How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, a biography of Montaigne and how he thinks about life. Below are some excerpts I like.
On mindfulness (from the author):
If you fail to grasp life, it will elude you. If you do grasp it, it will elude you anyway. So you must follow it–and “you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow.”
The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement of each instant of experience–but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing is to write about anything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are.
On self-understanding (author quoting Montaigne):
“If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off–though I don’t know.”
On life (author quoting Montaigne):
I like temperate and moderate natures.
The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.
On old age (from the author):
Old age provides an opportunity to recognize one’s fallibility in a way youth usually finds difficult. Seeing one’s decline written on body and mind, on accepts that one is limited and human. By understanding that age does not make one wise, one attains a kind of wisdom after all.
Learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection in this way, and even to embrace it.
In the chapter “Keep a private room behind the shop”, Montaigne noted “Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!” I also would like to have a private room to retreat to from time to time to think and do my own works, but then there is this cartoon.
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