Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580)

When Montaigne played with his cat, he wondered whether the cat was not playing with him. He wrote the thought down, the way he wrote everything down, in the round tower on his estate where he had withdrawn to study the only human being he could examine without flattery or lying: himself. He called the results essais, meaning attempts, and invented a whole form of writing by beginning from the admission that he did not know. Across more than a hundred of them he catches his own mind in the act, fearful and vain and idle and still grieving a friend years dead, and somehow the wandering composes a whole person. He moves from cannibals to the raising of children to how a man ought to die. The miracle is the voice. Four centuries on, no one in print sounds more like company, turning to you across the table as though doubt itself were a form of friendship.