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The year is 1570 and we're in a forest on the outskirts of Bordeaux, in a France torn apart by violent and ceaseless religious civil war. Michel de Montaigne, a high ranking legal counsellor of the Parlement and advisor to the Royal court, a man who is rightly known today as the father of the personal essay. Though indeed I would go one further, and I would call this great Renaissance writer the father of modern thought and the close friend of all who read him. Montaigne, at the age of 37, has just been violently thrown 12ft from his horse. One of his servants had been showing off behind him and his powerful steed got away from him and he collided full pelt like a colossus into the back of Montaigne, who is now torn and cut and bleeding profusely. And judging from all outward appearances, he is dead. Not the best end to a life that up to this point had already been filled with so much death, so much pain and trauma. Montaigne's 30s were quite the tragic pageant. He had already suffered through the death of five of his six children. He had suffered through the death of his brother. He had lost his best friend, who was very much like a brother. And more recently, in the year before the horse riding accident, Montaigne had suffered the death of his father. And that great loss had ushered in a new cluster of stressful responsibilities as he was now tasked with managing the family estate. Each death had compounded Montaigne's melancholy and increased his anxiety. And he found that he himself, being so scared of death, was no longer truly living. But though it looks bad for Montaigne, sprawled out on the floor, this is not the end of his life. In fact, this is just the beginning. Montaigne had completely lost consciousness after the collision, but after about two hours, his men realized that he was still alive. As he began to make violent movements, he was clawing at his clothes and he was throwing up bucketfuls of blood. He may have been alive, but perhaps it would have been better that he had died, given the extraordinary pain he was clearly in. Except he wasn't in pain. It would take several days for Montaigne to return to consciousness and to remember what had happened. But he would recall later that his soul had gone elsewhere and his body had taken over. But whilst all of this was happening, he had actually been experiencing a peaceful, happy floating sensation. And this made him realize that what often looks like intense pain and suffering to others may well be incredibly peaceful to the person undergoing it. He said that returning to Life over the next couple of days felt like returning from the other world. And having been so near to dying, his relationship with death changed. He ceased to fear his own demise and he came to the profound realisation that his business and his art was to live his life to the full. Montaigne would progress through three distinct attitudinal phases in regards to death that would ultimately help him and now help us to live. One year after the near fatal but life changing accident, Montaigne retired from his career in the Bordeaux parlement, which he had long grown tired of. He'd spent his adult life working his way up through provincial town magistrates courts, becoming an expert in the court system and developing a rigorous knowledge of the law. And what might sound like an exciting life was actually a dire combination of mundanity and danger. On the day to day level. Montaigne was trapped in the world of petty, pedantic and incompetent bureaucrats. This gave him a privileged but exasperating glimpse into the flaws of the justice system. And how could it not be that the justice system is flawed when the system was made by man and man is fallible? Montaigne saw that many laws were flawed and misapplied and lawyers were error prone and judges frequently made mistakes when they allowed their personal lives to intrude into their work. A judge being tired, hungry or hungover would often have tangible effects on the lives of real people. Not only were many laws ill thought out, but many new ones coming in were repressive. The France of Montaigne's day was not a safe place to be and being flung from one's horse would not have been the primary concern on anyone's mind. When riding through the countryside, one would have been much more worried about being accosted by armed men. Indeed, many wouldn't have felt safe if their homes and worries about violent break ins and kidnappings were incredibly valid. A decade and a half before Montaigne was born, Martin Luther nailed his famous treatise to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, which ignited the flame of the Reformation. The rebellion against the Holy Roman Church, which would then see most of Europe fall into one of two camps. Those who were loyal to the church or those who backed Luther's dissent. The ideolog division that tore through many Western nations was that of Protestant versus Catholic and France was absolutely no exception. Now the very first court that Montaigne knew was that of Henri d'Eu Henry II, whose wife Catherine de Medici was actually wielding a lot of the power Henry reigned over an incredibly tumultuous France. And for much of Montaigne's adult life, from the age of 29 until his death at the age of 59, all he knew of his nation was ceaseless, bloody civil war. Henry II would introduce tough heresy laws and a new chamber in the Parlement dedicated to religious crimes, which led to the violent persecution of the Protestants, mainly the Calvinist group of the Huguenots. This was a time of economic crisis from massive inflation and the aftermath of war with Italy that was compounded with discontent and religious fervour and ideological schism. After Henry II