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Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
- He is best known for his sceptical remark, “Que sçay-je ?” (“What do I know?”, in Middle French; “Que sais-je ?” in modern French).
- Among the psychological topics that Montaigne addressed was the education of children
- The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy.
- At the core of the personal essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience. As Michel de Montaigne, the great innovator and patron saint of personal essayists, put it, “Every man has within himself the entire human condition…”
- self-revelation
- an intimate style, some autobiographical content or interest,
The Conversational Element
- “It is natural to enter into dialogues and disputes with others,” writes the critic Stuart Hampshire, “because it is natural to enter into disputes with oneself. The mind works by contradiction.”
- Personal essayists are adept at interrogating their ignorance.
- I confess I love littleness almost in all things.
- inverse boasting
- The personal essay is the reverse of that set of Chinese boxes that you keep opening, only to find a smaller one within.
- If tragedy is said to ennoble people and comedy to cut people down to size, then the personal essay, with its ironic deflations, its insistence on human frailty, tilts toward the comic.
- The personal essayist, though, cannot assume that the reader will ever have read anything by him or her before, and so must reestablish a persona each time and embed it in a context by providing sufficient autobiographical background…this usually means having to repeat basic circumstances of his life materials over and over”
- The enemy of the personal essay is self-righteousness, not just because it is tiresome and ugly in itself, but because it slows down the dialectic of self-questioning, what Cioran calls “thinking against oneself.”
The Problem of Egotism
- If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.
- The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.
- A young person still thinks it is possible—there is time enough—to become all things
- The personal essayist looks back at the choices that were made, the roads not taken, the limiting familial and historic circumstances, and what might be called
- the catastrophe of personality.
- The jump from “I” to “we” or “you” can seem presumptuous if taken too quickly”
Saint Augustine’s Confessions
- “Most of the “I” sensibility tended to be expressed in poetry.”
- “As Simone Weil, a converted Catholic, put the matter, “The sin in me says ‘I’. Humility consists in knowing that in what we call “I” there is no source of energy by which we can rise.
- “belletrism”
- “But why not blame the people whom I am about to list for not arguing more firmly against my prejudices? They should have saved me from myself.”