Lovers of Montaigne's "Essays" will have been pleased to note sightings in a variety of places in recent months. First, and perhaps most surprising, Montaigne was pressed into service by California Governor Jerry Brown in his "State of the State" speech, delivered in Sacramento on January 24. Then again, on February 16, Montaigne popped up twice on the same day in the New York Times Op-Ed pages. First, Philip Lopate championed the essay as the genre of humility (while humbly not mentioning his own new book of essays, which was then hitting the stands). In the same issue, Adam Etinson quoted Montaigne to suggest that ethnocentrism is a problem, and come to the conclusion that we might solve it by humbly acknowledging that we're all in some measure ethnocentric.
To some extent this may be the influence of Sarah Bakewell's recent popularization of Montaigne, "How to Live?" Fans of Bakewell (like me) appreciate the clever ways in which her book stresses implicitly the usefulness the "Essays" for our current age of religious war and political paralysis. But the more general interest in Montaigne could be part of a larger cultural trend in which the extended essay may have begun to grab a certain number of readerly attentograms (attentogram=n. a small quantum unit of the dwindling store of available attention) away from such hegemonic cultural forms as, say, talk radio, cinematic distortions of American history, or novels with multiple unreliable narrators.
But Brown's turn to Montaigne is the most interesting. Read More
To some extent this may be the influence of Sarah Bakewell's recent popularization of Montaigne, "How to Live?" Fans of Bakewell (like me) appreciate the clever ways in which her book stresses implicitly the usefulness the "Essays" for our current age of religious war and political paralysis. But the more general interest in Montaigne could be part of a larger cultural trend in which the extended essay may have begun to grab a certain number of readerly attentograms (attentogram=n. a small quantum unit of the dwindling store of available attention) away from such hegemonic cultural forms as, say, talk radio, cinematic distortions of American history, or novels with multiple unreliable narrators.
But Brown's turn to Montaigne is the most interesting. Read More