died, three young sons in quick succession succeeded to the throne. With Catherine de Medici really running things, the landscape was one of constant fighting, uprising and massacres, which were referred to as the Troubles. In just four decades, between 2 and 4 million people died from violence, famine or disease directly caused by conflict. At the height of his career in the Bordeaux Parlement, Montaigne was sick of it all. He was weary of public service, weary of the country and weary of his fellow men. Though of a Catholic upbringing, Montaigne saw both sides as being as bad as each other. All are alike in using religion for their violent and ambitious schemes, he would say, so like each other in managing their affairs with excess and injustice, that they make you doub. Whether they really do hold different opinions, could you find behaviour more like, more closely identical? Even coming from the same teaching in the same school, it's evident to me that we only willingly carry out those religious duties which flatter our passions. Christians, Montaigne wrote, excel at hating enemies. Montaigne personally had great religious conviction, but statements like this would lead to many branding him as an anti Christian writer. Montaigne would argue that the hateful ones killing each other over differences in dogma in his country were hardly being Christian, however. Zeal never makes anyone go flying towards goodness, kindness or temperance, he writes. Our religion was made to root out vices. Now it cloaks them, nurses them, stimulates them. Montaigne wanted nothing to do with all of that, but being in Bordeaux placed him at the center of a complex community. The city itself was Catholic, but Protestant territories surrounded it and there was a significant and disaffected Protestant minority within it. After his close brush with death, one can understand why he would take the decision to call it a day for his public life. Not that he ever could fully leave it, as he would have the duties of mayor thrust upon him, whether he liked it or not. For two whole terms in his 40s, Montaigne quit his job at 37, and at the age of 38, he made the conscious decision to start his life over. And he followed the advice of the ancient philosophers who believed that after our affairs of state, after our service has been done, we should strive after wisdom with leisure, and we should strive after tranquility of mind. So you've got the part of your life that is business negotium, and then you have the leisured, idle part, the otium, the period of enjoyable reflection, reflection for its own sake, learning for its own sake. And this was a period of time that was supposed to reward your hard work. We have lived quite enough for others, Montaigne would say, let us live at least this tail end of life for ourselves. Montaigne withdrew to one of the towers of his family chateau. His family were winemakers, and the same chateau still produces wine to this day. He withdrew to his. There were two towers. His wife had one and then he kitted out another just the way he liked it. He turned it into a chamber of marvels and decorated it with all sorts of treasures and items from abroad designed to stimulate the imagination and the intellect. And there was ambulatory room so he could walk around whilst thinking. And most importantly of all, there was his library of a thousand volumes. Montaigne, meditating in his essay on Solitude, would say that we should all set up for ourselves a room at the back of the shop. That's how he phrased it, which perhaps puts us in mind of Virginia Woolf's assertion that a woman needs two things to write money and a room of one's own. We should all have a place where we can detach and spend time in company with ourselves. And solitude should not be a lonely condition. It's restorative because we are in company. We're in company with our soul. And when we are reading, when we read the great writings who have gone before us, we are in their company too. So we're never truly alone. Montaigne would say that it's not enough to withdraw from the mob, but we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession. He said we shouldn't become so attached to anything or anyone, be it one's property, one's partner, one's children. We shouldn't become so attached that our happiness depends depends on them. And so having a place to call our own is very important, because we can practice talking and laughing as though everything we are attached to did not exist. And so should the occasion arise when we do lose them, it won't be a new experience to do without them. This retreat into leisured life sounds great, but as many who have faced retirement discovery, in actuality, it turned into a nightmare for Montaigne, who, like Dante, like Don Quixote, found himself in the grips of a midlife existential crisis. The idleness tortured him and led to significant melancholy. The meaning of the word melancholy today is that of one being a bit blue, we're a little bit glum, I'm feeling melancholy. But melancholy back then in Montaigne's day, meant serious depression. Indeed, one of the paradigms of the world during the Renaissance was that of the four humors theory. It was believed that personality was governed by humour and different kinds of bile. And if one kind of bile was in excess, it would cause disruptions and disorders to our mood and behaviour. One can see different Shakespeare characters by virtue of their humour. King Lear, for example, is of a choleric humour, and that comes from an excess of yellow bile. Hamlet is of a melancholy humour which was thought to arise from an excess of black bile. And Montaigne was suffering from that too. And that really worried him. The more melancholy he became, the more worried he became, because he felt that