remark centuries later, most of the genuinely valuable observations about human behavior and psychology—and thus also about philosophy—“were first detected and stated in those social circles which would make every sort of sacrifice not for scientific knowledge, but for a witty coquetry.”
He wrote that they had both decided she should be punished by nothing more than stern words, and even then, “very gentle ones.”
On a global scale, no single creature can be of much importance, he wrote, yet in another way these I’s are the only things of importance. And only a politics that recognizes them can offer hope for the future.
Death is only a few bad moments at the end of life, he wrote in one of his last added notes; it is not worth wasting any anxiety over.
“This great world,” writes Montaigne, “is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.”
The earth gives this natural man everything he needs. It does not pamper him, but he needs no pampering.
The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.
Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober, and consequently ugly-looking.
Renaissance readers fetishized extreme states: ecstasy was the only state in which to write poetry, just as it was the only way to fight a battle and the only way to fall in love. In all three pursuits, Montaigne seems to have had an inner thermostat which switched him off as soon as the temperature rose beyond a certain point.
Mediocrity, for Montaigne, does not mean the dullness that comes from not bothering to think things through, or from lacking the imagination to see beyond one’s own viewpoint. It means accepting that one is like everyone else, and that one carries the entire form of the human condition.
In a time such as that of the Second World War, or in civil-war France, Zweig writes, ordinary people’s lives are sacrificed to the obsessions of fanatics, so the question for any person of integrity becomes not so much “How do I survive?” as “How do I remain fully human?”
What he loved above all about his travels was the feeling of going with the flow. He avoided all fixed plans. “If it looks ugly on the right, I take the left; if I find myself unfit to ride my horse, I stop.” He traveled as he read and wrote: by following the promptings of pleasure.
For a while, there were two different realities, depending on which side you were on.
Such writers, says Hazlitt, collect curiosities of human life just as natural history enthusiasts collect shells, fossils, or beetles as they stroll along a forest path or seashore. They capture things as they really are rather than as they should be. Montaigne was the finest of them all because he allowed everything to be what it was, including himself.
Montaigne wanted to drift away, yet he also wanted to attach himself to reality and extract every grain of experience from it. Writing made it possible to do both.
Just as he would not think of passing judgment on a roomful of acquaintances, all of whom had their own reasons and points of view to explain what they had done, so he would not think of judging previous versions of Montaigne. “We are all patchwork,” he wrote, “and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.”
It is beguiling; it is flattering. One looks into one’s copy of the Essays like the Queen in Snow White looking into her mirror. Before there is even time to ask the fairy-tale question, the mirror croons back, “You’re the fairest of them all.”
Old age provides an opportunity to recognize one’s fallibility in a way youth usually finds difficult.
Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself. Either this is not an answer at all, or it is the only possible answer.
Learning how to die was learning to let go; learning to live was learning to hang on.
Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, “I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it.”
The new theories of education emphasized that learning should be pleasurable, and that the only motivation children needed was their inborn desire for knowledge.