I guess I could try to put into words how much I love this book.
I could try to explain how this 84-year-old book about an obscure 16th-century philosopher is uniquely relevant to our times.
Or I could just tell you I put my money where my mouth is:
I bought 1,000 copies of this book.
Literally.
As in, all the available stock…which I was only able to get after I had my agent connect me with the publisher, Pushkin Press, who I then begged to print one final run before it went out of print.
That is how much I loved this little Stefan Zweig biography of Montaigne.
Zweig—who is best known for his haunting book The World of Yesterday, about Europe and the era destroyed by WWI—wrote Montaigne while on the run from the Nazis. It would be the last thing he published before despair killed him.
Surprisingly, for such a well-read man, Zweig was not familiar with the works of Montaigne until he was in his late fifties. In the cellar of a bungalow in Petrópolis, Brazil—living in exile after the Nazis condemned him, as they had all the Jews, banned his work, and burned his books in the streets —he chanced upon a “dusty old edition” of Montaigne’s essays. “Certain authors reveal themselves to us only at a certain age and in chosen moments,” Zweig would write of the man who found him at his lowest ebb.
I myself, read Montaigne’s work when I was in my mid-twenties, but I did not read this biography for the first time until 2016 (Montaigne lived through divisive political times). I read it again in 2020 (Montaigne lived through the plague). I read it again about a year and a half ago (Montaigne lived through religious wars, technological disruption, economic instability, and a kind of mass hysteria Zweig would refer to as “the herd’s rampancy”).
It’s a very surreal experience to read a book about a man turning inward amidst the cruelty and close-mindedness of his time, written some 350 years later by a man fleeing the brutality and persecutions of his time…as modern society continues to experience (and inflict) the same horrors on itself.
“It seemed to our generation that Montaigne was simply rattling chains we thought long since broken,” Zweig writes, “and we could never imagine that in fact Fate had reforged them for us, far stronger and crueller than ever before. It is precisely a generation like ours, cast by fate into the cataract of the world’s turmoil, to whom the freedom and consistency of his thought conveys the most precious aid.”
Montaigne’s was an epoch defined by fear, persecution, demagogues, rabble-rousers, civil strife, and the unraveling of long-standing institutions. It was a time of revolutionary movements. It was a time of new ideas. It was a time of technological disruption. It was a time of destabilization and conflict. The church, which had long been a unifying force, was for the first time becoming a source of bitter division. The recently invented printing press didn’t just spread knowledge and ideas but also misinformation, outrage, and hatred. “Instead of humanism,” as Zweig put it, “it was intolerance that spread.”
It was only a few decades earlier that Michelangelo had painted the Sistine Chapel. Magellan had circumnavigated the globe. Copernicus had displaced the earth from the center of the universe. The Renaissance had flowered, bringing with it beautiful art and earth-shattering awakenings. Scientific breakthroughs reshaped the world and what seemed possible. A new continent had been discovered across the Atlantic. Trade boomed. Wealth spread.
“But always when the wave climbs too high and too quickly,” Zweig tells us, “it falls more violently, like a cataract. And just as, in our time, the miracles of technology have morphed into the most horrific elements of destruction, so elements of the Renaissance and humanism which at first seemed to offer salvation proved a lethal poison.”
Yet for all the darkness shrouding the book, it remains an incredibly consoling and, I think, hopeful, book.
Because Montaigne did the impossible. He pulled up what Zweig describes as one of the toughest tasks in the world, “maintain[ing] one’s intellectual and moral independence and preserve it unsullied through a mass cataclysm.”
How did Montaigne pull it off? How was he not made crazy by the craziness around him? How did he not let the sonsofbitches turn him into a sonuvabitch? How did he, as Zweig put it, “remain human in an inhuman time”?
The answer is a lot of work.
It began with his incredible and totally unique education as a young man (which I am so fascinated by, it is a full third of my next book, Wisdom Takes Work. You can preorder that here—we have some signed copies that we will certainly run out of by the time it comes out in the fall, so be sure to grab it now).
From his earliest days, Montaigne was exposed to people who were not like him. Despite his great wealth, his parents made sure he was raised amongst the common people—people they believed their son could grow up and help (and certainly never feel superior to). Later, he would strike a coin for himself to carry as a reminder. “I reserve judgment,” it said.
In a time still partly medieval, he was a lover of books. Oh how he loved books.
Perhaps no one in any epoch read, studied, and conversed with the past more than Montaigne. “Books are my kingdom,” he said. “And here I seek to reign as absolute lord.” His library, thousands of books, was a temple of wisdom. “He wanders about the room,” another biographer describes, “taking from his shelves one book after another, opening them at random, reading a scrap, and then talking about it.”
On the shelves was his copy of Terence from school. There were the Stoics. There was Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, and Diogenes Laertius. There was his beloved Plutarch. When he wasn’t home? “I never travel without books, neither in peace nor in war,” he’d say. “Books are, I find, the best provisions a man can take with him on life’s journey.”
But all this reading did not make him smug or certain. No, it made him humble and open-minded. That was his famous saying, the one that motivated him to invent the essay, or, in French, an attempt: “Que sais-je?” What do I know? In the form of rambling meditations—some no more than a page, some almost the length of a short book—Montaigne would try to find out, what did he really, truly know?
