How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell

Author:Sarah Bakewell [Bakewell, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Philosophy, Autobiography
ISBN: 9780099485155
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2011-01-14T10:00:00+00:00

11. Q. How to live? A. Live temperately

RAISING AND LOWERING THE TEMPERATURE

IN MANY WAYS, readers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries found it easy to like the Montaigne they constructed for themselves. As well as appreciating his praise for the Americans, they responded to his openness about himself, his willingness to explore the contradictions of his character, his disregard for convention, and his desire to break out of fossilized habits. They liked his interest in psychology, especially his sense of the way different impulses could coexist in a single mind. Also—and they were the first generation of readers to feel this way in great numbers—they enjoyed his writing style, with all its exuberant disorder. They liked the way he seemed to blurt out whatever was on his mind at any moment, without pausing to set it into neat array.

Romantic readers were particularly taken by Montaigne’s intense feeling for La Boétie, because it was the only place where he showed strong emotion. The tragic ending of the love story, with La Boétie’s death, made it more beautiful. Montaigne’s simple answer to the question of why they loved each other—“Because it was he, because it was I”—became a catchphrase, denoting the transcendent mystery in all human attraction.

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