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| How to Read Montaigne | 
 enlarge | Author: Terence Cave
Publisher: Granta Books
Category: Book
Buy New: £6.99
New (4) from £2.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 63622
Media: Paperback
Pages: 112
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 4.8 x 0.6
ISBN: 1862079447
EAN: 9781862079441
ASIN: 1862079447
Publication Date: August 6, 2007
Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.
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| Customer Reviews:
A revolutionaryexperiment in recording thought November 19, 2008
This short book is not the easiest of reads, but it is very illuminating, showing, as it does, that Montaigne's Essais are primarily and in an original way about a way of thinking rather than about the contents of the thought. Essai was a word meaning an attempt, not a word describing a literary form as it was soon to become; it describes the attempts of Montaigne to capture and record precisely thought processes as they came to him, the precision matched with the fleeting nature of the thoughts, which often immediately evoked their opposites. Cave shows the careful choice of words and metaphor and how Montaigne's apparent randomness and digressions are actually cleverly crafted. There is no commitment to any certainty - hence the motto on one side of a medal he struck: Que sais-je? (Answer: `only one thing with certainty - myself'), matched on the reverse with a pair of scales to represent that one view needs to be weighed against another. He has often been described as a sceptic, and indeed he had quotations from sceptic philosophers painted on the beams of the ceiling in his library/study; but he knew that even scepticism had its drawbacks and dangers, and it is clear that he had some basic beliefs, and that at the centre of all his fleeting impressions there is a solid I. The book confirms the traditional picture of a sharp-minded but very attractive character.
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