![]() ![]() Montaigne contradicted himself constantly, proposed one opinion then another, failed to stick to his subject. And as Bakewell makes clear, the Essays have endured because they are capacious. ![]() One of the points she makes most strongly is that Montaigne himself was a temperate skeptic, intent on seeing every side of a question, anti-polemical, endlessly curious, insatiably personal: the last man, in short, to pronounce dogma. Bakewell asks the question twenty times: “How to live?” In twenty chapter/responses, she narrates the course of Montaigne’s life and traces the reception of the Essays, while quoting liberally from them. More than that I will not venture, for that is part of the answer: “Philosophise only by accident” and “Let life be its own answer.” In fact, the book is something of a fun-house of mirrors. Photo by Henry SalomeĪnd do I know how to live? Well, I know how Sarah Bakewell says Montaigne said to live. ![]()
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