Merry Wanderer of the Night:
essay collection

The Montaigne Readalong is a year long project in which I try to read over 1,000 pages of Montaigne's essays. Every Monday I write about the essays I read for the week. You can share your thoughts or join the readalong if you'd like, just check the Montaigne Readalong schedule. You can read several of these essays for free on Google Books or subscribe to Montaigne's essays on Daily Lit.

Essays Read this Week:
1. On moderation
2. On the Cannibals

Favorite Quotations:
"True victory lies in your role in the conflict, not in coming through safely: it consists in the honour of battling bravely battling through." (On the Cannibals)

"I wish everyone would write only what he knows--not in this matter only but in all others. A man may well have detailed knowledge or experience of the nature of one particular river or stream, yet about all the others he knows only what everyone else does; but in order to trot out his little scrap of knowledge he will write a book on the whole physics! From this vice many inconveniences arise." (On the Cannibals)

General Thoughts:
On the Cannibals is frequently taught in nonfiction writing classes, or at least it is at Iowa, which is why it makes me think not so much about the essay itself as nonfiction writing. That last quote in my favorite quotations about writing what you know, I think that is my biggest takeaway from this essay. Montaigne is really interested in judgement and the the human tendency to think there is only one way to do something. Your way. Culture to culture we all do things a little differently and it's easy to think of the world only in your terms. I think part of what essays do is help the writer recognize the way he or she does something while still pushing their boundaries and looking at how others might do it.

So then how do you write about your experience in another culture and still acknowledge that you are not an expert on that culture? This seems to be a huge problem in travel writing. The best travel writing, I usually feel, is either completely inward or completely social. In the inward variety the author really doesn't experience much but rather writes about the displacement of being in another culture and ruminates on that. The more social kind involves the writer talking to people of that culture but acknowledging his or her outsider status and understanding.

I am struggling with this quote a little bit because it doesn't acknowledge the writer's ability to go seek out first hand knowledge from an expert. Maybe I'm struggling because I become annoyed by people who do very little research and try to pass themselves off as experts. Part of the reason I love John McPhee is he always acknowledges how stupid he is on a given topic, even if he knows more than the average person. This seems like an extremely important aspect of essay writing--no wonder I'm pulling it from Montaigne.

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The Montaigne Readalong is a year long project in which I try to read over 1,000 pages of Montaigne's essays. Every Monday I write about the essays I read for the week. You can share your thoughts or join the readalong if you'd like, just check the Montaigne Readalong schedule. You can read several of these essays for free on Google Books or subscribe to Montaigne's essays on Daily Lit.

Essays Read this Week:
1. That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities
2. On affectionate relationships
3. Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de La Boetie

Favorite Quotations:
"How many of the things which constantly come into our purview must be deemed monstrous or miraculous if we apply such terms to anything which outstrips our reason! If we consider that we have to grope through a fog even to understand the very things we hold in our hands, then we will certainly find that it is not knowledge but habit which takes away their strangeness." (That it is madness to judge the true and the false)

"And in truth what are these Essays if not monstrosities and grotesques botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous?" (On affectionate relationships)

General Thoughts:
I can't decide if the order of Montaigne's essays just happen to line up with my thoughts this year or if I'm just reading too much of my own thoughts into his writing, but over the past several weeks it's seemed like Montaigne and I have just been on the same page.

This week I read On affectionate relationships, which was fitting because I've been thinking a lot about friendship. When I went home over spring break I had a strong desire to get back together with old friends. I did get together with a couple of friends I've stayed in touch with since high school, but I didn't see either of the people who were really my best friends in high school. I did run into some people who were good friends of mine, and it was just like seeing a stranger. The loss of old friendships has been painful for me. In On affectionate relationships Montaigne describes a kind of friendship in which the friends will do anything for each and other and are really a part of each other.

"Moreover what we normally call friends and friendships are no more than acquaintances and familiar relationships bound by some change or some suitability, by means of which our souls support each other. In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found. If you press me to say why I loved him, I that it cannot be expressed except by replying: 'Because it was him: because it was me.'"

