Sarah Bakewell
How to Live or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell is a delightful exploration of the life, personality, ideas, and thoughts of Michel Montaigne. Her biography of Montaigne delves in and out of his Essays to extrapolate answers to the nagging question, how should one live?
Bakewell paints a vivid portrait of Montaigne. He emerges as charming, honest-to-a-fault, self-effacing, open-minded, and wise, a man eager to embrace life in all its diversity. His Essays celebrate his uncensored, free-wheeling, and digressive thought patterns. He rebelled against abstract thinking by infusing his writing with intricate detail about apparently nonsensical trivia, as for example, when he pauses to describe how he sees himself through the eyes of his cat or how his dog twitches his ears while asleep. He showed little patience for dogma, eschewed philosophical abstractions, believed in the subjectivity of truth, and advocated for a suspension of judgment and moderation in all aspects of life. No subject was off limits, including bodily functions which he described with unfiltered, concrete detail.
Bakewell traces the reception Montaigne and his work received during his lifetime through to the twentieth-first-century. She aligns various aspects of his thought with those of Classical philosophers while explaining how he deviates from them. By situating him in his historical context, Bakewell is able to demonstrate how Montaigne’s Essays were innovative in style and content. No one had attempted anything like this before. His influence on other writers was prolific. Bakewell argues Montaigne’s writing is so expansive and replete with such ambiguity and after-thought that each generation is able to select what it wants from his work to either celebrate or chastise him.
Each chapter responds differently to the question “how to live” with headings like “Don’t Worry about Death,” “Survive Love and Loss,” “Be Convivial, Live with Others,” “Be Ordinary and Imperfect.” Bakewell’s style is engaging and energetic, sprinkled with funny anecdotes and asides. Her research is extensive and impressive. What so easily could have been a dry biography is, instead, entertaining and informative, covering a broad spectrum of topics: the man, his writings, his influence, his supporters and detractors, and the politically turbulent time in which he lived. The Montaigne who emerges from Bakewell’s biography is a delightful flesh and blood human being with idiosyncrasies and quirks, an innovative thinker, and a man, above all, who celebrates contradictions. To borrow the words of Walt Whitman, Michel Montaigne was a man who contains multitudes.
Highly recommended.