How to Live: A Life of Montaigne

Prompted by Nicholas Lezard's review in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, I've been reading Sarah Bakewell's wonderfully enjoyable How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer, a loose and rather Montaignesque biography of both Michel and his Essays. After setting out Montaigne's fascination with the question of how to flourish and lead a fulfilled life, Bakewell tries to come up with some rough answers by drawing on Montaigne's life and writings.

The book begins with the riding accident that convinced Montaigne to give up his career as a magistrate, jumping back to learn more about his strange upbringing, and forward again to learn about his great friendship with Étienne de La Boétie. It then follows Montaigne as he travels around Europe, trying to find a cure for his chronic kidney stones — his journal apparently includes precise details of his bladder and bowel functions — before eventually being called back to become mayor of Bordeaux.

Interwoven with biography of the man is the biography of the Essays. How they were written when Montaigne decided to step back from the world and concentrate on describing his life, how they came to wander around the point, and how he came to borrow his philosophy from the Greeks. It also describes the impact the Essays had on Montaigne's immediate intellectual successors — especially Blaise Pascal, who became completely obsessed with Montaigne's scepticism which he found both dangerous and frustratingly difficult to combat — his English admirers, including the Hazlitt dynasty, and stylistic successors such as Lawrence Sterne and James Joyce.

The whole thing rounds off with a rather delightful image of Montaigne, in his prime, taking time off from writing to play with his cat:

[The cat] was the one who, by wanting to play with Montaigne at an inconvenient moment, reminded him what it was to be alive. They looked at each other, and, just for a moment, he leaped across the gap in order to see himself through her eyes. Out of that moment — and countless others like it — came his whole philosophy.

There they are, then, in Montaigne's library. The cat is attracted by the scratching of his pen; she dabs an experimental paw at the moving quill. He looks at her, perhaps momentarily irritated by the interruption. Then he smiles, tilts the pen, and draws the feather-end across the paper for her to chase. She pounces. The pads of her paws smudge the ink on the last few words; some sheets of paper slide to the floor. The two of them can be left there, suspended in the midst of their lives with the Essays not yet fully written, while we go and get on with ours — with the Essays not yet fully read.

Which certainly makes me feel less guilty about the fact that I've only read a handful of the Essays...

---

ETA: Thanks to doctor_squale for noticing that I'd consistently misspelt "Montaigne"...