Michel de Montaigne Reviews Your Essays Highlights

This episode stages a fictional highlight audit by Michel de Montaigne. Five marked lines written for this channel stand in for the viewer's notes from the Essays. Montaigne upholds one, qualifies a second, corrects a third, redirects a fourth, and then names the sentence the reader walked past. The five lines are composites in the book's idiom, not quotations and not a real Readwise export.

The audit turns on arguments the Essays actually make. Montaigne identified human life with movement and instability, and took philosophy to be the exercise of free judgment rather than a body of doctrine ("Others form man, I tell of him") 1. Around 1576 he had a medal struck with the Greek Epecho, "I abstain", and the French Que sais-je? — what do I know 1. He liked the formulas that soften a claim: "perhaps", "to some extent", "I think" 1.

Three essays carry the rest. "Of cannibals" refuses the easy verdict on the peoples of Brazil and turns the comparison back on European practice. "Of friendship" is written around Étienne de La Boétie, who died in 1563, and gives Montaigne's answer to why the two loved each other: "because it was he, because it was I" 2. "Of solitude" argues for keeping a room at the back of the shop wholly one's own 2.

Montaigne closes with a reading instruction: take these essays as trials, carry the question forward, and keep the last essay, "Of experience", for the end 1.