Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface to the revised edition
- To the Reader
- 1 Society and Self-study: the Problem of Literary Authority
- 2 Literary Anxiety and the Romance of Books
- 3 Rival Readings
- 4 Writing and Embodiment
- 5 Reading and Temperament
- 6 The Paradox of Communication: Reading the Essays Otherwise
- 7 Portrait of the Essayist Without Qualities
- 8 On Public and Private Life
- 9 Civilisation, Literacy and Barbarism
- 10 On Living and Dying as We Do
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
To the Reader
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface to the revised edition
- To the Reader
- 1 Society and Self-study: the Problem of Literary Authority
- 2 Literary Anxiety and the Romance of Books
- 3 Rival Readings
- 4 Writing and Embodiment
- 5 Reading and Temperament
- 6 The Paradox of Communication: Reading the Essays Otherwise
- 7 Portrait of the Essayist Without Qualities
- 8 On Public and Private Life
- 9 Civilisation, Literacy and Barbarism
- 10 On Living and Dying as We Do
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Montaigne's Essays speak to us in a voice so direct that the reader must consider from the start how to accommodate their intimate appeal. The reader is no more released from the world by the Essays than was their author in writing them. The room in which the Essays were written, and wherever they are read, is therefore not apart from the world; it becomes the setting of one of the world's great friendships to which we lend ourselves in a lesson of freedom, family and good sense:
To the Reader
This book was written in good faith, reader. It warns you from the outset that in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one. I have had no thought of serving either you or my own glory. My powers are inadequate for such a purpose. I have dedicated it to the private convenience of my relatives and friends, so that when they have lost me (as soon as they must), they may recover here some features of my habits and temperament, and by this means keep the knowledge they have had of me more complete and alive.
If I had written to seek the world's favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed. Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.
Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.
So farewell. Montaigne, this first day of March, fifteen hundred and eight.
From the very beginning, Montaigne requires a reader who will not simply lean upon the preface for an easy sense of the essays to follow.
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- Information
- Essaying MontaigneA Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Reading, pp. 1 - 11Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001