He is eighty-two. And lately wonders how he became who it is he happens to be. It occurs to him how that’s just the sort of thing one of his all-time favorite writers did. That would be Michel de Montaigne, the father of the essay. Now plenty of autobiographical discourses had been written before Montaigne wrote his essays. What makes his essays so different is their focus. They amount to a phenomenology of himself. There’s nothing especially egotistical about it. He simply records his observations of himself as if he were watching pears ripen on a window sill.
To observe oneself in so detached a way really was original. The old man hopes he can pull it off.
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