Friday, July 27, 2012
Monday, July 9, 2012
What I'm Reading
Lose weight, save money, and save the polar bears at the same time? When you live the Wildly Affordable Organic way, it is possible! Join the movement to change the way you eat—and keep the change.
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...and, to start off on the right thought ...
How to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love—such questions arise in most people’s lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: How do you live?
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell
Winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
Turns out to be one of the best books I've read in a long time. Ms. Bakewell, formerly a curator of early-printed books and currently a writer and writing teacher in London, has combined a tour through Montaigne's views on just about everything with the details of his actual, physical life.
It's important to note right off that the book and Montaigne – as the title indicates – make no attempt to proselytize how one should live. Montaigne made certain to reassure everyone that he had no answers to the big questions. In fact, while he might glimpse a fleeting truth, he staunchly maintained his belief in its ephemeral nature and in his own inability to get to the root of anything.
Bakewell places Montaigne's individual thoughts and concerns within the turmoil of his larger civic and political life in 16th-century France. The religious wars, political unrest, wealth disparity, health crises, and a fluid knowledge and artistic panoply suggest the present 21st century, but Montaigne’s response to these external pressures is unusual for any era. Mostly, he holds firm to his Stoic philosophic roots, refuses to take a stand on anything (even for action or inaction), and makes it look deceptively easy to straddle the balance beam of moderation in all things. Not for him the armed fortress, for instance; even during plague years and times when desperate bands of outlaws roamed the countryside, Montaigne kept his gates open and the welcome mat out.
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