Montaigne for the 20th Century writer

Yesterday my friends, my wife and baby boy drove almost three hours through rain and traffic in the southwest of France to see something that I have pictured in  my mind for a long time; the small tower, and the grounds where the 16^th century writer Michel de Montaigne lived and worked. To visit sites such as chateaus is normal, but this was not Montaigne’s chateau, but rather just the small tower that remained. Luckily for us that tower is the most important part, as Montaigne wrote his famous and influential essays from a tiny room on its top floor. A visit to Montaigne’s former residence is not a historical journey as far as I am concerned; instead it is perhaps one of the more pure ways of seeing my own generation. The lens turned on Montaigne reveals more about the artistic expressions of our time, as well as the societal progress we are making than any I can think of.

Reading Montaigne if you haven’t should not be daunting, even though the essays are longish, and the entire volume very big. Instead do what I did, get it on a Kindle, and you won’t notice the size. As soon as you start reading, if you are like me, you will have this strange sense of time bending, where plagues, kings and political strife don’t matter, but instead you are sitting next to a friend who is speaking more eloquently than you the words you would have liked to have spoken yourself. This admiration of Montaigne is almost a trend in the United States, as nearly every author I respect mentions him as an influence, and seeing both the tower, and reading the essays is it easy to understand why. The first reason is rather shallow, but nevertheless relevant. That is, Montaigne was doing, (much better) what I am doing now. He was writing about what he felt important, even if it was unconnected with any political or fashionable trend. He felt a need to move from journal writing to something which had not been done before, which was essay writing. He had his views published not for money, but so that others could have the chance to read his often contrarian views, and notice the same feelings in themselves when it happened. This is what we do with blogs a lot of the time, and certainly Montaigne would have been a very popular blogger. He was a celebrity, connected to royalty, had the best parties, traveled the world, and yet wrote about the condition of living which was universal.

The second reason I see a connection has to do with a conversation I had with Professor Steven Pinker  about his upcoming book about violence. Though no one has read it yet, it is essentially, from what I understand an account of humanities tendency throughout time to become less violent. Dr. Pinker is very quantitative, so I am sure this is backed up by a lot of data, but we can imagine this even rationally when considering the bloody tortures of times past, and the mere likelihood that you and a family member would directly experience violence.  Montaigne lived during one of these violent times, yet he himself was an outlier, resisting all violence and cruelty towards other people and even animals. My generation of writers seems to be embracing similar ideas, which is a departure from the tough Hemingway and Mailer generation of writers. Jonathan Safron Foer wrote a convincing book about animal cruelty, which led him and subsequently others to vegetarianism. Franzen’s “Freedom” is as much a call for peace towards wildlife as it is a story of a family. Jonathan Letham takes empathy in a direction not dissimilar from Montaigne in a novel format in “Chronic City”, where wealth and society are things to be coped with, but do not make for a rewarding existence. Rather personal connections far exceed superficiality. I mention these three only in rather cliché ways, when I like all three books a great deal and find them more complex, as I find Montaigne himself more complex. Somehow though the spirit of that tiny writing room on Montaigne’s giant estate 500 years ago still speaks to us, even in Brooklyn New York.

So, if you can’t make the physical journey at least read these essays, and see the world’s first would be blogger, and father of generation X philosophy.