MIKE's Little Gem from the NY Times- December 18

Montaigne wrote about whatever crossed his mind: animals, sex, magic, diplomacy, violence, hermaphroditism, self-doubt. “Essayer” means “to try” in French, or as Ms. Bakewell adds, “to test, or to taste it, or give it a whirl.”


“He has this way of adding things as they occur to him, even adding things into the middle of an essay,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Clapham, in south London.

Others have noted this affinity. Montaigne is “the quintessential blogger,” declared Andrew Sullivan, who writes for The Atlantic, someone who dared “to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older.”



The 20 attempts at an answer to “How to Live” that Ms. Bakewell describes in her book include: “Be born,” “Do a good job, but not too good a job,” and “Question everything.” But the one that resonates most strongly with her is “Read a lot, forget most of what you read and be slow-witted.”

Montaigne always complained of his “monstrously deficient” memory, so he didn’t bother accumulating facts, Ms. Bakewell explained. Much more important was the exposure to someone else’s experience and perspective. Reading and forgetting “let him follow his own thoughts wherever they led,” she writes, “which was all he really wanted to do

MY TANGO TODAY

The embrace.
The music in my bones.
The floor.
THEN go with my body and soul.