A Summer with Montaigne

At the front of the Essais, Montaigne warns the reader with a kind of shrug: this book has no aim but a private, domestic one, and its subject is himself. He tells you not to waste your time. It is one of the oddest openings in literature, and Compagnon lingers on it, because the modesty is doing something radical underneath. Before Montaigne, the self was hardly considered a fit subject for serious prose. You wrote about God, about virtue, about the deeds of great men. You did not write about the fact that you preferred white wine, disliked doctors, and forgot names.

Montaigne wrote about all of that, and insisted it mattered. Not because he thought himself important, but because he thought himself ordinary — and reasoned that a faithful portrait of one ordinary man would show something true about the human condition generally. Each man, he wrote, bears the entire form of the human estate. It is a startling democratic intuition dressed as autobiography: study yourself honestly enough and you study everyone.

Compagnon keeps returning to a Montaigne that surprises first-time readers: the one obsessed with the body. This is not a philosopher who floats above the flesh. He writes about his digestion, his kidney stones, his sleep, his sexual habits, the way his memory fails him. He notes that we are neither pure spirit nor pure animal but an awkward composite, and that any wisdom which ignores the body is lying. When he confronts death, it is not as an abstraction but as the concrete decay he watches in himself and in the people around him.

This bodily frankness serves a philosophy. Montaigne is suspicious of grand systems precisely because he trusts what he can feel more than what he can prove. His famous line — that even seated on the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our own backside — is a joke, but a serious one. It punctures every pretension. No title, no learning, no power exempts a person from the plain facts of being a creature who eats, tires and dies.

Step back from the forty fragments and one word gathers them: doubt. Montaigne's motto, engraved in his tower, was a question — Que sais-je? What do I know? He meant it. He distrusted certainty the way other people distrust danger, because he had watched certainty, in the religious wars around him, turn ordinary men into killers. His famous essay on the cannibals of Brazil turns the mirror on Europe: the so-called savages, he suggests, are less barbaric than the Christians torturing each other at home. The doubt is not a party trick. It is a discipline for not becoming a monster.

This is where Compagnon's little book quietly makes its case for Montaigne's modernity. Montaigne's skepticism is not the nihilism it is sometimes mistaken for. He does not conclude that nothing is true and therefore nothing matters. He concludes that we should hold our beliefs more loosely, test them against experience, stay ready to change our minds. His is a supple, provisional relationship to truth — a willingness to live inside uncertainty rather than paper over it with a system. In an age drowning in confident opinions, that posture feels less like an antique and more like a rare skill.

The radio project that became A Summer with Montaigne ran on the simplest premise imaginable: a few minutes, one passage, no conclusion demanded. Compagnon never tries to hand us the whole thousand pages. He hands us doors, forty of them, and trusts that a reader who steps through one will want to find the rest. The bet pays off because it matches the book's own grain — a work assembled from attempts, revised for twenty years, and content never to finish.