The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

When lately I retired to my house resolved that, in so far as I could, I would cease to concern myself with anything except the passing in rest and retirement of the little time I still have to live, I could do my mind no better service than to leave it in complete idleness to commune with itself, to come to rest, and to grow settled; which I hoped it would thenceforth be able to do more easily, since it had become graver and more mature with time. But I find (variam semper dant otia mentem), that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it is a hundred times more active on its own behalf than ever it was for others. It presents me with so many chimeras and imaginary monsters, one after another, without order or plan, that in order to contemplate their oddness and absurdity at leisure, I have begun to record them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of them.

The Spouter-Inn returns with an experiment. We recorded four episodes over a busy weekend, and our cluster topic was "Essays, Essaying, Stories, Storying". We decided, this time, to put a “classic” text in conversation with some much more recent works. Let’s see where this path takes us?

Michel de Montaigne’s Essays are often described as the origin of the genre. But his writings are almost nothing like the kinds of essays we read in magazines or write for academic assignments. Montaigne’s pieces are meandering and personal, and often only tangentially related to the topics they are nominally “about”. Chris and Suzanne read a few of these essays and follow them wherever they might go.

Show Notes.

Michel de Montaigne: Essays (trans. M.A. Screech). Also available on Project Gutenberg (trans. Charles Cotton) and on the HyperEssays website.

The essays we look at:

• On Idleness (1.8)
• On Liars (1.9)
• On the Power of the Imagination (1.20)
• On Friendship (1.27)
• On the Education of Children (1.25)

Our episodes on Leaves of Grass and the Symposium.

Étienne de La Boétie.

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Next: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson:Dancing On Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence.