Like flinging hand grenades into a fog
Why was Pascal so obsessed with Montaigne? Eliot insists that Pascal studied Montaigne in order to demolish him but could not do so, because it was like flinging hand grenades into a fog. Montaigne, Eliot assures us, was “a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element,” which must surely be the oddest description of Montaigne ever attempted. The intention of Eliot’s invidious metaphor is revealed when the author of Murder in the Cathedral insists that Montaigne “succeeded in giving expression to the skepticism of every human being,” Pascal and Eliot doubtless included.
Fascinating that a personification of a person as a gas or liquid is described as "insidious" (def: "harmful, dangerous, or treacherous [...] subtle and unnoticed until it causes significant damage"), something so disturbing that we must destroy it with explosives.
Why do we fear non-solid personas? It is comfortable to know another as a known quantity. We are box putters. When everyone in our life is stable and unchanging, it gives us fixed conditions for us to ease into, for don't we define ourselves as our relationship to others? If our friends and family were to rapidly warp their politics and morals and tastes, would that not create clashes that force us to re-consider our own? The fear of shape-shifting others is fear of the inner gas. The "you've changed" middle-school jab is an act of defense. Ego is solid, frozen, calcified.
To molt is to let light, liquid, and air burst out the confines of the chitinous shell of a Roach self—to truly hold cognitive liberty, at least for a moment, an hour or day, before reassembling into a new shell, like the homeless hermit seeking refuge from the dangerous beach, is to glimpse the freedom that only you withhold from yourself. Montaigne is a model for man in perpetual molt, always passing, always becoming. We can only know our soul if we perennially refactor the code of our self.