I just really loved that quote because I think it perfectly sums up my ideas on friendship. The majority of my friends now are really just familiar relations. We have parties, go out for coffee, and so on, but I don't feel like I know them that well or like they know me that well. It's crazy to think about now, but the only people who I feel really know me are my friends from high school who are still my friends today. I never thought I would stay in touch with so many people from high school, the whole point of college is to branch out and meet new people right? But I've found that friendships are largely disappointing, and the only people who really have my back are the people who watched me through my awkward teenage years.


I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

The Montaigne Readalong is a year long project in which I try to read over 1,000 pages of Montaigne's essays. Every Monday I write about the essays I read for the week. You can share your thoughts or join the readalong if you'd like, just check the Montaigne Readalong schedule. You can read several of these essays for free on Google Books or subscribe to Montaigne's essays on Daily Lit.

Essays Read this Week:
1. On educating children

Favorite Quotations:
"In the case of those who wish to hide their borrowings and pass them off as their own, their action is, first and foremost, unjust and mean: they have nothing worthwhile of their own to show off so they try to recommend themselves with someone else's goods" (On educating children).

"My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me" (On educating children).

General Thoughts:
This essay brought up a lot of the same things last week's On schoolmaster's learning brought up. Montaigne talks about problems with educating, particularly with exams well, regurgitation, "Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given." Montaigne believes education should allow you to know yourself and school should be where you form yourself. He thinks teachers give students quotations and books to read in an attempt to make the students believe those are the last words on everything. In this way students never learn how to speak for themselves. They simply say what others have already said.

"I sometimes hear people who apologize for not being able to say what they mean, maintaining that their heads are so full of fine things that they cannot deliver them for want of eloquence. That is moonshine. Do you know what I think? It is a matter of shadowy notions coming to them from some unformed concepts which they are unable to untangle and to clarify in their minds: consequently they cannot deliver them externally."

I really love the idea of learning to form yourself. I've gotten bad grades in some classes but walked out with information that really shaped my thoughts on the class topic. I've gotten A+ in some classes that I remember nothing from. These are obviously extremes, but I've often thought about going back to the professors of classes and showing them how much I actually did learn in their class-- even if it wasn't what I supposed to learn for an exam.

Questions:
1. What do you think education is for?

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

The Montaigne Readalong is a year long project in which I try to read over 1,000 pages of Montaigne's essays. Every Monday I write about the essays I read for the week. You can share your thoughts or join the readalong if you'd like, just check the Montaigne Readalong schedule. You can read several of these essays for free on Google Books or subscribe to Montaigne's essays on Daily Lit.

Note: I'm posting this on Thursday rather than Monday because I was participating in a giveaway hop on Monday.

Essays Read this Week:
1. That the taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have of them
2. One is punished for stubbornly defending a fort without good reason
3. On punishing cowardice
4. The doings of certain ambassadors

Favorite Quotations:
"... that it is with pain as with precious stones which take on brighter or duller hues depending on the foil in which they are set: pain only occupies as much space as we make for her" (The taste of good and evil things depends on our opinion).

"The man who is happy is not he who is believed to be so but he who believes he is so: in that way alone does belief endow itself with true reality" (The taste of good and evil things depends on our opinion).

General Thoughts:
The longest essay I read was That the taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have of them, which is probably why I have the most to say about it. Montaigne spends quite a bit of this essay talking about pain and death, which was attractive to me this week because I have thumb injury causing quite a bit of pain. He says the most painful part of death is not death itself, but the time we spend thinking about it. Death, he says, is actually the release from pain. This basic principle can be moved to other parts of life though. For example, I spend a lot of time thinking about writing my papers, but once I finish the paper I find it's actual quite painless and relieving. If I would just quit thinking about the paper and write it I could save myself a lot of pain and misery.