that was rather out of character for him. He was typically of an easygoing, jovial nature. But what I think happened is that when he had a period without distraction, a lot of the pain and trauma he had experienced over the. But not properly addressed or processed or dealt with, all of that had built up and then slammed into him, just like that horse had slammed into him. And it made him manic, disoriented and depressed. He realized that he could no longer flee from himself. And determined to overcome the mental monstrosities harassing him, he decided that he was going to write everything down, everything about him, his thoughts on everything. He was going to probe into the deepest recesses of his mind and show everything, warts and all. He said he wanted to keep a record of his thoughts, hoping in time to make his mind ashamed of itself. What he found is that his writing actually purged the melancholy. There was a great catharsis as Montaigne underwent talk or self talk therapy, hundreds of years before such a thing was even feasible. Montaigne, like the other two writers who make up the three horsemen of Renaissance literature, Shakespeare and Cervantes, learnt to talk and hear himself talk, and thus change through paying attention to himself as though the self was now another. And reading him can do the very same thing for us. Too. And in an age when distinguished men wrote discourses, Montaigne put pen to paper and wrote essays. To assay something means to try something, it means to attempt something. Essay means attempt, and that's what each and every one of his essays is. He tries different things on for size, and he readily admits that sometimes he will fail. He will overstretch himself, he will find the limits of his judgment and intellect, and he will need to fall back into ignorance, his default state. And that is absolutely okay. And this is a great mindset to have. Whenever you write an essay for yourself, it does not need to be perfect. You're just trying things out. You're picking a topic, you're exploring, you're having some fun, you're seeing where it takes you, you're seeing what you can do. You do not need to do it perfectly. You just need to try. And in an age of instruction, where literature was overly didactic and moralistic, Montaigne shunned this. He rejected this, and consequently he ended up teaching us more than anybody. In an age where men of learning praised rhetoric, memory and highfaluting language, Montaigne wrote swift, like a horse at a gallop. And he dispensed with written etiquette and gloss and niceties. He scorned words, words, words, as the Prince of Denmark would say. And we might think that Shakespeare's Hamlet took his cues from Montaigne, for the Bard was a deep reader of his essays. Montaigne favoured matter, substance over style, and whenever he heard some, someone lingering over the language of his essays, he wished that they would hold their peace, because whilst they might have thought they were extolling the words, what they were actually doing was devaluing the meaning. I may be wrong, Montaigne writes in a fantastic essay called Reflections upon Cicero. But there are not many writers who put more matter in your graphics than I do. We are not supposed to take his roughshod manner of expression, which is a rather unfair charge that he brings against himself, as his work is often as poetic as it is profound. But we're not supposed to take his style or his lack of attention to style as the substance. And in fact, we should observe that he writes like this because he trusts us. The rough style is a compliment. Montaigne said that he presents himself meager to those he loves and is most intimate with, and he only dresses his words up for those he does not respect. Montaigne was so resistant to style for style's sake that even thinking about the correct protocol of writing would trip him up and ultimately make him decide not to bother writing at all. Judge not the man by his finery, he says, but by his self. Do you like the man or the britches he wears? It wasn't just the niceties and conventions of writing that he rejected. He also rejected illogical social conventions too. In a really fantastic short essay called Ceremonial at the Meeting of Kings, he speaks of how one nobleman was told that he would soon receive a royal visit at home. Now, the hierarchy of the time meant that the person in the lower, more subservient position has to wait for the higher person. So if a king or a queen was going to visit you, you had to wait around all day, you had to stay at home. Now, this nobleman wanted to go out from his house, he didn't want to stay in all day, and he thought, I'll just go and meet them. Why not? This was a big social faux pas, but Montaigne said there was absolutely nothing wrong with this. And he said, I often neglect these vain obligations in my home. I have to cut out all formalities. Does anyone take offence? What are of it? It is better that I offend him once than myself all the time. That would amount to servitude for life. What is the use in fleeing from the slavery of the court if we then go and drag it back to our lairs? So Montaigne wrote at a gallop, in a reverie, and he was happy and eager to take absolutely anything and everything as his topic. No topic is so vain that it does not deserve a place in this confused medley of mine. He said, one the most exciting things about reading Montaigne really is just how varied the topic matter is. He would write profound art criticism. He would dissect lines from Virgil, he would review the techniques of Plutarch, his favorite historian, and the philosophy of Seneca. He would explore the classical virtues. He'd write about moderation, constancy, truthfulness, courage. He would write about kings and queens, emperors, princes, great