As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance.

Every so often, I have to remind myself that I am in, if my late, twenties when it comes to my reading career. I have Proust, Gilgamesh, at least ten works of Woolf, and two of the Four Great Chinese Classics under my belt, with a third of the last waiting for me in the wings of 2020. I have not, however, yet encountered Sterene, Seneca, or Montaigne himself, names that have long been familiar but have also been passed over in recent years due to an accumulation of less than favorable encounters with the mass white boy lit fixation that plagues the definition of "being well read." Coming to this on the tail end of December 2019's focus on neglected (by me at any rate) 21st century works on my shelf reminded me of all this and more, so it's rather fortunate that I'm letting a few of the bigger names (largely ones I've previously read and approved of) back in my diet next year, as at the ripe old age of nearly 30, I've gained enough self-confidence through a course of far flung reading across time and space to go back to the purported canon and see what I can get. In university, I took classes on experimental women's lit and postcolonial short stories alongside those on 'Canterbury Tales' and 'Paradise Lost,' and these days, I feel I can trust myself to ferret out the more worthy members of the commonly esteemed literary conclave and incorporate their worthiest sayings into my own holism: after reading this, Montaigne is high on that list, especially with my newly acquired knowledge of, and choice of sides in, the drama surrounding the editions of his work.

Montaigne was also impressed by the way the city's courtesans lived in dignity and luxury, openly maintained by noblemen and respected by all.

Despite the lack of mention in this particular tome, my most remembered experience with Montaingity would have to be [b:Epitaph of a Small Winner|909746|Epitaph of a Small Winner|Machado de Assis|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311991278l/909746._SY75_.jpg|605176] by [a:Machado de Assis|22458|Machado de Assis|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1494210909p2/22458.jpg]: irreverent, through provoking, and, ultimately, the most nonsensical sense and sensible nonsense I have ever encountered. After reading this, if de Assis hadn't somehow gotten his hands on a Portuguese translation of the 'Essays', I'll eat my hat, as Bakewell made such a strong argument for that work's influence spanning both countries and centuries that it'd be absurd if Zweig had made it to Brazil before his beloved author did. Montainge's equivocation proves conducive to his continued survival, and yet he forbid torture when he could, looked favorably on sex workers, and found most, if not all, excuses for violence not just ineffective, but inhumane. His wisdom was born out of the strenuous labor and suppression of hundreds, if not thousands, of others through hierarchies of class, gender, nation, and religion, but what he left behind is something that, as Bakewell says, suggests itself well to self-reflexive humanitarian concerns and a focus on raising up, if largely on the basis of shrewd self-absorption. Still, much like his friend Boétie's strikingly revolutionary text, Montaigne's words can be easily adapted as any variety of bedrocks for any variety of persons at a variety of ages. I don't expect to act any differently when I finally read him for myself: my only goal is to confirm that he is indeed worth reading.

The cultivation of potatoes was under way, although their vaguely testicular shape still made people think they were good only as an aphrodisiac.

This book gave me a glimpse of what I've been missing out on due to my having followed a nearly white boy-less reading path for the past several years, and I have to say, I do appreciate most of the context. Still, I delighted whenever the more important Woolf was mentioned, as well as whenever this text gave me a woman writer who I considered worth pursuing (I've added works by both [a:Marie de Gournay|16795452|Marie de Gournay|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-6a03a5c12233c941481992b82eea8d23.png] and [a:Veronica Franco|73247|Veronica Franco|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1245511394p2/73247.jpg] as a result). That's the measure I take of most things these days: I follow the beaten trail of the best and brightest, knowing that the trail is often trampled on the backs of fellow worthies by the weight of anyone who only received a higher education through the fortunate coincidences of their innately inherited, rather than developed, characteristics and nothing more. So, I will read the Montaigne and the Seneca and the Sterne, but for every one of them, I aspire to a bare minimum of five of their respective contemporaries who most history books say did not exist. Montaigne valued his flexible point of view; I aspire to make my own all the more accurate and acute.

There they are, then, in Montaigne's library. The cat is attracted by the scratching of his pen; she dabs an experimental paw at the moving quill. He looks at her, perhaps momentarily irritated by the interruption. Then he smiles, tilts the pen, and draws the feather-end across the paper for her to chase. She pounces. The pads of her paws smudge the ink on the last few words; some sheets of paper slide to the floor. The two of them can be left there, suspended in the midst of their lives with the Essays not yet fully written, while we go and get on with ours—with the Essays not fully read.

the most genuinely engaging biography I've ever read. Didnt think I could grow to love Montaigne more than I already did, but here we are.

