Michel de Montaigne: Essays

[Patrick Murtha]

This was a tweet of mine a couple of years ago:

Time for a little Montaigne this morning, what’s the next essay in order?

“That we should not be deemed happy till after our death”

Damn

On another occasion:

I laughed out loud when he speaks of “the mad curiosity of our nature which wastes time trying to seize hold of the future as though it were not enough to have to deal with the present.”

Montaigne anticipating contemporary politics:

“The normal restraints in a healthy State do not provide for...abnormal occurrences; they presuppose...a common consent to acknowledge and obey [those restraints]. The way of the law is...no good for resisting ways which are lawless and wild.”

This is fun:

Reading a Montaigne essay (“On the power of the imagination”) which contains extended discussion of nocturnal emissions, erectile dysfunction, and farting-on-command, well this certainly adds spice to my day

Montaigne imagines putting his penis on trial for “[thrusting] itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and...so inopportunely [letting] us down when we most need it”

Who said literary classics are boring?

Towards the end of the essay, Montaigne brings in enema methods and the ingestion of cat poop

It’s a winner

 

[Liam]

Along with Proust, reading the entirety of Montaigne's essays has been a summer project for me for a long long time

 

[Patrick Murtha]

You can string it out over a longer period of time, for sure. In fact, reading an individual Montaigne essay is a great way to start the morning! His clarity is like sunshine.

The one exception to that reading method would be the “Apology for Raymond Sebond”, which is very lengthy, really a separate book in itself (and it has been published that way). I’m saving it for last.

I can’t recommend the Penguin edition highly enough. Montaigne was a reviser, and the text of the Essays is complicated. But this edition gives you everything and marks which version it comes from, without interrupting the reading flow.

 

[redhead]

I can’t recommend the Penguin edition highly enough. Montaigne was a reviser, and the text of the Essays is complicated. But this edition gives you everything and marks which version it comes from, without interrupting the reading flow.

How's the translation in the Penguin edition? Not trying to open a can of worms like in that Story of the Stone thread, but I'm curious how readable it is? I tried to read them but my edition's translation is from like the 1700s and getting around the diction could be a struggle.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

How's the translation in the Penguin edition? Not trying to open a can of worms like in that Story of the Stone thread, but I'm curious how readable it is? I tried to read them but my edition's translation is from like the 1700s and getting around the diction could be a struggle.

It’s great, very readable.