#Things to consider
- Montaigne invented the essay. In the late 16th century he started recording everything he did and felt on paper. Peoples response to this when reading him was that they felt as if Montaigne knew them deeply, under the skin.
- By writing openly about himself, others connected and recognized themselves in him on a whole new global level, and that was unlike anything before at the time.
- From being the gloomiest among his acquaintances, he became the most carefree of middle-aged men, and a master of the art of living well.
- Montaigne also loved the strong sense of Plutarch’s own personality that comes across in his work: ‘I think I know him even into his soul.’ This was what Montaigne looked for in a book, just as people later looked for it in him: the feeling of meeting a real person across the centuries.
- He was thirty-seven – middle-aged perhaps, by the standards of the time, but not old. Yet he thought of himself as retiring: leaving the mainstream of life in order to begin a new, reflective existence.