Introduction
You often look to grand philosophies for answers on how to navigate existence, only to find abstract systems that ignore daily realities. You want a practical guide for handling grief, fear, and the sheer messiness of being human.
Sarah Bakewell answers this need through the life and writings of sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. The central idea of the book is that Montaigne offers a usable manual for living by examining his own ordinary mind, habits, and flaws rather than preaching lofty ideals.
The book explores twenty distinct attempts at answering Montaigne's ultimate question through episodes from his life and the reception of his ideas by later thinkers.
How can you live well without fearing death? How do you maintain mental independence during violent political conflicts? What can an ordinary life teach you about wisdom?
1. The Obsession with Death and the Tower Retirement
Facing early bereavements and a near-fatal accident cured Montaigne of his fear of death, prompting him to retire to his estate tower and invent the modern essay.
Conquering the Fear of Death
In your twenties and thirties, you might suffer from a morbid obsession with death. Montaigne experienced this intense dread because he immersed himself in classical philosophy and faced a rapid succession of bereavements. Reading ancient philosophers who taught that to philosophize is to learn how to die made him hyper-aware of the fragility of existence.
Montaigne's younger brother Arnaud died at age twenty-seven after a light blow to the head from a ball while playing the tennis variant jeu de paume. At age 30, Montaigne lost his best friend Étienne de La Boétie to the plague in 1563.
A near-fatal horse riding accident at age 36 completely cured Montaigne of his fear of death. He realized that dying feels like a painless, pleasant slide into sleep rather than a terrifying confrontation.
Montaigne was riding near his château in the Dordogne when a muscular servant on a powerful horse galloped into him like a colossus. The impact knocked him flat and left him momentarily lifeless.
You do not need to prepare for death through complex philosophy because nature takes over and handles the dying process perfectly. Uneducated peasants and everyday people died with great calm without ever studying philosophy.
- If you don't know how to die, don't worry
- Let Nature tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately
- Do not bother your head about it
Retreating to the Library Tower
At age thirty-seven, Montaigne resigned from his public magistracy and retired to his ancestral estate tower. He had worked for 13 years at the Bordeaux parlement before growing weary of the servitude of court and public employments.
On February 28, 1571, on his thirty-eighth birthday, Montaigne established his sanctuary in a fortified corner tower containing his library of approximately 1,000 volumes. He had a Latin inscription painted on his wall dedicating the retreat to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.
An existential crisis caused by retirement and isolation prompted Montaigne to start writing down his wandering reveries, thus inventing the modern literary essay in 1572. Left with less work, his idle brain generated wild, directionless fantasies he called essais or chimeras and fantastic monsters.
Montaigne compared his unoccupied mind to an unfertilized womb giving birth to shapeless lumps of flesh, or sunlight reflecting off a water bowl and dancing across the ceiling. He developed a unique literary discipline of spying on his own inner sensations, emotions, and consciousness from close up.
- Spy on yourself from close up
- Attend to elusive fragments of experience
- Sound out and meditate on every satisfaction rather than skimming over it
Montaigne even had a long-suffering servant wake him regularly in the middle of the night to try and catch a glimpse of his own unconsciousness as he fell asleep.
2. Flux, Attention, and the Art of Living
The Philosophy of Flux
Human experience and the physical world are in a state of perpetual flux and movement, making it impossible to capture a fixed reality. Montaigne observed that both the mind and the physical world exist in endless turmoil and change. The observer and the observed are both unstable variables, rendering secure measurement impossible, which led Montaigne to model his writing as a meandering stream of consciousness rather than an artificial system.
Montaigne compared the landscape around his house to heaving porridge, noted the shifting sand dunes of Médoc devouring the land, and observed the Dordogne river carving its banks.
Because the mind and world exist in perpetual change, you must anchor your attention in the present moment rather than chasing fixed certainties.
Autobiographical writing should not capture a fixed character or static essence, but rather the constant flux of inner states from minute to minute. Rather than attempting an artificial consistency, Montaigne recorded his changing opinions, contradictions, and moods over decades of life, establishing a literary tradition of close inward observation. Within the space of a few lines in the Essays, Montaigne presents himself as a young man, an old man, or a middle-aged mayor, shifting between impotence and lust, hot-headedness and discretion. Over twenty years, Montaigne wrote and revised his Essays.
