1. How I Became Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne is thirty-eight years old when he retires to the tower of his chateau in southwestern France. The year is 1571 and the average life span of a French nobleman is fifty-four. So his retreat from the world is not as premature as it seems. What makes his retirement unique is that instead of quickly resorting to a trending sixteenth-century hobby such as tennis or sewage system upgrades, the fourth Seigneur de Montaigne spends all of his free time taking copious stock of himself and the world. He even takes stock of his stock-taking.

The stone tower of Chateau Montaigne rises above the gateway of the estate and gives fine views of the garden, chicken-run, back court and main house. Somewhere in that house, his wife Françoise and daughter Léonor are going about their day while scratches ink onto paper.

The title he selects for the project is essai, the French word for an attempt. Among other things, Montaigne is attempting to entertain the one-tenth of the French population that knows how to read without offending the much smaller percentage of readers who have the power to put him to death for offending them. That he writes as freely as he does in the middle of a religious civil war under the totalitarian thumb of church and state is testament to Montaigne’s belief in the power of the written word to put a reader to sleep before any real damage is done.

In moments of doubt, discounting the fact we look like identical twins, I ask myself why I would want to chronicle the internal journey of a male as dead and white as Michel de Montaigne. Can I not see that my own profile as his chronicler is a literary black hole of advanced age, masculinity and whiteness from which not even ink can escape?

”A human being is a wondrously vain, diverse and fickle subject on which it’s difficult to form any constant and uniform judgment,” Montaigne writes. But he’s patient enough to give it a try, and I’m patient enough to follow his lead. It's my sincere conviction that his essais are every bit as important and futile now as they are almost five centuries ago.

The purpose of his retreat to the tower of Chateau Montaigne is to “spend in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live. It seemed to me that I couldn’t do a greater favor to my mind than to leave it in complete idleness to talk to itself.” 

The problem is that instead of talking idly to itself, his mind is a spooked horse bolting from thought to thought with no apparent order or purpose. So he starts to write the thoughts down, “hoping with time to make my mind ashamed of itself.”  Then he forgets to be ashamed of writing his thoughts down, and I forget to be ashamed of chronicling them, and we carry on. It's the beginning of a wonderful friendship.