Writers are readers. This is not because they have no thoughts of their own, but precisely because they seek a thought that is their own: or rather, thought that becomes their own through the conversation of minds to be found in reading. To be sure, Montaigne begins by leaning heavily on his predecessors. To the extent that this is so, he can hardly be said to have found his vocation as a writer. Yet there are few vocations that are truly born in a moment; though we indulge the practice of retrospectively finding their moment of inspiration. Or else, because of the madness of the inspired moment, we hide our creative sources in night, reducing them later to the routinised formulae of methodology, encouraging the daytime illusion of public and common access to art and science. Montaigne speaks casually of his decision to write. Having retired in order to settle his mind in the idleness of old age, and finding himself rather a thousand times further from himself due to the vagaries of his imagination, he decided to write them down in order to keep an inventory, rather like a household record which usually shames us with its proof of our extravagance and wastefulness (1: 8, 21). In this task it is natural that he should find the writings of historians and moral philosophers congenial; and he borrows heavily from their topics and examples. In fact, in the first two books of the Essays, as he says in a later comment that he inserts, he does little more than keep a register of deaths, out of fascination with how it is men conduct themselves in those last hours that await us all: