5/20/2023 0 Comments How to Live by Sarah BakewellMontaigne contradicted himself constantly, proposed one opinion then another, failed to stick to his subject. And as Bakewell makes clear, the Essays have endured because they are capacious. One of the points she makes most strongly is that Montaigne himself was a temperate skeptic, intent on seeing every side of a question, anti-polemical, endlessly curious, insatiably personal: the last man, in short, to pronounce dogma. Bakewell asks the question twenty times: “How to live?” In twenty chapter/responses, she narrates the course of Montaigne’s life and traces the reception of the Essays, while quoting liberally from them. More than that I will not venture, for that is part of the answer: “Philosophise only by accident” and “Let life be its own answer.” In fact, the book is something of a fun-house of mirrors. Photo by Henry SalomeĪnd do I know how to live? Well, I know how Sarah Bakewell says Montaigne said to live.
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