notes to self: reminders from Michel de Montaigne
reflections on the comfort of contradiction and the beauty of human complexity
I spent this morning sifting through everything I've written over the past year. Blog posts, essays, personal reflections, half-finished projects—all over the map in terms of topics and style. And that familiar feeling crept in: that nagging self-doubt about not having a "niche."
You know the one. That voice that says people won't connect with you if you're not predictable, if they can't put you in a neat little box. "What's your brand?" it whispers. "What's your specialty?" As if being human requires having a content strategy.
I caught myself doing that thing where I try to cope by claiming I'm "nicheless on purpose"—like it's some intentional branding choice rather than just... following my curiosity wherever it leads. One day I'm deep into the psychology of decision-making, the next I'm researching ancient pottery techniques, then suddenly I'm writing about quantum physics analogies for relationships.
And that's when Montaigne popped into my head.
Michel de Montaigne—the 16th-century French nobleman who basically invented the personal essay by writing about whatever the hell interested him at any given moment. Who embraced contradiction and change as features, not bugs, of being human.
And just like that, I tumbled down a rabbit hole.
the man in the tower—
Michel de Montaigne wasn't just any 16th-century French nobleman. Born in 1533 to a wealthy merchant family in Bordeaux, he had the kind of education most couldn't dream of—Latin from birth, private tutors, the works. His father, Pierre Eyquem, was obsessed with Renaissance humanism and innovative education, arranging for young Michel to be spoken to only in Latin for the first six years of his life.
He could have been just another aristocrat playing the political game. For a while, that's exactly what he did—serving as a counselor in the Parliament of Bordeaux, acting as a diplomat between warring factions. But something shifted in him. Maybe it was the early death of his closest friend, Étienne de La Boétie, in 1563. Maybe it was his own brush with death in 1569, when he was thrown from a horse and nearly killed. Or maybe it was simply the exhaustion of navigating France's increasingly bloody religious civil wars.
Whatever it was, in 1571, at age 38, Montaigne did something unusual. He resigned his position, retreated to his family estate, and literally built himself a tower. Not for defense, but for reflection. He filled it with books—about a thousand of them, an extraordinary collection for a private individual at that time—and he began to write.
Not histories. Not political treatises. Not poetry. Just thoughts. He called them "Essais"—attempts or trials—giving us the very word "essay." But these weren't essays in our modern sense of organized arguments marching toward a conclusion. They were explorations, meandering journeys through his own mind.
What strikes me most is how revolutionary this was. In an age obsessed with classical authority and religious doctrine, Montaigne turned to the one text nobody had thoroughly examined: himself. "I study myself more than any other subject," he wrote. "That's my metaphysics; that's my physics."
the first modern "I"—
This is what pulled me in deeper today. Montaigne wasn't the first to use "I" in writing—far from it. Augustine had written his Confessions over a thousand years earlier. But Augustine's "I" was a theological device, tracing his path to God. Medieval mystics wrote of their visions and spiritual experiences, but always with the divine as the true subject.
Montaigne's "I" was different. Radically different. It was secular, curious, and unapologetically mundane. He wrote about his kidney stones, his dislike of certain foods, his sexual performance, his bowel movements. He wrote about how he sometimes forgot his own books after writing them. How he changed his mind frequently. How he could be brave one day and cowardly the next.
In "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions," he gets especially honest. He basically shrugs and says: look, we don't make sense. Not consistently. We're not unified creatures. We change according to hunger, memory, the mood of the weather.
"We are all patchwork," he writes, "and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each piece, each moment, plays its own game."
Reading this today feels like finding the first modern person—someone who recognized the self not as a fixed, eternal soul but as a process, a series of moments, an ongoing conversation between mind and world. He was writing in the Renaissance, but his voice feels startlingly contemporary.
Montaigne and Horace: a friendship across time—
What fascinates me is how Montaigne drew strength from those who came before him, especially Horace—that Roman poet born in 65 BCE who somehow managed to be both philosophical and deeply human.
Horace wasn't your typical stern Roman. Born the son of a freed slave, he made his way into the literary circles of Rome through sheer talent. His poems and epistles struck a balance between philosophical insight and everyday observation. He could write about grand virtues in one line and wine, friends, and country pleasures in the next. He celebrated the "golden mean"—that sweet spot between all extremes—and approached life with a gentle skepticism that never hardened into cynicism.
Montaigne's essays are peppered with Horace's words like conversations with an old friend across time. He quotes him more than any other ancient author, not just as scholarly decoration but as genuine touchstones. When Horace wrote "Pale death knocks with the same foot at the huts of the poor and the towers of kings," Montaigne felt it so deeply he had it inscribed on his library walls.
What drew Montaigne to Horace wasn't just literary admiration. It was recognition. Here was another mind, separated by fifteen centuries, who understood the value of self-awareness without self-importance. Who could laugh at himself even while pondering life's biggest questions. Who knew that wisdom wasn't about reaching perfect conclusions but about staying open to life's contradictions.
In one letter, Horace had written:
"I strive to be brief, and I become obscure. I aim at grace, and fall into affectation."
It's the kind of humble, self-aware observation that Montaigne would echo throughout his essays. Both men knew the ache of trying to live right and the impossibility of doing it perfectly. They weren't trying to be sages. They were just trying to be honest.
the ripple effect: Montaigne through the centuries—
The rabbit hole goes deeper. Because once you start tracing Montaigne's influence, you realize he's everywhere in modern thought.