…the house I live in…

A few years ago I fell into the habit of devoting a summer season to reading a specific writer, or genre. It was not intentional, it just evolved that way. This summer is no different, well, slightly different.

Ten years ago I read Proust for the first time. Six of the seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu—or to be less pretentious about it, especially since I don’t speak a lick of French, The Remembrance of Things Past. Then last summer, I re-read the first volume, Swan’s Way. I decided to do the same this season, and perhaps, if discipline and endurance holds, I’ll make it all the way and chalk off the seventh volume too, Time Regained.

Five summers ago, while working in the mountains of Colorado, I devoted the season to Montaigne, my old friend of almost forty years. This summer, it appears, the theme is French, specifically Proust and Montaigne. I am not qualified by any stretch to talk about Proust with any intelligence. Maybe I need a few more decades of reading him under my belt to tackle that. But Montaigne is another matter. Not that I am qualified necessarily, but rather he lends himself to discussion. His essays, bite-size by comparison, are more easily penetrated than Proust’s 3000 page novel. Too, there is the matter that we’ve been together for so many years, Michel and I, sharing him is like introducing a dear friend to another dear friend. It’s joyful. So that’s the backstory, as well as what I’m doing, reading wise, this summer.

With that established, my plan is to dip into Montaigne without agenda, to simply open the book, choose an essay and then, briefly and without labor, share a few paragraphs of ideas, quotes, insights, or whatever strikes my fancy. This will be a minimalist approach, just a little light fun. With my recent post, a review of Sarah Bakewell’s biography of Montaigne, by way of introduction, I begin “My Summer with Montaigne”. Let’s roll.