Living in the Here and Now
To truly live, one must cultivate a naive amazement at the present moment and continuously drag attention back to the here and now. Because life is fleeting and slips away rapidly, the proper philosophical response is to deepen and enrich the present moment through intense observation of ordinary things and inner states.
Montaigne practiced strolling meditation in his orchard, bringing his wandering thoughts back to the walk, the orchard, and the sweetness of solitude, summarizing his discipline with the maxim: When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep.
- Bring wandering thoughts back to the immediate physical action and surroundings
- Observe the river of life running through daily existence perpetually
- Describe ordinary objects on your table or the view from your window to open your eyes to their marvel
Montaigne was subjected to an unprecedented educational experiment where he was raised as a native speaker of Latin without formal grammar rules or corporal punishment. To grant his son a direct link to ancient wisdom, Pierre Eyquem arranged for baby Montaigne to be nursed among peasants, and upon his return home instituted a strict rule that only Latin would be spoken around him by a German tutor and the entire household. Montaigne learned Latin naturally before age six without books or grammar whips, and the household Latinization even spread to neighboring artisans who adopted Latin-derived names for tools.
3. Reading, Slowness, and Civil Wars
Cultivating a slow mind and drawing on concrete literary anecdotes protect your judgment from dogmatic fanaticism during times of violent civil conflict.
Plutarch and Concrete Details
Montaigne discovered Ovid's Metamorphoses around age seven or eight. This reading shifted his perspective from the grim grammatical studies of Cicero and Horace to a lifelong love of real-life human diversity found in historians like Tacitus and biographers like Plutarch.
Montaigne read Ovid secretly as a boy. He grew fascinated by stories where people turn into trees, animals, stars, or half-male and half-female hybrids.
Great writing relies on assembling concrete images, conversations, and objects rather than coldly abstract arguments. Montaigne admired Plutarch because his works were full of tangible things and unpredictable anecdotes. These details opened paths for inquiry rather than imposing neat, dogmatic conclusions.
Plutarch illustrates the difficulty of living well through the story of a man who threw a stone at his dog, missed, hit his stepmother instead, and cried out that it was not so bad after all.
Cognitive Slowness and Civil Conflict
Montaigne claimed a monstrously deficient memory and a slow understanding. This limitation forced him to keep his speeches brief, tell the truth because he could not remember lies, and maintain common sense free from dogmatic noise.
Cultivating forgetfulness and a slow, inert mind can protect your judgment from clutter, over-elaboration, and fanatical zeal.
Montaigne cited the ancient story of Lyncestes, who forgot his memorized defense speech under pressure. Soldiers promptly killed him, mistaking his hesitation for guilt.
Absolute dogmatic certainty and uncompromising religious factions drive societies toward cyclical civil wars fueled by mutual fear. The rise of militant Catholic leagues and Calvinism, founded on total depravity and absolute submission, destroyed political moderation and produced decades of brutal internal conflict in France.
The duc de Guise and his soldiers stormed a clandestine Protestant worship service in a barn in Vassy on March 1, 1562, killing about thirty people and triggering the first French civil war.
4. Friendship, Grief, and Hellenistic Tricks
The Bond with La Boétie
The legendary friendship between Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie was an all-consuming intellectual and emotional bond that defined Montaigne's life. The two men met by chance in Bordeaux and instantly bonded over shared literature, philosophy, and classical ideals of friendship, though they only had six years together before La Boétie's premature death at thirty-three. When asked why he loved La Boétie, Montaigne famously wrote, Because it was he, because it was I.
In his political treatise On Voluntary Servitude, also known as Contr’un, La Boétie argued that tyranny persists not through brute force, but because the masses willingly submit and cooperate with their oppressors. A tyrant's power would instantly evaporate if the people simply withdrew their support and stopped supplying armies of slaves and sycophants, yet people remain hypnotized by habit and charisma. La Boétie noted that the Roman populace mourned Nero and Julius Caesar despite their tyrannical abuses, echoing insights he supposedly wrote down at the age of sixteen.
Contracting a contagious illness on August 9, 1563, La Boétie faced his final days with rational wisdom and classical courage, using his deathbed to enact the philosophical lessons he and Montaigne had studied. Montaigne recorded every detail of the final days, noting how La Boétie maintained his philosophical composure until his final sigh on Wednesday morning, August 18, 1563, concluding an exact lifespan of 32 years, 9 months, and 17 days.