generals. He would write about war and peace, foreign climes, customs. He would explore the deepest and most pressing theological questions. He would write about how to govern yourself, your inner life, how to keep a good inner life, how to live a good life. He would write about how to remove the fear of death, how to be a good conversationalist and how to be a good friend, how to control your temper, how to read and how to enjoy the little pleasures in life. But he would also write about ostensibly more frivolous things. He would write about different smells that he liked. He has an essence on thumbs. He would write about impotence and how to overcome it. Indeed, he would say, the genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right. What have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious, orderly conversation? Montaigne would write about bodily functions like passing gas. He would write about the parts of the body that polite society would rather pretend did not exist. But no matter what he was writing about, whether the theme was grand or small, dignified or embarrassing, mundane or profound, he was always ultimately writing about himself and therefore all of us. The universal is in the individual. And by describing the minutia of what makes him unique over the course of 107 essays, we see ourselves as though in a mirror. If you tell your story, story truly, you tell mankind's story. And if you look to the dedicatory letter at the beginning of Montaigne's essays, you will find something revolutionary and astonishingly unconventional. Now, it was usual to have dedicatory notes at the beginning of books. You would write a note to a patron, a royal patron, typically, and the note would be fawning and sycophantic. But here we see Montaigne speaks directly to us, to the reader, across time and space. And he speaks in a very intimate and self deprecating manner that really sets the tone for what's to come. And it's absolutely true that if you want to create a sense of trust and intimacy with another, what you need to do is reveal private, raw and personal details about yourself, reveal a weakness or a flaw. This doesn't make people think less of you, it actually does the opposite. People will be endeared to you if you show your flaws. We begin the essays with a direct warning to the reader that says that this book was designed to be private. It was for his friends and kinsmen, and it was designed to detail some traits of his character and his humors so that they could know him better, so that they could keep their knowledge of him more alive. But here's the revolutionary part. He's says here I want to be seen in my simple, natural, everyday fashion, without striving or artifice, for it is my own self that I am painting here. You will read of the defects as far as social custom allows. And he assures us that were we living among the people who live under the sweet liberty of nature's primal laws, I can assure you, he says, that I would most willingly have portrayed myself whole and wholly naked. Montaigne is writing Hundreds of years before Walt Whitman. And he is saying what Whitman would say in his poetry. I am stripping myself bare. I'm laying everything out, contradictions and multitudes and all. I myself am the subject of my book, he says, and it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Montaigne was incredibly well read, but he was wise enough to know how little he truly knew, except his protestations and warnings. For us not to read him, I think, only endear us to him all the more. We are in the company of one who does not take his life too seriously. Elsewhere he refers to his essays as the droppings of an old mind, sometimes hard, sometimes squat, but always ill digested. He would also, despite the tone of self deprecation, assert that as he has offered himself to himself as the theme and subject matter, it is the only book of its kind in the world. I am all on display, he says. It is not what I do that I write of, but of me, of what I am. And he frequently refers to his essays as being one with him. By portraying myself for others, I have portrayed my own self within me in clearer colours than I possessed at first. I have not made my book any more than it has made me. And this book is of one substance, with its author proper to me and a limb of my life. And why take yourself as the subject of your book? The Delphic oracle said, know thyself. And Montaigne said that this was the most important thing for us to learn. But why? Well, because what else, or who else is there? Montaigne would say, I only exist at home chez moy. I only exist at home in myself and that other life. The other me, the public me, is only the vanity of imagined opinion. In another tremendous essay called On Presumption, which pairs beautifully with the one preceding it on Glory, he writes, all men gaze ahead at what is confronting them. I turn my gaze inward, planting it there and keeping it there. Everybody looks before himself. I look inside myself. I am concerned with no one but me. Without ceasing, I reflect on myself. I watch myself savor myself. I turn round and round in myself. For Montaigne, being himself meant being at home, and that meant attaining presence. We are never at home, he writes. We are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope impel us towards the future. They rob us of feelings and concern for what now is in order to spend time over what will be, even when we ourselves shall be no more. In choosing himself as subject, he wished to unshackle himself from the burden of living only in the future and never in the now. Getting to know yourself means going unapologetically into the core of your being. This means you own your flaws because they are yours, you own your