Looking Forward to Montaigne

As part of the Contraptions book club we will be reading the Essays of Montaigne. I actually started to read the Donald Frame translations, but felt I needed more context. In the book club, Paul Millerd had recommended Sarah Blackwell’s book on the life of Montaigne. I just finished it and I was left feeling rather warm.

In contrast I was left rather cold and unsure by a recent podcast on a recent book by Byung-Chul Han. The book is titled The Crisis of Narration and covers the idea that we have lost the ability to tell good stories. Stories, Han says, create a shared reality instead stories have been turned into a commodity to create consumers. Storytelling has become storyselling. As far as I know, Han doesn’t offer any solutions. Social media has turned a dark corner but it would have been nice to know what we can do, if anything. Montaigne seems to offer some relief.

Being literally the first person to write essays, and btw a cat’s person, Montaigne writes in a way that one could think of as storyselling. But you look deeper and it turns out to not be the case. He writes in a frank and meandering way that reminds of the old internet. Dead for 500 years, M seems more real as a person than the influencers ever could.

Now I just happen to have come across these two sources in a temporal coincidence, so, to quote Montaigne, what do I know, but writing and thinking like Montaigne could be the antidote to Han’s doom. Maybe we don’t need a global story thread, but knowing about how you thwarted the bugs in your balcony garden would create a sense of liveness that social media has stolen from us.

I’ll be reading Don Quixote and Montaigne’s essays over the next two months and I’m certain my views will change. Right now, I’m thinking having the average, mediocre, lens to life will take us through these dark days.

I leave you with two wonderful quotes (obviously about cats) from MdM:

“When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.”

“In nine lifetimes, you’ll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you.”