The Tower of Self

On his thirty-eighth birthday, Michel de Montaigne climbed the spiral staircase to his library tower for the first time as a free man. The year was 1571, and he had just retired from the Parlement of Bordeaux, abandoning his career as a magistrate to pursue something unprecedented. In this circular room, lined with a thousand books and decorated with Greek and Latin inscriptions, he would attempt to study the most elusive subject in the universe: himself.

He sat at his desk and opened a fresh notebook. For a moment, the blank page intimidated him. Who was he to write when Plutarch and Seneca had said everything worth saying? What could a minor French nobleman contribute to the wisdom of the ages? Then he remembered his friend Étienne de La Boétie, dead these eight years, with whom he had shared a friendship so perfect that life since had felt like exile. If he could not converse with Étienne, perhaps he could converse with himself.

He dipped his quill and wrote: "What do I know?" It was a simple question, but it would take him twenty years and a new literary form to answer. In this tower, surrounded by the chaos of France's religious wars, Montaigne would discover that the proper study of mankind was not Man in the abstract, but one particular man: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, with his kidney stones and his love of radishes, his fear of death and his fondness for scratching.

That afternoon, as cannon fire echoed in the distance—another skirmish between Catholics and Huguenots—Montaigne made a radical decision. Instead of writing about great themes in the grand style, he would write about whatever crossed his mind: thumbs, coaches, cannibals, the resemblance between fathers and children. He would follow his thoughts wherever they led, like a hunter following game through the forest. He would invent a new word for these attempts: essais—trials, attempts, experiments in being human.