contradictions and you own your mistakes. And Montaigne certainly had no intention of hiding his personal futilities or hiding where he might have been wrong. Even if he changes his own opinion in time, and he does, he readily accepts it. And he says that he welcomes anybody to call him ignorant, to call him wrong. My goodness, I say it myself. He says it's very, very hard to get one over on Montaigne because he's always out ahead of us, he's always got there before we have. And anything we can say about him he has already said himself. These are my humours, he writes my opinions. I give them as things which I believe, not as things to be believed. My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me. Part of the process of knowing yourself involves the great gift of trusting yourself, what Emerson would call self reliance. In his essay on Prognostications, Montaigne mused on the concept of the diamond, the demon, the genius, the guardian spirit, the muse. And he saw this as actually the gut instinct of one who had committed to excellence and moral virtue, one who had committed himself to wisdom. And so that's why Socrates in an instant could offer a profound thought without long rational arguments. Montaigne believed that everyone can sense in themselves some ghost of such agitations, of a prompt, vehement, fortuitous opinion, bold and undigested opinions that over the course of our day to day life we clamp down on. We suppress these opinions to our detriment. We fail to trust ourselves. But Montaigne believed that divine inspiration was actually the gut response of someone who was well read, who practiced living virtuously and knew themselves. You can trust your gut instinct if you dedicate yourself to living well. Now, self trust aside, which is a great thing to flex and develop and train, this constant preoccupation with oneself might sound rather onanistic, navel gazing and even narcissistic. But knowing oneself is actually one of the greatest ways to know other people. Do we not always see through our eyes? There aren't any other eyes we can see through. This great world of ours, Montaigne writes, is the looking glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves. From the right slant we are all cramped and confined inside ourselves. We can See no further than the end of our nose. Interpersonal communication is intrapersonal communication and vice versa. And Montaigne was great with people, and you can tell why when you read through his works. He's charming, but not in a contrived way. He's humorous and witty. He's profound and thought provoking. And yes, he takes the matter of living seriously, but ultimately he doesn't take much that seriously. Knowing himself intimately meant that Montaigne could make so many allowances for other people. In a great essay on the art of conversation, he writes that stupidity is a bad quality, but to be unable to put up up with it, to be vexed and ground down by it, as happens to me, is another hardly worse in its unmannerliness than stupidity. And he says, I wish to condemn that in myself. He said, he welcomed truth. He welcomed contradictions. He welcomed others to oppose his thoughts. Why? Because my thought so often contradicts and condemns itself that it is all one to me if someone else does so. And he would say, I feel far prouder of the victory I win over myself when I make myself give way beneath my adversary's powers of reason in the heat of battle than I ever feel gratified by the victory I win over him through his weakness in talking to other people. Do not seek to win the argument, to win the debate. It's a shallow, hollow victory. Doesn't feel that good. He says, basically, I feel much better when I can accept another person's point of view. I can see another person's point of view. I feel really proud when I say, do you know what? I think you're right there. I can see where you're coming from. I concede it to you. That is something to be more proud of. Why? Because it's more difficult. The easy course of action is to nail ourselves to one opinion and stay stubborn in our beliefs. But the world is different according to who sees it, who contemplates it. So let us share in the experience. Let us give way to one another. Let us accept one another. The reason why Montaigne was so good with others was because he was so good with himself. He accepted himself. His essays exude kindness in intimacy and friendliness, and many consider him to be almost a philosopher. Nietzsche certainly thought that everything one needed to know about the human condition could be found in his essays. But Montaigne himself says that he was only an accidental philosopher. I love that because he records everything. He's bound to stumble into some profound truths here and there. But this is not Rigorous logical deduction. Now, I think he is a philosopher, it doesn't matter if it's accidental or not. But I also see him as a psychologist, a fantastic proto psychologist in the midst of bloody civil war. To give an example of how Montaigne knew others so well, Montaigne judged that it was actually safest to keep his home free of barricades. He didn't want armed guards all over the place, he didn't want really strong and overt defences and he left his door open, always open. He believed that defence provokes offence, it's asking for an attack. It's like saying, hey, there's something behind this door that's worth your trouble. And he also thought that in a civil war one's own manservant can turn against you, so what's the point anyway? Now this probably doesn't sound like the best advice, but it did work for Montaigne. For 30 whole years he left his door open to everybody. The reverse psychology worked. Now of course, that's not to say he never came up against trouble because he does relate some