Essays of Michel De Montaigne — Volume 15
1580
Essays of Michel De Montaigne — Volume 15
1580
Translated by Charles Cotton
In 1572, a French nobleman abandoned public life to read in his library and think. What he produced there changed literature forever: the personal essay, a form that bears his name. Montaigne wrote to discover what he thought by writing it down, and in doing so, he revealed the contradictions, fears, and small pleasures that make us human. He reflects on friendship, mortality, religion, and the violence of his era with a questioning honesty that feels startlingly contemporary. Montaigne offers no certainties, only the inexhaustible pleasure of watching a curious mind work. Five centuries later, he reads less like a philosopher and more like a brilliant friend talking late into the night about what matters.
