Conville & Walsh

In the year 1570, at the age of thirty-sevel, Michel de Montaigne gave up his job as a magistrate and retired to his chateau to brood on his own private grief – the deaths of his best friend, his father, his brother and his first-born child. On the ceiling of his library he inscribed a phrase from Lucretius: ‘There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer.’

But finding his mind agitated rather than settled by this idleness, Montaigne began to write, giving birth to the ESSAYS – short prose explorations of an amazing variety of topics. And gradually, over the course of his writing, Montaigne rejects his stoical pessimism and turns to a new philosophy of existance. He erases the inscription from Lucretius and begins to embrace life in all its sensory, exuberant vitality, finding an antidote to death in the most overlooked places – the touch of a hand, the smell of his doublet, the playfulness of his cat and the flavour of his wine.

Saul Frampton offers a celebration of perhaps the most joyful and yet profound of all Renaissance writers, whose essays are the first sustained representation of humans consciousness in Western literature and went on to have a huge impact on Shakespeare, and whose thoughs, even today, offer a guide and an unparalleled insight into the simple matter of living.