The irreplaceable loss of Étienne de La Boétie pushed Montaigne to internalize his friend's memory and adopt pragmatic Hellenistic mental tricks to master grief.
Unable to find a replacement for his lost friend, Montaigne consecrated his library and future studious work to La Boétie's memory, using the presence of his friend's books and memory to hold himself to exalted standards. Montaigne wrote in his private travel diary years later about being nearly eighteen years later still suddenly overcome by painful thoughts of La Boétie while writing a letter.
Philosophical Tricks and Diversion
Montaigne turned away from dry academic philosophy to embrace pragmatic Hellenistic schools aimed at achieving human flourishing, known as eudaimonia, and imperturbability, known as ataraxia. Drawing on Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism, he sought practical solutions for everyday irritations and deep grief by mixing and matching doctrines, much like thinkers in the third century BC when Greek thought and culture spread to Rome.
Because emotional control is nearly impossible to tackle head-on, philosophers used lateral tricks—such as imagining that the current moment is the last of one's existence—to gain perspective on time and value. Seneca wrote of a wealthy man named Pacuvius who conducted a daily funeral ceremony for himself, complete with a feast and a bier.
You can apply these deliberate thought experiments and mental rehearsals to conquer the fear of death and control your emotions:
- Imagine that today or this very moment is the last moment of your existence
- Consider whether you are truly alive or consumed by panic and remorse
- Picture yourself at the point of death, evaluating whether you have lived well or wasted your life
When reason fails to subdue overwhelming grief or negative emotions, distraction and diversion provide a reliable psychological escape. Montaigne discovered that variation and deflection are more effective than direct confrontation against pain, finding relief by substituting a contrary or different mental notion. To cure a young prince of a dangerous passion for revenge, Montaigne did not lecture him on morality, but diverted his ambition toward the honor and goodwill gained through clemency.
You can use deflection when negative states take hold:
- Notice when a painful notion takes hold of you
- Instead of trying to subdue it directly, recognize that it is quicker to change it
- Substitute a contrary or entirely different subject into your thoughts
- Gently deflect conversation with a grieving person by moving from nearby subjects to slightly more remote ones
5. Skepticism, Animals, and the Suspension of Judgment
Pyrrhonian skepticism and the study of animal behavior dismantle human vanity and dogma, offering mental peace through the suspension of judgment.
Pyrrhonian Skepticism and Peace
In 1576, Montaigne had personal medals struck featuring weighing scales and the word epekho. His prose is heavily saturated with qualifying words like perhaps and it seems to me to moderate human rashness and highlight inner mutability.
Originating with Pyrrho and developed by Sextus Empiricus, Skepticism utilizes the mental maneuver of epokhe to free individuals from needing definitive answers. By refusing to dogmatically assert or reject claims, a person achieves ataraxia, or mental calm. Scholars Henri Estienne and Gentian Hervet found that reading Sextus Empiricus cured their weariness and filled them with joy and laughter.
You can use Pyrrhonian Skepticism as psychological therapy:
- Suspend judgment by saying epokhe or je soutiens when faced with conflicting dogmatic claims
- Memorize Sextus's formula: to every account purporting to establish something dogmatically, there appears an opposed account equal in convincingness
Montaigne's longest essay pretends to defend a rationalist theologian by arguing that human reason is inherently fallible and valueless. In the Apology for Raymond Sebond, Montaigne uses a Pyrrhonian technique to defend Sebond against rationalist enemies by undermining human reason altogether, concluding that anything based on human intellect is unreliable. Critic Louis Cons described the essay as supporting Sebond as the rope supports the hanged man. The Apology for Raymond Sebond runs 248 pages in the 1580 edition, which contains 93 other chapters averaging nine and a half pages each.
Undermining Vanity with Animals
Montaigne used animal stories to dismantle human exceptionalism, demonstrating that animals possess sophisticated cooperation, morals, and cognitive inner worlds. Drawing heavily from Plutarch, Montaigne cataloged animal feats—such as elephants grieving or parrotfish rescuing hooked companions—to show that humans are not superior to creatures like octopuses or dogs.
Montaigne observed his cat playing, questioning whether he was more of a pastime to her than she was to him in their reciprocal interactions. Montaigne noted how his own perceptions and moods drastically shifted depending on whether he had an empty stomach, good weather, or a corn on his toe. Greek philosopher Pyrrho died in 275 BC, leaving a tradition of unassumingness that inspired these reflections on human limits.