I really liked the second quotation I posted from this essay though. It seems like the more negative energy you put out, the more you find yourself in a negative state of being. If you believe you are happy and put out positive energy, good things will come to you. This isn't always true, but I think there is something to be said for it. I've recently been dwelling in negatives so it seems like a lot of negative things have happened to me. In reality as many positive things have happened as negative, it's just easier to focus on the negative for some reason.

I did tsk tsk about halfway through this essay when Montaigne talks about how crazy women are for putting themselves through the pains of corsets and other crazier things (flaying themselves alive to have a fresh color in their skin?) just to become beautiful. Clearly Montaigne lived during a different time, but he doesn't acknowledge why women were driven to do these things, probably because no one thought about it much. But that is a story for another day...

Over the course of One is punished for stubbornly defending a fort without a good reason and On punishing cowardice I felt like Montaigne was relying on Nature to explain new human values. He talks about how humans are going against Nature because of new technology and broken traditions, and what this means for humans. Just funny that this argument continues to go on today.

From The doings of certain ambassadors I came away loving the first idea of the essay. He says when he meets other people he tries to bring the conversation back to the subject each person knows best. I thought this was a great idea and one I should observe more frequently.


Questions:
1. Do you believe that having a negative/positive attitude changes the way you feel about yourself or your life? Do you think you can apply "positive spin" to your own reality?
2. What subject are you an expert on? What would others want you to talk about?

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

The Montaigne Readalong is a year long project in which I try to read over 1,000 pages of Montaigne's essays. Every Monday I write about the essays I read for the week. You can share your thoughts or join the readalong if you'd like, just check the Montaigne Readalong schedule. You can read several of these essays for free on Google Books

Essays Read this Week:
1. That our deeds are judged by the intention
2. On idleness
3. On liars
4. On a ready or hesitant delivery
5. On prognostications
6. On constancy
7. Ceremonial at the meeting of the kings

Favorite Quotations:
"If I can, I will prevent my death from saying anything not first said by my life." (That our deeds are judged by the intention)
"When the soul is without a definite aim she gets lost; for, as they say, if you are everywhere you are nowhere." (On idleness)
"This, too, happens in my case: where I seek myself I cannot find myself: I discover myself more by accident than by inquiring into my judgement." (On a ready or hesitant delivery

General Thoughts:
That our deeds are judged by the intention is a good essay to live your life by, I feel, because it makes you want to put all of the grudges you have in your past, speak your mind, and let things go. This is something I really need right now because I've been holding negative thoughts in my mind all year and I really just need to move past them.

Montaigne spends a good portion of On liars talking about his bad memory. It was really interesting for me to think of the "father of the essay" as someone with a bad memory because the essay is so connected to memory today. Even so, he had a beautiful description of memories, "they make a deep imprint by means of awareness and knowledge; it is hard for those facts not to spring to mind and to dislodge the falsehoods." This is interesting to think about today when so many nonfiction writers do take artistic liberties with their work. I think Montaigne would not approve of blatant lies in nonfiction, but I don't know how he would feel about light coloring. It would be interesting to hear what he thinks about artistic license.

In On a ready or hesitant delivery he spends the latter part of the essay talking about how he accidentally finds himself when he is writing, then walks away from what he wrote only to come back and not understand it. It is only when someone else reads it and finds the meaning again that he can come to understand it.

Questions:
1. Do you even find yourself accidentally? Does it have anything to do with writing?
2. Do you have a difficult time letting things go in your life? Do you struggle with saying what you feel?

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

The Montaigne Readalong is a year long project in which I try to read over 1,000 pages of Montaigne's essays. Every Monday I write about the essays I read for the week. You can share your thoughts or join the readalong if you'd like, just check the Montaigne Readalong schedule. You can read several of these essays for free on Google Books

Essays Read this Week:
1. We reach the same the same end by discrepant means
2. On sadness
3. Our emotions get carried away beyond us
4. How the soul discharges its emotions against false objects when lacking real ones
5. Whether the governor of a besieged fortress should go out and parley
6. The hour of parleying is dangerous

I read quite a few short essays this week so instead of talking about all of them I'm just going to talk about the three that interested me the most, which were On sadness, Our emotions get carried away beyond us, and How the soul discharges its emotions against false objects when lacking real ones. Throughout these three essay the main subject is obviously emotions. In On sadness he refers to sadness as the Italian tristezza, which I always thought meant more melancholy than sad, but I could be wrong about that. Montaigne talks about the danger of sadness and he seems to think it is a bit of a showy emotion. One thing the essay made me think of is that age old question of "Can you be happy and be a writer or artist?" I think Montaigne would argue that you can-- and should.

