![]() He was a hero to the enlighteners Montesquieu and Diderot. ![]() Within a decade of his death, his Essays had left their mark on Bacon and Shakespeare. Montaigne’s persistence in assembling his extraordinary dossier of stories, arguments, asides and observations on nearly everything under the sun (from how to parley with an enemy to whether women should be so demure in matters of sex, has been celebrated by admirers in nearly every generation. Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have lived it I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that I am without … I have seen the grass, the blossom, and the fruit, and now see the withering happily, however, because naturally. With an almost Socratic irony, he tells us most about his own habits of writing in the essays titled “Of Presumption”, “Of Giving the Lie”, “Of Vanity”, and “Of Repentance”.īut the message of this latter essay is, quite simply, that non, je ne regrette rien, as a more recent French icon sang: He is only a second rate politician and one-time Mayor of Bourdeaux, after all. Montaigne frequently apologises for writing so much about himself. If Rancière is right, it could be said that Montaigne’s 107 Essays, each between several hundred words and (in one case) several hundred pages, came close to inventing modernism in the late 16th century. Annette Bozorgan/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |