How To Live Or A Life Of Montaigne In One Question And Twenty Attempts At An Answer Sarah Bakewell by Sarah Bakewell 9781590514252, 1590514254 instant download after payment.

How to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love—such questions arise in most people’s lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honorable thing, while flourishing & feeling happy?

This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Monatigne, perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them “essays,” meaning “attempts” or “tries.” Into them, he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine & food, his childhood memories, the way his dog’s ears twitched when it was dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller and, over four hundred years later, Montaigne’s honesty & charm still draw people to him. Readers come in search of companionship, wisdom & entertainment—and in search of themselves.

This book, a spirited & singular biography, relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed & the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing, youthful career & sexual adventures, his travels, & his friendships with the scholar & & & poet Étienne de La Boétie & with his adopted “daughter,” Marie de Gournay. And we also meet his readers—who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, “how to live?”