And although he’s famous for that line, his ceiling was inscribed with ones he liked better, that showed the key to his genius.
From the Greek philosopher, Sextus Empiricus, ΟΥ ΚΑΤΑΛΑΜΒΑΝΩ (I do not understand), ΕΠΕΧΩ (I stop), and ΣΚΕΠΤΟΜΑΙ (I examine). From Terence, “I am a man and nothing human is foreign to me.” From Socrates, “Impiety follows pride like a dog.” From Pliny, “The only certainty is that nothing is certain.”
Montaigne was aghast at the way people treated each other, especially people they disagreed with. He believed that ideas should be questioned and that humans were prone to error. “It is to take one’s conjectures rather seriously,” he would say, “to roast someone alive for them.” Yet that’s literally what people were doing–burning their religious opponents to death over disagreements that could never be proven.
When the New World was discovered—basically in his lifetime—he did not think that the people who lived there were savages. No, from his reading of Herodotus, he understood that every distant land has its own culture and beliefs—and that our customs would seem just as barbaric to them. In one of his best essays, On the Cannibals, he writes at length about what he learned from his extensive reading and his many conversations with a French explorer who had lived among the so-called cannibals for over ten years. He was fascinated by their relationship to nature, how they trusted in its abundance and saw no need to try to alter or dominate it. He was fascinated by how they lived without all the systems and structures that define European society—no money, no written language, no math, no government, no social hierarchy, no private property, no formal economy. He was fascinated by their core values—“two things only: bravery before their enemies and love for their wives.”
And he was fascinated by the ritual meaning behind their most shocking custom, how cannibalism was, for them, “not as something done for food—as the Scythians used to do in antiquity—but to symbolize ultimate revenge.” He wasn’t defending or excusing the “horrible barbarity” of cannibalism. What struck him was that “while judging correctly of their wrong-doings we should so blind to our own.” Did the cannibals draw and quarter each other? Did they commit mass murder and atrocities? Accuse each other of black magic? Who was actually more barbaric?
Most of all, Montaigne understood what it was like to be an other. As new‐money merchants, the Montaigne family was not fully accepted by the aristocracy. Montaigne’s mother’s side of the family were Marranos, Spanish Jews who during the Inquisition converted to Christianity under the threat of death. In the Inquisition, multiple relatives of Montaigne had been burned to death, including a great‐great‐great‐grandfather. And then on the other side, his paternal uncles were Protestant.
He didn’t fit in with anyone and so he tried to be sympathetic to everyone. He tried to be open minded about everything. Because he knew where the absence of this led. This moderation, this tolerance, did not win him the friends it should have. He sensed that he was a man without a country. He knew he had a target on his back. “I was belabored from every quarter,” Montaigne lamented; “to the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, to the Guelph, a Ghibelline.”
I’ve said before that what I love so much about the Zweig biography is how timely it is. While reading this book, it’s hard to not see alarming warning signs about today’s world and how it’s verging on becoming like Montaigne’s and Zweig’s. The same forces that haunted their eras—intolerance, extremism, misinformation, institutional decay, fanaticism and fundamentalism, technological disruption, demagogues, charlatans, and con artists—are once again reasserting themselves all around us, eroding trust, stirring division, and making it a challenge to be sane, rational, informed, decent humans.
But what I also love about the Zweig biography is that it also gives us solutions: Turn inward. Master yourself. Take your education into your own hands. Do “not fall for every smooth talker,” as Marcus Aurelius would say. Read, study, and converse with “the rich souls of times past,” as Montaigne said, for “history,” Zweig added, “is [the] great instruction manual.”
This is why I started giving Zweig’s little book on Montaigne to people in chosen moments—in 2016, during the pandemic, before and after the recent election. It’s why I pick up my copy and reread it whenever I need or want to step back and get a little distance from the craziness of our epoch. And it’s why I bought those 1,000 copies—because I wanted to continue to be able to rave about it and never run out of stock at the bookstore.
Because Montaigne really is a man for our times…
A wise and insightful thinker who never took himself too seriously.
A man obsessed with figuring himself out: why he thought the way he did, how he could find happiness, his fetishes, his near-death experiences.
A man who lived in a time of dysfunction and coped by looking inward.
A man who devoted his life to the work of wisdom, the work of living the philosophical life, of living those four virtues.
We’re lucky that he did, and we must do the same. We must take from his example the need to be always curious, always questioning, always ready to learn something new.
Montaigne kept learning until the day he died, and indeed, the questions he devoted his life to, the inner journey he relentlessly applied himself to, continues on through each of us today.
We must be brave and disciplined enough to pick up the task he laid before us. The task of remaining human in an inhuman world. Of thinking clearly and independently. Of mastering ourselves in a world where so much conspires to try to pull us into being part of the mob and rabble. Of, in short, becoming wise.
It takes study. It takes reflection. It takes experience. It takes humility.
It is a battle to be won over ego, over ignorance, over the self, over the mob, over “the vortex of pandemonium,” Zweig said, and “the deranged prejudices of others.”
Most of all, it takes work.
