{"product_id":"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","title":"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","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhen 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44947484147765,"sku":"ByrdShop_0375424717","price":59.43,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780375424717.jpg?v=1770014173","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/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","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}