rather harrowing encounters in his essays. But Montaigne's way of interacting with people, how he dealt with people, would prove to be life saving on a number of occasions. He relates one experience in which an armed man came up to his house fresh from the heat of nearby battle. He was terrified and exhausted and he said that his enemy was hot on his heels. Montaigne actually knew this man. He was a neighbour of his and he also knew the man he said he was quarrelling with. He let him into his house but then five more armed men turned up wanting to be let in too, let in for refreshment and respite. Then more men and more men turned up until he had more than 30 armed men in his home and he thought, oh great, now I see what's happening. But it was too late. He couldn't very well usher them out now and get them to leave because they outnumbered him and they were now going to do what they were going to do. And such behaviour also would not accord with the Montaigne who trustingly let these men in in the first place. That would be like telling them, oh no, I have a reason to fear you now. And so if instead he treated them sincerely, frankly, kindly, and he held himself with great composure and great innocence and he could tell that the men were waiting for the signal from the leader to take the house and rob Montaigne and possibly hurt him too. But the leader never gave the signal and they ultimately decided to just go peacefully on their way. Instead. That man later would tell Montaigne that his counter countenance and his frank behavior wrenched the treachery from them. They couldn't bring themselves to do it. On another occasion, Montaigne was travelling during the heights of religious conflict across difficult terrain and four groups of Huguenot horsemen had set out to trap him. He was charged by masked gentlemen and a wave of bowmen. He was captured and dragged off into a thicket and he had all his possessions ran, ransacked and seized. And they wanted to ransom him for an absurdly high price. And Montaigne says that they clearly didn't know who he was. They didn't know much about him because whilst it's true that he had once stored up money, whilst that was once true, he had realised that his relationship with money was causing him anxiety and prohibiting him from living. And so he decided to have a much more laissez faire approach to it. And that meant he didn't have much. An argument started among the men about whether or not they should let him live. So his life was on the line. Montaigne held to the initial terms of his surrender, meaning that they could have what they had just grabbed off of him, but he would not be meeting their ransom. After several hours a change came over the men and the leader returned all of Montaigne's belongings and gently bid him on his his way. Montaigne was told that he owed his liberation to his countenance again and his firmness of speech which made the men realize that he was unworthy of such misfortune. They could read his innocence, his sincerity, his frankness and admirable self possession in his eyes. He looked them in the eyes and they saw his humanity. And that made them ashamed of themselves. They, they realized they were dealing with a real person, a human, a kinsman. And that saved him again. Montaigne was great with people because he knew himself. And knowing your own eccentricities and unique traits gives you a great appreciation for the differences of other people. We share some core key commonalities, but there are thousands of different ways of living and Montaigne celebrates that in his work. So his, his essays are pieces of him. They're an organic extension of the man himself. And piece by piece, essay by essay, we get to know Montaigne the man in all his glorious and self admitted contradictions. What is beautiful about reading his essays is that you can see the evolution of Montaigne, the man, the thinker and the writer. Not only in real time as the book progresses. But you can see at least, least three distinct selves from very different times in his life, post near death experience simultaneously. Now, when you begin the essays, you'll see that they start off like little vignettes. They are short, a couple of pages max, maybe a page here and there. These are little attempts, little tries. And he had designed his book to be divided initially into two books. And the first book was like his apprenticeship and indeed the very last word of the final essay in book one, apprenticeship. But he saw the work evolve over the years and it turned into three books. And when you graduate to that third book, you will see that you're graduating to a Montaigne, who is a higher version of himself. It's a very, very wise portion of the book. But when you start reading his essays, you can see that he originally designed it to be something of a commonplace book, a quarry to preserve his favourite quotations and ideas, ideas from the writers who, though long dead, had become his dear friends. And it's very interesting to think about Montaigne's attitude to quotations. He quotes so many great writers. He really makes us want to go back to Plutarch and explore him, to explore Seneca, to explore all of these great writers. He would say, I only quote others, the better to quote myself. That's a good mindset. When you quote another person, do not take their words wholesale. Do not lean on their wisdom and borrow another man's clothing. Use them because you've lived those words yourself and they are the most appropriate. Now, what's interesting, because he used the work initially as a commonplace book, what he started to do was he would mix the words of ancient philosophers among his own with many quotations. He wouldn't directly attribute who said them, who wrote them. He would mix them in with