I expected this to be more centered in Montaigne's life philosophy and less biographical but naturally and especially with someone like Montaigne the biography always goes hand in hand with what they left behind in writing. Montaigne was truly ahead of his time. I enjoyed the historical context and the specific life habits of the 16th century as well as the more abstract and philosophical ideas. The book goes to a lot of detail about editions, translations and the influence Montaigne had on contemporaries and future generations.

I must admit I skimmed this. The answers to the principal question "how to live" are good advice, and there are some interesting vignettes in Montaigne's life, but for me to want of read a biography, I need to be pretty interested in the subject, and Montaigne just doesn't do it for me.

Borrowed this copy from the Castillo house. Reading this book made me glad that Montaigne's "Essays" is one of the few books that made the cut when we culled our books before moving to California. I read parts of it in one of my Core classes at Columbia, and I remember enjoying it, but I wasn't as taken with it at the time as I know Elise was. Bakewell's book was a great reminder that it is absolutely worth picking up again.

Having just read a book about Stoicism, and also having been reading a Zen-influenced blog, it's impressive how many of Montaigne's characteristics resemble practices from these traditions: cultivating mindfulness and attention; cultivating acceptance of the world and gaining comfort with relinquishing control; seeing yourself as someone you need to build a relationship with just like anyone else.

One of the threads running through Bakewell's book is that people of different eras and different persuasions have seen in Montaigne the things that they want to see--and I guess I am no different from any of them!

This is basically a number of different kinds of works woven together into a tapestry that approximates a picture of it's main subject: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.

It is, at its simplest, a biography of a man. Bakewell sets the table for what 16th century France looked like. She sets the table with Montaigne's parents, explains his upbringing, his decision to "retire" at age 37 (Comme ç'est gentil!), the traumatic incidents that drive him to write, his relations with La Boetie, the creation of a family of his own, his travels and professional responsibilities, and his death.

As a writer, he was way ahead of his time and an inspiration to those attracted to a sort of Stoic way of living and experiencing the world. One of his ideas related by Bakewell that I find very compelling is that the act of observing and writing about one's experience of the world facilitates the goal of living in the present. Paying full attention to one's surroundings is, after all, one of the surest paths to enlightenment in any number of religious sects and philosophical schools. For somebody who often wants for an excuse just to write, this feels like permission to proceed, no matter how trivial the subject.

But almost more than a biography of a man, this book is biography of Montaigne's Essays. It's an exegesis not just of the text itself, but its reception too and its cultural legacy moving forward. You get an idea of where it sat with his contemporaries, how it came to be banned for a period by the Catholic church, how it was rediscovered by new generations and new groups like the Romantics, modernists, psychoanalysts, the English, post-modernists, feminists, etc.

And it doesn't stop there! She also explains in great detail the succession of editions of the Essays that would follow. Montaigne himself continuously updated the text almost until the day of his death. The ways in which subsequent editors and publishers pieced together what remained is a deeply-explored subject in itself. The relationship of Marie Le Jars De Gournay — the Lenin to Montaigne's Marx as Bakewell puts it — is especially interesting, spinning off a thread about what the reception and criticism of her editions of the book over the years say about evolving attitudes towards women and literature.

Then perhaps the outermost layer of this intricate amuse bouche is the extremely contemporary framing of this entire project as almost a self-help book. By presenting the book's 20 chapters as answers to the central question of "How to live?" you get lots of little aphorisms, supported if only tangentially by the actual content of the chapter. This has the pleasing effect not only of aping the style of Montaigne's Essays, with their deceptively simple titles, but it makes the reader feel as though he's actually getting some of Montaigne's wisdom second-hand.

As much as I enjoyed that, along with a reflection of that notion that Bakewell often returns to that almost all readers of Montaigne find something of themselves in his text, the only logical conclusion to me on finishing "How To Live" was that... well, I guess I have to read "The Essays" now! Knowing what I do now of the incompleteness of second or third-hand Montaigne, if I really want to feel kinship with the man, I'll have to read all 1,300 pages. By sucking me in with her promise of a biography wrapped in pleasant aphorisms, her work essentially turned into an extended preface for the work itself.

If that was her intention, then bravo! But let that be a warning to other fans of philosophy or relentless completionists: this is not a 330 page undertaking. It's more like 1,700 pages.