'Provocative Openness of Mind and Limitless Curiosity'

I think I understand a reader who fails to share my pleasure in reading Montaigne. It’s easy to think of the Frenchman as a blowhard whose essays are formless rambles stuffed with other men’s words, sometimes embarrassingly self-involved (more complaining about kidney stones?). Is he a precursor to a million contemporary narcissists? Perhaps, but don’t blame Montaigne. Few writers have so winningly mingled learning and life, books and experience. He’s never stuffy. A good essayist’s job is to reclaim a piece of the world we thought we understood and filed away on a shelf, and to remind us that humans are elusively complicated. We never exhaustively understand anyone, even the first-person singular. The most stirring of Montaigne’s virtues for this reader is his relentless curiosity about the world. One wonders if he was ever genuinely bored. He is one of nature’s democrats. He will speak with anyone, including prostitutes and common laborers – and Pope Gregory XIII. He is fascinated…