Sarah Bakewell
>To follow thoughts where they lead
>
Sarah Bakewell on bloggings’ debt to Michel Montaigne @ The Paris Review.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The weekend newspapers are full of them. Our computer screens are full of them. They go by different names—columns, opinion pieces, diaries, blogs—but personal essays are alive and well in the twenty-first century. They flourish just as they did in James Thurber’s and E. B. White’s twentieth-century New York, or in the nineteenth-century London of William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. There seems no end to the appeal of the essayist’s basic idea: that you can write spontaneously and ramblingly about yourself and your interests, and that the world will love you for it.
No end—but there was a beginning. The essay tradition blossomed in English-speaking countries only after being invented by a sixteenth-century Frenchman, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. His contemporary, the English writer Francis Bacon, also used the title Essays, but his were well-organized intellectual inquiries. While Bacon was assembling his thoughts neatly, the self-avowedly lazy nobleman and winegrower Montaigne was letting his run riot on the other side of the Channel. In his Essais (“Attempts”), published in 1580 and later expanded into larger editions, he wrote as if he were chatting to his readers: just two friends, whiling away an afternoon in conversation.
Montaigne raised questions rather than giving answers. He wrote about whatever caught his eye: war, psychology, animals, sex, magic, diplomacy, vanity, glory, violence, hermaphroditism, self-doubt. Most of all, he wrote about himself and was amazed at the variety he found within. “I cannot keep my subject still,” he said. “It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.” His writing followed the same wayward path.
>Montaigne, the long party
>
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Michel de Montaigne is known among cat lovers for a popular quip: “When I am playing with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me?” This is just one of the musings in his Essays — a book that could qualify today as a blog, for Montaigne was the first person to unabashedly write about himself, flaws and all.
Accustomed to Facebook, Twitter and blogs, we take disclosure as a given. But in the 1500s, public self-revelation was reserved for great people who accomplished great things, or, like St. Augustine and Dante, those writing about how they found God.
Then there was Montaigne, who, in the Essays, characterized himself as “idle. Cool in the duties of friendship and kinship, and in public duties. Too self-centered.” Not exactly the hero type. Nor did he expound on the greatness of God. In fact, his fear that death is nothingness bordered on atheism.
Purposely evading the so-called big ideas, Montaigne homed in on the quotidian, at times mundane, details. In the Essays, he divulged that though he knew many fair ladies in his prime, he had never seen his wife’s breasts — not even during sex — out of respect for her honor; that he “could dine without a tablecloth, but very uncomfortably without a clean napkin”; and that he liked his meat rare. One of his most famous essays, “Of experience,” included a long-winded description of the pain of expelling kidney stones.
altimoniere 