the paragraphs that he was writing. He would paraphrase. Why was he doing this? Because Montaigne was something of a troll, a Renaissance European troll. He wanted his critics to attack him without realizing they were actually taking the words of Seneca or Plutarch apart, which they otherwise wouldn't have done if they knew that a certain line was from Seneca, they wouldn't attack it. But when they think it's Montaigne, well, maybe it's fair game. So that was kind of like an intelligence test for his critics. But he used quotations as well to make him better. He said that in using these strong maxims and ideas from great writers, he was undertaking to march shoulder to shoulder with giants and such marching would develop A strong backbone. So the work, which was originally designed to be split into just two books, developed in 23. And you can see that as you read through his essays, they become richer, they become more robust, they start offering lots of different angles on the different topics. And the essays also become longer. And we can see that what he is ultimately doing is teaching us how to live. Flaubert would say, don't read Montaigne for amusement. Don't read him to be instructed. Read him in order to live. By the time you get midway through the work, you'll see that not only are many of his essays quite long, but they're very, very deep too. He wrote his essays over the course of 20 years. And the really fascinating is he would go back to older essays and he would add things in. Insights from his older self meld with the voice of his younger, middle aged self. He didn't really remove things, he didn't want to do that. He thought that if he started pulling things out, then he has missed the point of what he's doing. He can't just go scraping out words with his eraser that would efface the whole of his essays. The point was to show the bumps, to show the flaws. But not only that, but he found that many of the ideas that he chanced upon the heart half digested thoughts that were maybe not perfectly articulated, they were often the ones that were clearer than the noonday sun. And he found that it was his former hesitations that astonished him. He would come to a passage and think, oh, I remember deliberating about taking that out. But my goodness, this is one of the wisest things I wrote. So you've got to trust yourself. If you're a writer. You have to trust what seems ill thought out. Because insights come from the rich, fertile soil of frivolity. And because we have a 59 year old Montaigne adding thoughts to the writings and musings and essays of a 39 year old Montaigne. The essays as a whole have a very textured, layered quality to them. Indeed, one of the very last things that Montaigne wrote basically on the verge of dying, was added to one of the very first more frivolous things he wrote. He added wise lines to his earlier, more juvenile essays. Now you can mark the evolution of the man by paying close attention to the ABC system. In most versions of the essays you will see A capital A, B or C at the start of a paragraph, or even in the middle of a paragraph, mixed among sentences. What this is, is it's basically telling you whether what you're reading comes from the younger, slightly older or even older Montaigne. And thus you can see how his thoughts on the same topic have matured over time in one place. The essays are iterative. They contain the character of a. Or indeed several Montaignes. They contain the character of a Montaigne that is forever in flux. And so how do you read Montaigne logistically, pragmatically, how do you do it? Are there a curation of his best essays, his top 10? That one should start with? Now, you may find such lists, and I will provide you at the end of this talk, not with a definitive list, but with my personal curation, my favourites at this moment in time, because every reader will have their own particular favourites. And in my list there will be overlap there with what I believe to be objective greatness, but that will be mixed in with the aesthetic and cognitive elements that are doing it for me right now. But is that a way to read Montaigne, reading his top 10? That's one way to do it. You can also, like with the great writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Wilde, Woolf, Pascal, you can read in a disjointed fashion, dropping in and out of essays. You can roam about, you can skim, you can speed up, then slow down. You can begin your journey by tracing your finger down the contents page and allow it to stop at the title and topic that arrests your attention. That's a really great method of entry and one that comes highly recommended. Just go to the topics that leap out at you. Just flick through, just go back and forth, zoom in and out. Have fun with it. But for the ambitious seekers of wisdom, I would like to issue you a challenge. I would like to urge you and implore you to give yourself the gift of meeting Montaigne fully between now and the end of the year. And that means reading all of the essays from start to finish. The book is long, but that's because. Because it is the soul of a deep thinker and feeler. It's the physicalization of the man over the course of 20 years. Now, I will tell you that just because the work is long doesn't mean it necessarily takes a long time to read. On my first significant meeting with Montaigne, I read every single essay, or inhaled would be the better word. I inhaled every single essay in just under a week. And I'm not a fast reader. Yes, that meant gliding over some things, focusing disproportionately on others, but this is a very inhalable book. I find I do not want to ask you to do that. However. Instead, your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to have read the entire essays by the end of the year.