6. The Back Shop and Sociable Wisdom
You must preserve an independent mental retreat while maintaining an open, sociable engagement with ordinary human conversation and daily life.
The Private Back Shop
To preserve inner liberty and protect yourself from the pain of loss, you must maintain a private mental retreat independent of family and worldly ties. You should not bind yourself so strongly to possessions, wife, or children that happiness depends entirely on them. Maintaining an arrière-boutique allows you to converse with yourself and remain free even if those ties are severed.
Montaigne faced the successive deaths of several infant daughters with Stoic detachment, recording them plainly in his diary without deep repining. He documented the births of Thoinette born June 28, 1570, Léonor born September 9, 1571, an unnamed daughter born July 5, 1873, an unnamed daughter born December 27, 1874, an unnamed daughter born May 16, 1577, and Marie born February 21, 1583.
Practical rules govern this interior space:
- Reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, to establish our real liberty and principal retreat
- Ensure our ordinary conversation in this retreat is between us and ourselves so that outside association has no place
- Talk and laugh privately as if without wife, children, possessions, or servants so losing them is not new to us
Gay and Sociable Wisdom
Montaigne championed a gay and sociable wisdom rooted in open communication, friendly goodwill, and the simple pleasures of conversation. Rejecting formal etiquette and rigid small talk, he preferred honest debate and witty repartee among friends. He kept his estate open to visitors, acrobats, and neighbors despite the dangers of the civil wars, maintaining that human connection and friendliness drive cultural progress.
Montaigne traveled to investigate anomalous births, visiting a hermaphroditic shepherd and a man without arms who could write and sew with his feet.
You can apply this sociable outlook directly:
- Encourage social grace in children from an early age to bring them out of their private worlds
- Banish formal etiquette and burdensome prescriptions of social codes from your home
- Welcome diverse people openly while allowing guests and residents the freedom to pursue solitude without causing offense
7. Openness, Mercy, and Cultural Perspectives
Frankness acts as a better defense than fortified walls, and examining diverse cultural customs shatters assumptions of European superiority.
Openness as Defense
Locking places invites thieves because it signals high value. An open door and frank demeanor disarm aggressors. Barricades are useless during a civil war since threats are already inside.
15 to 20 masked men attacked Montaigne in a forest. He boldly interrupted their debate over his ransom, declaring they would get nothing. The leader removed his mask, let him go, and returned his possessions, attributing his deliverance to his frankness and firmness of speech.
Point of View and Culture
Examining widely divergent cultural customs acts as a mirror. It wakes you from the sleep of habit and breaks your assumptions of superiority. Every culture takes its own practices as the absolute standard. Shifting perspectives reveals that your habits are no stranger than anyone else's.
Montaigne collected memorabilia and conversed with Tupinambá visitors brought from South America to Rouen. He marveled at their society, which lacked trade, letters, magistrates, and poverty, yet engaged in ritual warfare and cannibalism.
10 Key Ideas
- Facing early bereavements and a near-fatal accident cured Montaigne of his fear of death, prompting him to retire to his estate tower and invent the modern essay.
- Because the mind and world exist in perpetual change, you must anchor your attention in the present moment rather than chasing fixed certainties.
- Cultivating a slow mind and drawing on concrete literary anecdotes protect your judgment from dogmatic fanaticism during times of violent civil conflict.
- The irreplaceable loss of Étienne de La Boétie pushed Montaigne to internalize his friend's memory and adopt pragmatic Hellenistic mental tricks to master grief.
- Pyrrhonian skepticism and the study of animal behavior dismantle human vanity and dogma, offering mental peace through the suspension of judgment.
- You must preserve an independent mental retreat while maintaining an open, sociable engagement with ordinary human conversation and daily life.
- Frankness acts as a better defense than fortified walls, and examining diverse cultural customs shatters assumptions of European superiority.
- Examining widely divergent cultural customs acts as a mirror that wakes you from the sleep of habit and breaks your assumptions of superiority.
- Montaigne established a literary tradition of close inward observation by recording his changing opinions, contradictions, and moods over decades of life.
- Montaigne offers a usable manual for living by examining his own ordinary mind, habits, and flaws rather than preaching lofty ideals.