Montaigne: Selected Essays Translator’s Preface-Book 1.
It’s an interesting endeavor in which Montaigne is engaged. In a preface he deprecates his own value as subject-matter, and proposes that his essays are really best read as an attempt to keep a record of his own character for the sake of his friends and family. Yet elsewhere in the work he takes long detours from the subject at hand to discuss his project of essay-writing. Not for scribes.
Thought As Style: Montaigne’s Essays. By Jared Marcel Pollen. Inventing a literary form is an honor bestowed upon few. We may speak of Don Quixote as the “first novel,” or Emerson as the “father” of American poetry, or Augustine’s Confessions as the earliest example of autobiography, and enjoy doing so because it exercises our desire to create ranks, build consensus and celebrate.
True, his essays are 500 years old and not very coherent, but Montaigne wanted to share his raw thoughts with the world. The essay has now become a sophisticated literary genre, but Montaigne simply wanted to journal about life. Still, this is a very informative article for today’s writer. No student would be able to get away with a Montaigne-esque essay.
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Frame, in his Montaigne’s Discovery of Man, p. 37, has judiciously preferred to call Montaigne’s humanism in this period “apprehensive,” pointing out that to call it stoical humanism may be misleading (it is eclectic) or redundant (humanism at the time meant stoicism of a sort). Nonetheless, he and all Montaigne scholars find themselves at a loss for a convenient term to replace.
Montaigne's stated task in his preface to the reader is for self-examination, but it becomes very clear that Montaigne sees himself as an 'everyman' character. He strives for full-disclosure; indeed, he writes that were he another culture 'which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws', then he might have appeared naked. This is a complete set of the Essays, together.
Montaigne (1533-1592), the personification of philosophical calm, had to struggle to become the wise Renaissance humanist we know. His balanced temperament, sanguine and melancholic, promised genius but threatened madness. When he started his Essays, Montaigne was upset by an attack of melancholy humor: He became temperamental and unbalanced.