He also discusses different types of sadness, talking about a story (which he often does) in which a man sees his daughter working as a servant and his son led to execution with no reaction on his face, but when a friend of his is brought in a negative situation he becomes very sorrowful. When asked about his emotions the man said the first two could basically not be expressed properly so it was better to not express any emotion at all. Montaigne also suggests that it was the build-up over time that made the man express sorrow during the last incident rather than the first two. Later he says, "We cannot display our grief or our convictions during the living searing heat of the attack; the soul is then burdened by deep thought and the body is cast down, languishing for love" (9-10). He ends On sadness saying that he is not controlled by violent emotions, but that he controls them by arguments, which I thought might mean he believes analyzing or essaying the world allows him to control his feelings, which is something I definitely feel as someone who writes essays. However, my essays are often drawn by emotions, which forces me to ask if Montaigne is bluffing?

He carries on these ideas in Our emotions get carried away beyond us, but focuses more on the relationship between body and soul. In this essay he wonders by humans worry so much about what will happen to them after death, citing many humorous stories about human burials, when their body is really not "them" it is their soul that is them and their soul will not be in the ground. At least that is how I understand it. While his main argument is about death, I took away more of a "Don't worry about the future, focus on the now," message from the essay.

In the final essay I want to talk about, How the soul discharges its emotions against false objects when lacking real ones, he talks about people placing their emotions on a physical manifestation rather than dealing with whatever emotion they have (perhaps through essaying or observing the world around them). He says, "it seems that the soul too, in the same way, loses itself in itself when shaken and disturbed unless it is given something to grasp on to; and so we must always provide it with an object to butt up against and to act upon" (19).

Questions from This Week:
1. What do you think is the best way to deal with strong emotions? Do you react to small upsets more violently than big ones because you don't know how to react?
2. Do you displace your emotions just so you have something to make you feel better? Do you think this works?
3. If you read any of these essays, which one stuck out the most to you and why?

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Michael Chabon's book Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands is 1. The most physically beautiful book I have ever read and 2. A manifesto about reading and writing which touts the importance of genre fiction and comic books. So take those last two things and combine them with my undying love of Michael Chabon and you have basically described a perfect book for Ash. I only had to read the first essay about the modern short story and find the following quotation before I really fell in love, "... I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature" (14). These are ideas that made me start my blog, but Chabon has a way of putting the ideas in my head into beautiful words on a beautiful clean white page in my McSweeney's copy.

The book is a series of essays about books, or reviews, depending on how you read them. He covers Shelock Holmes, The Road, The Golden Compass, and way more. Chabon gushes over is favorite writers, their techniques, their passion. It's a bit like reading blog posts by Chabon, which is exciting because you come away from the book with tons of book suggestions from an amazing author. If Chabon liked it I'm willing to give it a try. Since the book is a series of essay it's not really made to be a sit down and read for a couple hours book, but I read this over winter break and found myself finding excuses to escape and read... a book of essays? Is that even possible. It is my friends. Chabon writes so beautifully about books and connects them to the human experience so well that any bibliophile will drool over the (have I mentioned how beautiful this book is?) cover.

"... a mind is blown when something that you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out to be far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off it nethermost edge" (93-94).

I just loved this quotation, possibly because I read it right after finals week and was feeling very much like I was sailing off the nethermost edge of my earth. But it is a really good example of how Chabon can work words and make a series of essays something that is incredibly captivating. I'm really not doing it justice, if you love to read you will at least kind of like this book.

