It is not the sort of introduction that would have been written a half-century or more ago, when it could be assumed that readers would be familiar with Montaigne and his place in the historical unfolding of European philosophy and literature.īakewell begins at ground zero, much as Montaigne did, without assuming anything more than that her readers have an interest in themselves and a desire to live well, which she addresses by cleverly organizing her book as a series of suggestions Montaigne makes for doing just that. Here is a writer whose love for her subject is so infectious that some readers might abandon her halfway through and plunge straight into the Essays. What a delight, then, to come upon Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, an engaging introduction to the life and thought of Michel de Montaigne, and a pleasure to read. But apparently publishers have concluded that appeals to taste or pleasure or (why not) truth are bad for the college market, so we are left with these grim checkpoints guarding the border between the us and the author, protecting him from any embrace.
Doesn’t it occur to publishers that while this scholarly detritus may have a place in footnotes and appendices, it does not constitute an introduction, whose function is, well, to introduce? When any of us presents someone or something to another person, the first thing we try to convey is why he, she, or it might matter. What they never tell you is why you should read the book.
They lecture you on the narrow historical context they’ve banished the book to and its ordained place in the author’s development then it’s on to mind-numbing debates about which manuscript or folio or annotated edition or critical commentary (their own) is to be preferred. Today you bang your knee instead against belabored essays by scholars who think “foreground” and “background” are verbs. It predisposed you to give the author an even break. It used to be that when you opened, say, a Penguin or Oxford classic you’d find a short, engaging tour d’horizon, quirky in the English style and focused on essentials.
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