How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer - Hardcover

Bakewell, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701178922 ISBN 13: 9780701178925

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2010

Synopsis

Brilliant, original, funny and moving — a vivid portrait of Montaigne, showing how his ideas gave birth to our modern sense of our inner selves, from Shakespeare's plays to the dilemmas we face today.

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love — such questions arise in most people's lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honourable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy?

This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them 'essays', meaning 'attempts' or 'tries'. Into them he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and over four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment — and in search of themselves.

This book, a spirited and singular biography (and the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years), relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing (made to speak only Latin), youthful career and sexual adventures, his travels, and his friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boétie and with his adopted 'daughter', Marie de Gournay. And as we read, we also meet his readers — who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, 'how to live?'

About this title

About the Author

SARAH BAKEWELL had a wandering childhood in Europe, Australia and England. After studying at the University of Essex, she was a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before becoming a full-time writer, publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart and The English Dane. She lives in London, where she teaches creative writing at City University and catalogues rare book collections for the National Trust.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The riding accident, which so altered Montaigne’s perspective, lasted only a few moments in itself, but one can unfold it into three parts and spread it over several years. First, there is Montaigne lying on the ground, clawing at his stomach while experiencing euphoria. Then comes Montaigne in the weeks and months that followed, reflecting on the experience and trying to reconcile it with his philosophical reading. Finally, there is Montaigne a few years later, sitting down to write about it – and about a multitude of other things. The first scene could have happened to anyone; the second to any sensitive, educated young man of the Renaissance. The last makes Montaigne unique.
     The connection is not a simple one: he did not sit up in bed and immediately start writing about the accident. He began the Essays a couple of years later, around 1572, and, even then, he wrote other chapters before coming to the one about losing consciousness. When he did turn to it, however, the experience made him try a new kind of writing, barely attempted by other writers: that of re-creating a sequence of sensations as they felt from the inside, following them from instant to instant.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0701178922
• ISBN 13: 9780701178925
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 387