How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

"This is a slightly eccentric choice, but I think it’s an amazing book. It’s about many things but one of them is midlife. It traces the long aftermath of Montaigne’s midlife crisis, which involved the death of his closest friend Étienne de la Boétie, then his own brush with mortality two years later as he fell off his horse and almost died. Montaigne withdrew from public life when he was around thirty-eight to become a writer. His was a story of transformation, of saying in midlife, ‘I need to stop and reflect on everything .’ And boy does he reflect! Montaigne writes this legendarily creative, original, open-minded, curious, and exploratory series of essays that have become iconic for what self-reflection can be. The book is about the many ways in which Montaigne attempted to answer in practical terms the question of how to live. It ends up addressing virtually any problem you might be having in midlife. Whatever it is, Montaigne had something to say about it, whether it’s bereavement or religious turmoil or kidney stones. Somewhere he addressed it in a way that was humane and entertaining. Bakewell’s book gives you an incredibly lucid and engaging overview of that. Yes, that’s true. There are wonderful discussions of his anxiety about penis size, or, rather, his determined lack of anxiety about penis size, and about impotence and so on. Montaigne has this incredible tolerance and acceptance of the foibles of human life and this willingness to accept and embrace mediocrity in the sense that, yeah, we should be jovial about the fact that life isn’t going to be the pinnacle of success that you might have imagined in youth. I think it’s quite consoling. That’s certainly true. There is an irony in Montaigne writing about mediocrity when even in his own lifetime he was celebrated as an author. And he was well-off in other ways too. But his writings are set against the backdrop that death might be imminent. His closest friend died in his thirties and he almost died, so there is the sense that life is fragile and might slip away at any time, and there’s no way to avoid that. There is an awareness of the vulnerability of the human condition. “There’s even a book by a psychoanalyst that uses Odysseus as an example of a midlife crisis: infidelity, drinking, and waywardness that eventually get resolved when he comes home.” No amount of wealth or success can make that go away, and that’s something that Montaigne is very attuned to. It’s also true that in his depictions of other people, he’s lovingly attentive. There’s an openness to and an embrace of human individuality that makes you feel like the celebration of mediocrity or of humanity in all of its forms – successful or not – isn’t just for show. It’s not a put-on. That’s also part of what’s beautiful about How to Live . It manages to be a celebration of Montaigne many times over by exploring the different threads in his work. There is something about the idea of the human individual as worthy of celebration that is exemplified very movingly both in Montaigne’s Essays and in Bakewell’s book. That’s right, yes. He gets pulled back into public life afterwards, unwillingly, but his idea was to step back and let the farm run itself. He wasn’t incredibly energetic as a landowner. He let things just sort of float along, which is a fact he is amusing about in the Essays . But, yes, the idea was to just go and read and think and meditate on life in the library on his estate. It was a reaction to his confrontation with death. It’s also a meditation on friendship. There’s deep sadness to the fact that he had this incredibly close friendship with la Boétie, and they were only really friends for four years and then la Boétie dies. In a way the Essays internalise la Boétie; Montaigne has this voice in his head that he’s talking back and forth with that allows him to continue a virtual relationship with his friend. It’s very poignant."

"Like Sarah Bakewell’s more recent book, At the Existentialist Café , this is beautifully written. How to Live is the story of the quirky 16th-century genius Montaigne, who was transformed by a narrow escape from death and by the early loss of a friend and became a reflective writer, retiring to his study to write brilliant and sometimes strange essays that can seem peculiarly modern. His digressive writing, often intimately confessional, playful, and challenging, all at the same time, is completely compelling. I challenge you to read Bakewell’s book without turning to the essays themselves. She gives their flavour and context, and discusses the best of them in a way that is both true to her subject, and is immensely satisfying to read."