Essays

What It Is

One hundred and seven pieces in three books, begun around 1572 and revised until Montaigne died in 1592. The first version appeared in 1580; he never stopped adding to it. The word he chose for them, essai, means an attempt or a trial, and it has kept that meaning in every language it entered.

The subjects are whatever he felt like: friendship, cruelty, cannibals, thumbs, smells, sleep, the education of children, his own kidney stones. He quotes Latin poets by the yard. He contradicts himself, gets distracted, and then says something so exact you have to put the book down.

Note that the essays were written in layers. Passages from the 1580s sit inside sentences from the 1570s, and a good edition marks the strata. You are watching a mind revise itself over twenty years.

Why It Matters

He invented the essay, and everyone who has written one since works in his building. Bacon, Hazlitt, Emerson, Woolf, Orwell, Baldwin, Didion: the form was Montaigne's, and so was the discovery it depends on, that a private, particular, fallible person is a legitimate subject for serious writing.

He also worked out a way of using the first person that is neither confession nor boasting. He puts himself on the table as evidence. What am I actually like, and what can be known from a single specimen? Nobody in Europe had asked it that way.

The reach is enormous. Shakespeare read him in Florio's translation. Descartes built a philosophy to answer his scepticism, and Pascal spent years wrestling with him. Nietzsche said that a writer like this increased the joy of living on earth.

And the setting matters. He was writing during the French wars of religion, with Catholics and Protestants slaughtering each other within a day's ride of his tower. The unhysterical curiosity of these pages, the refusal to hate anybody on schedule, was a moral achievement, not a temperament.

Before You Read

Thirteen hundred pages. Do not read it the way you would read a novel; the people who try to get through it in a month are the people who never open it again.

Read one essay at a sitting, at intervals, for years. Start with Of Cannibals, Of Friendship, To Philosophise Is to Learn How to Die, Of the Education of Children, and above all Of Experience, the last thing he wrote and the best.

The titles are close to useless. Of Coaches is barely about coaches at all. He wanders, and the wandering is the method.

Which Translation to Read

• Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957; also Everyman's Library, 2003) — recommended. The most accurate English Montaigne and the most companionable, faithful to the syntax without strangling it, and it marks the layers of composition so you can see the man revising. The Everyman printing gives you the essays plus the travel journal and the letters in one volume. The cost: Frame's English is formal in a mid-century way, and it can sound more composed than Montaigne actually is. View on Amazon →
• M. A. Screech (Penguin Classics, 1991). Livelier and franker, unembarrassed by Montaigne's obscenity, with fuller notes and a short introduction to each essay. Take it if you want the fastest way into the tone. The cost: Screech sometimes flattens the imagery to get the sense across, and the annotation is busy.
• John Florio (1603). The Elizabethan version, the one Shakespeare read, and a great work of English prose. The cost: it is unreliable as a translation. Florio elaborates where Montaigne is plain. Read it for what it is, not for what Montaigne wrote.

Take Frame and stop looking. The Everyman hardback is also the handsomest edition in print, and here the best reading text and the best object are the same book.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read with a pencil, and mark the sentences you disagree with. Montaigne is not trying to win; he is trying to see what he thinks, and he will change his mind two pages later without apologising.

Skip the classical quotations if they stall you. He piled them in partly out of habit and partly to give himself cover.

Sarah Bakewell's How to Live is the rare companion book worth having, but read some Montaigne first.

You do not finish this book. You put it down, and find it waiting, and discover it has become a different book because you have.