Snippets from “The Life and Essays of Michel de Montaigne” by Jane Kramer, in the September 7, 2009, issue of The New Yorker.
Montaigne … often warned his readers that nothing he wrote about himself was likely to apply for much longer than it took the ink he used, writing it, to dry. …
“Yes. I admit it,” he wrote in “On Vanity.” “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.”
It [“On Vanity”] is a meditation on dying and, at the same time, on writing—or, you could say, on writing oneself to life in the face of death, on getting lost in words and in “the gait of poetry, all jumps and tumblings” and in the kind of space where “my pen and my mind both go-a-roaming.” … “My mind does not always move straight ahead but backwards too,” he says. “I distrust my present thoughts hardly less than my past ones and my second or third thoughts hardly less than my first.”
… “If I were allowed to choose I would, I think, prefer to die in the saddle, rather than in my bed, away from home and far from my own folk. There is more heartbreak than comfort in taking leave of those we love.” …
“In a truly loving relationship—which I have experienced—rather than drawing the one I love to me I give myself to him. Not merely do I prefer to do him good than to have him do good to me, I would even prefer that he did good to himself rather than to me: it is when he does good to himself that he does most good to me. If his absence is either pleasant or useful to him, then it delights me far more than his presence.”
