Extract

Que sais-je? (What do I know?)

A retired magistrate in a tower library in southwestern France begins writing about whatever crosses his mind, cannibals and thumbs and kidney stones, and in doing so invents an entire literary form. Michel de Montaigne published the first two books of his Essays in 1580, and the word itself, essai, means attempt, trial, a weighing of thought in progress rather than the delivery of conclusions. He quotes the ancients constantly but wears his learning as a comfortable garment, not armour. Every page circles back to the same radical question: what do I actually know? The honesty is startling even now, a man willing to record his own contradictions without embarrassment, trusting that the self, fully examined, opens onto the universal.