I am reading Sarah Bakewell’s book “How To Live” which may sound like yet another self-help book but is actually a book about the life and writing of Michel De Montaigne, a French writer and philosopher who popularised the “essay” as a literary genre.

I love reading personal essays and I want to share more of my personal reflections in my writing. Sometimes, though, I doubt if studying myself is the best use of my time. Really? Isn’t that narcissistic? Too much self-importance, no?

Montaigne’s excellent work has the answer: no. This art form has great value to enhance our understanding of the human condition.

In the introduction to the book, Bakewell writes about the thought behind Montaigne’s work. Here are a few things which resonated. Sharing exact quotes:

1. On the invention of the essay:

“This idea – writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognise their own humanity – has not existed for ever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official and wine-grower who lived in the Périgord area of south-western France from 1533 to 1592.”

“ Montaigne created the idea simply by doing it. Unlike most memoirists of his day, he did not write to record his own great deeds and achievements. Nor did he lay down a straight eyewitness account of historical events, although he could have done: he lived through a religious civil war which almost destroyed his country over the decades he spent incubating and writing his book.”

“A member of a generation robbed of the hopeful idealism enjoyed by his father’s contemporaries, he adjusted to public miseries by focusing his attention on private life. He weathered the disorder, oversaw his estate, assessed court cases as a magistrate, and administered Bordeaux as the most easygoing mayor in its history. All the time, he wrote exploratory, free-floating pieces…”

2. Raw reflections: “Montaigne presents himself as someone who jotted down whatever was going through his head when he picked up his pen, capturing encounters and states of mind as they happened.”

3. Magic of detail: “In place of abstract answers, Montaigne tells us what he did in each case, and what it felt like when he was doing it. He provides all the details we need to make it real, and sometimes more than we need. He tells us, for no particular reason, that the only fruit he likes is melon, 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. But he also describes sensations that are harder to capture in words, or even to be aware of: what it feels like to be lazy, or courageous, or indecisive; or to indulge a moment of vanity, or to try to shake off an obsessive fear. He even writes about the sheer feeling of being alive.”

4. Relatability:

  • “The journalist Bernard Levin, writing an article on the subject for The Times in 1991, said, ‘I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: “How did he know all that about me?”’ The answer is, of course, that he knows it by knowing about himself.”

  • “A sixteenth-century admirer, Tabourot des Accords, said that anyone reading the Essays felt as if they themselves had written it.”

  • “Over two hundred and fifty years later, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing in almost the same phrase. ‘It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life.’”

5: What’s an essay? “Having created a new genre by writing in this way, Montaigne created essais: his new term for it…Essayer, in French, means simply to try. To essay something is to test or taste it, or give it a whirl. One seventeenth-century Montaignist defined it as firing a pistol to see if it shoots straight, or trying out a horse to see if it handles well. On the whole, Montaigne discovered that the pistol shot all over the place and the horse galloped out of control, but this did not bother him. He was delighted to see his work come out so unpredictably.”