Imagine you are 38. You have a respectable career, a large house and every reason to keep doing what you have been doing. Instead, you walk upstairs, surround yourself with roughly a thousand books and begin asking a dangerous question: What do I actually know?
That was Michel de Montaigne.
In 1571, he withdrew from public life to a library in a tower on his estate near Bordeaux. It sounds like every book lover’s fantasy. But the room was more interesting than that.
Montaigne described it as round, with his books arranged in five tiers along the walls. From his chair, he could see them all at once.
And when he looked up? More words. He had sayings from classical writers and the Bible painted on the ceiling beams. Just imagine being in that room.
Montaigne had loved reading since childhood. At seven or eight, he was absorbed by Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
“To divert myself from a troublesome fancy, ’tis but to run to my books.”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book III, Chapter 3, “Of Three Commerces” (translated by Charles Cotton)
Later, his shelves brought him into conversation with writers such as Plutarch, Seneca and Lucretius. One surviving copy of Lucretius still carries Montaigne’s annotations.
Some books meant even more to him because of who had owned them. His close friend Étienne de La Boétie left him his books and papers when he died. Montaigne called them the most precious part of his possessions.
On several surviving volumes, he wrote a small “b.” to mark that they had come from La Boétie. It is a small gesture, but I find it moving.
Now, you might expect a man with a thousand books to prescribe a stern reading schedule. Montaigne did the opposite. He moved between books without much of a plan.
If a passage resisted him after a couple of attempts, he left it and read on. He admitted that he forgot much of what he read. Books gave him pleasure, but he also wanted them to help him understand how to live and how to face death.
That freedom shaped the Essays. Montaigne read other people closely, then tested their ideas against his own experience. A page might lead him from ancient Rome to friendship, from friendship to fear and from fear to some awkward truth about himself. He called the works essais, attempts.
The title tells you something about the man. He was willing to think on the page without pretending that every thought had reached its final form.
Most of the books that once stood around him have scattered. Scholars have located only a fraction of the collection. Yet the tower still has its painted words and surviving volumes still carry traces of his hand.
I think that is why Montaigne remains such good company for readers. He knew that you could spend a lifetime among books and still be uncertain. He went upstairs anyway, picked one off the shelf and began.
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