Blog is a portmanteau word; that is, it’s a mashing up of two other words, in this case web and log. So, by definition, a blog is something written for the web. But I’m going to extend that definition just a bit. I do this with the probably specious logic that if the web had been around 432 years ago, “The Father of Us All” would have written for the web. But of course that wasn’t the case, so Michel Eyquem de Montaigne wrote his blogs for publication, his only way of sharing them. But in any modern sense of the word blog, blogs are what Montaigne wrote.
Montaigne is generally credited with being the first to use the term essay to describe his writing, drawing from the French word essai, meaning trial or attempt. And that is exactly what he set out to do in his essays: attempt to understand himself. And through himself understand something of the world. The continued popularity of his essays attests to how well he succeeded.
Everything is grist for Montaigne’s verbal mill. Most importantly, his main topic is “How to Live”; or, more accurately, how to live a good life, a correct or honorable life.* And in the exploration of that seminal question, he wrote about the major perplexities of life: how to cope with the fear of death; how to you deal with the loss of a dear friend; how to live with failure. But he also wrote about the minor perplexities of life: how to cheer up a sad friend; wondering what his cat is thinking; and what to do if a friend thinks a witch has cast a spell on him. The answers he found came from examining his own life--and sharing that life with us, his reader.
The tower on his estate where Montaigne wrote his essays.
And it’s a fascinating life! We find out he likes melons, “that he prefers to have sex lying down rather than standing up, that he cannot sing, and that he loves vivacious company and often gets carried away by the spark of repartee”* and oh so much more.
Montaigne doesn’t have an agenda; he’s not pushing some point of view. The Montaigne at the beginning of the essays is not the same Montaigne we find at the end. He often comes up short of definitive answers. But the reader of these essays will not come away unchanged.
------------------
Some selected quotes, located on-line:
--“When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?”
--“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.”
--“Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.”
--“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”
--“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
--“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”
--“I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more as I grow older.”
--And perhaps his most famous: “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?)
-------------------------
*I encourage you read a delightful and insightful book about Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell: How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. There are many translations of Montaigne’s essays; I use the M. A. Screech translation, available most everywhere, including as an e-book.
