When I Am Playing with My Cat How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?: Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life

About this book

When I dance I dance; when I sleep I sleep. And when I am walking alone in a beautiful orchard if my thoughts are sometimes preoccupied elsewhere the rest of the time I bring them back to the walk to the orchard to the sweetness of this solitude and to me. Montaigne In the year 1570 at the age of thirty-seven Michel de Montaigne gave up his job as a magistrate and retired to his chteau to brood on his own private griefthe deaths of his best friend his father his brother and his firstborn child. On the ceiling of his library he inscribed a phrase from the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius: There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer. But finding his mind agitated rather than settled by this idleness Montaigne began to write giving birth to the Essaysshort prose explorations of an amazingly wide range of subjects. And gradually over the course of his writing Montaigne rejected his stoical pessimism and turned from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life. He erased Lucretiuss melancholy fatalism and began to embrace the exuberant vitality of living finding an antidote to death in the most unlikely placesthe touch of a hand the smell of his doublet the playfulness of his cat and the flavor of his wine. Saul Frampton offers a celebration of perhaps the most enjoyable and yet profound of all Renaissance writers whose essays went on to have a huge impact on figures as diverse as Shakespeare Emerson and Orson Welles and whose thoughts even today offer a guide and unprecedented insight into the simple matter of being alive.