I have discussed Michel de Montaigne here a number of times lately. Well, 413 years ago today, the great man died. Mass was being said in his room and he died, reportedly, duting the elevation of the Host. One of the sayings he had carved into the roofbeams of his library will serve to honor his memory: "I establish nothing. I do not understand. I halt. I examine."
More at Today in Literature, which could use your support.
Thanks, Dave, for taking the time to post that. It says perfectly what I've been trying to. But one good turn deserves another. So here is another comment on Montaigne, from one of my favorite books, J.B. Priestley's Literature and Western Man:
ReplyDelete"The chronicles of his time, the age seen as history, repel us; the very air seems stifling, murky with dark fanaticism, intrigue, murder and civil war. It is only in literature, around these little essays in self-knowledge, that the sun seems to shine and the air to have some sweetness. But then the essayist does not claim to know too much outside himself; God is a mystery and not a fellow-conspirator in the power-plot; the universe still escapes the limits of the human mind, and does not obligingly dwindle to suit a sect; there is so much that cannot be known, that exactitude, logic, consistency, must be sacrificed, with some loss of force and pride, to humility and good sense, which can at least enjoy what God appears to have provided. All this there is in Montaigne, and in all those who have travelled, then and since, that broad road with him. But there is something that can begin to be known, as he proved to his and our profit, something much closer and more comprehensible than the doctrine of the Trinity or the world plan of the Absolute, and that is -- the mind, the inner world, that shapes and colours both character and action. No wonder that Montaigne was free from the raging and murderous fanaticism of his time. He had taken a peep into the kitchen where that hell-broth was being stirred."