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On Monday 6/15, I'm hosting a workshop to kick off a reading group for classic essays: RSVP here.

← The Essays

A remix per century

If you have lived one day, you have seen everything. One day equals all days. There is no other light, no other night. The Sun, Moon and Stars, disposed just as they are now, were enjoyed by your grandsires and will entertain your great-grandchildren.

This is Montaigne citing Manilius citing Vives citing St. Augustine's City of God. The original in Latin is "Non alium videre patres: aliumve nepotes Aspicient", which is "Your fathers saw none other: none other shall your progeny discern." So this is four layers removed from the source, yet far more elegant, lodging itself in my mind in a way that the original never would have done.

This reinforces the idea that, while there is much of creativity that comes from your own mind, without conscious influence, there are whole wells of wisdom that are waiting to be transfigured into their maximum potency. Speaks to this whole project of reading widely, highlighting obsessively, and then reacting to, writing on, and deepening them.

I'd go as far as saying that Montaigne as a whole is due for a remixing. The Screech translations (1991) are already so much more accessible than Hazlitt's (1877) which was just a reworking of the 1685 translation by Charles Cotton. Just like Locke called for a revolution once a century to readapt government to the emerged situation, we likely need a re-rendering of great thinkers once per century to make them maximally salient to the current generation.

And so what Montaigne needs, in my opinion, as you might predict, is a re-structure.

Yes he did edited his essays when he republished them, but mostly, as far as I can tell, in the form of slight deletions and additions, keeping the overall essay arc the same, and the overall flow of the volume chronological. Why present the essays chronological? This matters for a historian, but not for a teenager who can be inspired into become Montaignian themselves. If I were to have a go, it would be a radical re-ordering, restructuring, and compression, while trying to preserve his cryptic essence, shape-shifting identity, and turns of phrase. It's a type of translation, not just of words, but of essence.