And now I have to verbally drool over the cover a little bit. There are three parts to the book jacket, each depicting a different world. The illustrations are beautiful and if you need a break from reading you can always take one of the jackets off the book and explore that world for a little while. You can be entertained by this book without even reading. It's fabulous! The pages are nice thick paper and the most vibrant white I have ever seen in my entire life. Even if you don't like that book that much I'm sure you will squeal with delight just holding it.

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I've had a long time love affair with Joan Didion. She is the master of the personal in the essay. She knows exactly when to divulge her own history and when to hold back and let others come trough. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays about 1960's America and Didion captures the mood perfectly. She isn't afraid to question or learn and that is what makes her such a fantastic essayist and journalist. In the preface Didion says she went to San Francisco because the world she understood was disappearing. And, as an essayist, she attempts to understand the world she has come to.

I think a lot of people feel this way now. The world a lot of us have been a part of is disappearing, and that includes me. Not only is technology moving faster and broader than any of us probably expected, but we are losing the vastness of American-- we are constantly building over it. Didion looks at San Francisco with the same wonder and confusion we look at our world today, and in doing so realizes that things fall apart. The collection is split into two parts, Life Styles in the Golden Land and Personals. Life Styles in the Golden Land contains essays that explore others lives in San Francisco while Personals is more of Didion's ruminations on things like journaling and home. I vastly preferred Personals to Life Styles in the Golden Land, but this was perhaps because they were easier to connect to on the surface.

Out of everything I read in this book, I loved her essay On Keeping a Notebook the most. In this essay she explores the reality of a notebook, and considers how temporary it actually is. In a journal we write what we are thinking at one moment, and years later we can return to those some words and not have a clue what we were actually thinking about. She talks about how she cannot actually keep a diary because it is too boring, but how she still has a need to write things down. And then she says "I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check counter in Pavillon..." (135). I loved this because when I journal I often do write about other people, but it isn't actually about them, it's all just a reflection of me.

Because of the disconnect I felt between the two sections I'm giving this a B, but I know I will return to it someday.

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I borrowed I'm Sorry You Feel That Way: The Astonishing but True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man and Dog

from a friend, which isn't something I do a lot of but she thought I'd really enjoy it. I'm really glad I read this book because Diana Joseph is a hilarious writer and it commented on a lot of issues I could relate to myself. Like relationships between children and parents and what it means to be a woman. I especially liked her essays about romance and growing up, and what it means to be a slut ("What happens is sometimes a girl will go with this one, and he isn't right for her, so she'll go with that one, and she doesn't like him either" [13]). College has kind of turned me into a feminist (which has really been nagging me in the back of my mind lately, but that's another story) so reading Joseph's comments on gender were really interesting to me.

But the moments this essay collection really shines are the stories about Joseph's son. I love when she buys him a guitar to make him a rock star, which is so something I picture myself doing as a mother, only to find out that her son has absolutely no interest in becoming a rock star. And later, she finds that he thinks most people smoke weed, and that is bad. While it might not every be explicit we might be able to assume that Joseph has smoked weed at some point in her life, so it's difficult that her son looks down on these people so much. But then again, isn't that what he is supposed to think? And later he calls a girl at his school a slut, but Joseph was kind of a slut herself, and how dare he call this girl a slut when he doesn't know anything about her. So in this way her past comes into conflict with the personality her son has created for himself.

Another enjoyable moment was when she talked about her pervert friend Andrew Boyle; "I worry that my friend Andrew Boyle is a pervert, even if he doesn't hang fuzzy dice from the rearview mirror of a sleekly black Pontiac Trans Am" (136). As funny as this moment was, I think it's also really important. Joseph is upset by her son judging the slutty girl in his class and consequently judging his own mother even though he knows nothing about sex, why people have it, and what really makes a slut. With Andrew Boyle though, Joseph knows her friend, but she slaps this pervert label on him with a great deal of ease. I'm not saying this is a bad thing really, it's just interesting to see how easily we label people, but when it's us that is getting the label it's hard to take.

This essay collection earned a B.

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