Montaigne, me

Relaxing, Reading recently arrived New Yorker (September 7), I found Jane Kramer’s “Me, Myself, And I,” about Michel De Montaigne.

“Every French schoolchild learns the date: February 28, 1571, the day that the educated nobleman Michel de Montaigne retired from court and public duties, retreated into the tower of his family castle, near Bordeaux, shut the door, and began to write. It was his thirty-eighth birthday. His plan was to spend the second half of his life looking at himself. Montaigne’s pursuit of the character he called Myself lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision that he called 'essais.'” ... "They made no claim to composing the narrative of a life, only of the shifting preoccupations of their protagonist in an ongoing conversation with the Greek and Roman writers on his library shelves—and, of course, with himself. … ”

… he wrote in his essay, “On Vanity,” that “Even in my wishes and dreams I can find nothing to which I can hold fast. The only things I find rewarding (if anything is) are variety and the enjoyment of diversity.” (quoted on p38) -- Surely this is so attractive to me because it is so close to my own sentiment … put quite well, I think, by Kathryn Morton: "Nothing passes but the mind grabs it and looks for a way to fit it into a story....Feverish for order, our minds seek not only a unified field theory, a pencil by the telephone and a punch line to the joke. We want to make sense out of the greatest mystery all of us must face‑‑ourselves." (1985, in “The Story-Telling Animal”) … Montaigne ends “On Vanity” with the Delphic Oracle’s familiar injunction: “Know Thyself” ... resonating again as I hear myself telling another group of A&O students that the beginning and end of being an artist (a human) is to know and to be known.

Later in Jane Kramer’s piece, she comments that Montaigne “thinks of himself as a browser, and in a way he is, because, by his account, a couple of interesting thoughts or stories bin one book will always remind him of something smarter, or more interesting—or better still, contradictory—in another book and he opens that.” (p40). Although I feel more like a pinball in play, this almost makes me feel normal.