How to Live

4 ideas

1. Montaigne's riding accident cures death-fear

   Around 1569–70, in his mid-thirties, Montaigne was thrown from his horse when a servant galloped into him, and he was carried home apparently dying, vomiting blood and tearing at his doublet. He later recalled the experience as a drifting, pleasant half-consciousness, with his body acting on its own while he felt no distress. This firsthand evidence that dying need not be terrible dissolved the obsessive fear of death he had cultivated through Stoic rehearsal, and it replaced the philosophical preparation for death with the advice 'don't worry about death' because nature handles it when the time comes.

2. The essay as a trial of oneself

   Montaigne named his form 'essais', meaning attempts or tests. Each one weighs a topic by recording how his own mind responds to it at that moment, rather than arriving at a settled conclusion. Because he treated the self as something in constant motion, he revised by adding layers instead of correcting earlier ones, so contradictions stay visible on the page. Writing becomes a way to observe a changing person, not to fix a position.

3. Suspended judgment as a defense against fanaticism

   During the French Wars of Religion, Montaigne adopted the Pyrrhonist habit of withholding judgment, summed up in his motto 'Que sais-je?' ('What do I know?'). He also imagined other perspectives, as when he asked whether his cat was playing with him rather than he with her. Bakewell presents this as a practical political stance: whoever doubts his own certainty loses the justification for killing people who hold a different certainty. This helped Montaigne act as a trusted moderator between Catholic and Protestant factions.

4. Readers remake an open author in their image

   Because the Essays are loose, contradictory and centered on the self, four centuries of readers have each found their own preoccupations in them. The Church first tolerated and then banned them, libertines read them as freethinking, Pascal was both disturbed and absorbed by them, and Romantics and moderns read them as confessional or proto-existentialist. Bakewell treats this reception as part of the work itself: an open-ended text survives by becoming a mirror, so tracing how readers used it shows as much about them as about the author.

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