Essays

Montaigne retired to his tower library in 1571, at 38, after a career in law and local politics, and spent the next twenty years writing about himself. The Essays — he invented the word and the form — began as a commonplace book, a way of annotating his reading. They became something stranger: the first sustained attempt in Western literature to take one ordinary individual's mind and consciousness as a sufficient subject for writing.

The result is enormous, digressive, and unlike anything else. Montaigne writes about cannibals and cowardice, about the education of children, about thumbs, about the management of his own kidney stones, about the nature of experience, about how we should face death. He quotes extensively and badly (often from memory, often slightly wrong), contradicts himself without apology, and returns to the same questions across twenty years with different answers. He says this is the point: "I study myself more than any other subject. It is my metaphysics; it is my physics."

What the Essays give you that nothing else does is a mind in the act of thinking, preserved with unusual fidelity. Montaigne is not presenting conclusions; he is showing the process. He is also, in a period of violent religious civil war, making an argument for intellectual humility, for the limits of certainty, for skepticism as a form of decency. The Essays are the founding document of a certain kind of liberalism — not political, but epistemological. To read them is to practice uncertainty as a discipline.

The Essays have one character: Montaigne himself. But the self he describes is not simple.

The private Montaigne is a reader, a horseman, a mayor of Bordeaux twice over, a man who nursed his dying friend Étienne de La Boétie and spent the rest of his life writing from within that grief. La Boétie, to whom the essay "On Friendship" is dedicated, is the book's absent center: the account of their friendship — "because it was him, because it was me" — is the most celebrated passage in the Essays and the one that most clearly shows what the project is mourning.

The public Montaigne is skeptical of his own public roles, mordantly aware of the gap between how institutions present themselves and how they function, suspicious of the certainty that leads to violence. He was a Catholic who negotiated with Protestants during the Wars of Religion and was trusted by both sides, which he considered a minor miracle.

The textual Montaigne exists in three layers — the original 1580 edition, the 1588 expansion, and the posthumous additions written in the margins of his personal copy. Reading the Essays is partly an exercise in watching a mind revise and deepen itself over time.

No. 1 · "To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die" (Book I, Essay 20). The Essays open with death because Montaigne's project is Stoic in origin — he was working through Seneca — but he eventually pushes past Stoicism. The essay begins with the conventional consolations and ends somewhere more interesting: that the goal is not to make death less frightening but to make life less interrupted by that fear. This is the essay where the project defines itself.

No. 2 · "Of Cannibals" (Book I, Essay 31). Montaigne considers the indigenous peoples of Brazil — based on accounts brought back by travelers and a conversation with an actual Brazilian — and concludes that Europeans who call them barbarous have misunderstood the word. This essay is the founding document of cultural relativism in Western thought. It is also funny: the Brazilian visitors, shown the wealth of Versailles, had two objections to French society, one of which was that they couldn't understand why the soldiers in the king's retinue weren't strangling all that wealth out of their commanders.

No. 3 · "On Experience" (Book III, Essay 13). The final essay in the Essays. Montaigne has been writing for twenty years and this is his summary statement: experience is the only reliable teacher, and the self is the only reliable subject. He catalogues his own physical habits — what he eats, how he sleeps, how his kidney stones have changed his understanding of his body — with the same attention he applied to philosophy in the first book. The essay is the fullest statement of what the project turned into.

For first-time readers, the Penguin selected essays editions are a practical entry point — start with Book I and Book III before committing to the full text. There is no definitive film adaptation, but Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne (2010) is an excellent companion.

Read this if you are… A reader interested in how a mind works on the page — not what it concludes, but how it moves through a problem. Anyone working through questions of identity, mortality, or the relationship between reading and living will find Montaigne speaks to these directly. Readers of personal essays or memoir who want the genre's origin point. Anyone interested in what European thought looked like before systematic philosophy colonized it.

Skip it if you are… Looking for a structured argument with a conclusion. The Essays resist summary and punish skimming. If you are uncomfortable with digression, qualification, and self-contradiction, Montaigne will frustrate you. The full text is also long — most readers are better served by a selected volume than by attempting the complete work at once.

Do not read the Essays in order. Start with "On Experience" (III.13), "Of Cannibals" (I.31), "To the Reader," and "On Friendship" (I.28). These four pieces give you the range of the project — the personal, the philosophical, the political, the elegiac — before you commit to the full volume.

Read slowly and out loud when possible. Montaigne's prose is designed for the speaking voice. The rhythm carries meaning that silent reading misses. When he quotes Latin and Greek, read the translation even if you know the languages — his quotes are often inexact, and how he uses them matters more than what they originally said.

Plan to return. The Essays are not a book to read once and shelve. They work differently at different ages.

• Seneca — Letters from a Stoic. The book Montaigne was working through when he began writing. The Essays start as annotations to Seneca and gradually argue against him. Reading both lets you see the argument developing.
• Virginia Woolf — "The Modern Essay" (1922). Woolf locates Montaigne as the essay's inventor and traces the form forward through her own time. A useful map of where Montaigne fits in the tradition he created.
• Sarah Bakewell — How to Live: A Life of Montaigne (2010). Organized around twenty answers Montaigne gives to the question of how to live. The best companion for a general reader new to the Essays.

1. Montaigne insists that the self is an unstable, contradictory subject and yet writes about it for twenty years. Is this a contradiction or is it the point? What does it mean to study something that won't hold still?
2. "Of Cannibals" argues that what Europeans call barbarism is mainly unfamiliarity. Does this argument hold consistently throughout the Essays, or does Montaigne's own cultural position undermine it elsewhere?
3. Montaigne revised and expanded the Essays over twenty years without removing earlier positions he had changed his mind about. What does this choice tell you about what he thought the project was doing?
4. The essay on friendship ("On Friendship") argues that true friendship is so rare as to be nearly impossible. Does the rest of the Essays — the sustained self-examination, the address to the reader — suggest that writing can substitute for that friendship?
5. Montaigne was writing during the Wars of Religion, when certainty about religious truth was driving mass violence. Is the Essays' skepticism a philosophical position or a political one?
6. Which of Montaigne's self-portraits — the reader, the horseman, the kidney-stone sufferer, the mayor, the mourner — feels most essential to understanding the project?