How to Live

Pick it up: If you enjoy intellectual exploration. If you are in a phase of life when you feel the need to self-reflect. We all ask the question in our heads often enough - but this is a book for when we are willing to put in serious time answering it.

This is a book that tries to answer a very fundamental question, How to Live?  Not how we should live, in the sense of morality, but how to live a good life, a fully human, satisfying, and flourishing one. Sarah Bakewell tries to answer this question through the medium of the life and writings of one man, Michael de Montaigne, the man who single-handedly created the literary genre of the essay, and gave it its name. This book is both philosophy and biography, and it makes for fascinating reading.

Montaigne was a French nobleman who, after serving as the mayor of Bordeaux, retired to live a more private, more reflective life, managing his estate, making wine, reading and writing. He was a memoirist, who, unlike other writers of his time, did not write about his own deeds and achievements, or the historical events of the day.

He wrote about himself and his experience of life. He examined his thoughts, his fears, and his reactions to different situations, and he wrote about them in a way that no one else had done before. He wondered about people, the way they lived, and why they did the things they did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human being going about his business, he wondered about himself.

The full title of this book is, How to Live: A life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. The book is divided into twenty sections. Each section offers a different answer to the question of How to Live? There is, obviously, no one correct or complete answer to this question. Each of the answers presented here comes at the question from a different angle.

Don't be afraid of death, pay attention to your life as it happens, question everything, learn to get along with others and to cope with loss, don't let habit cloud your awareness, learn to live temperately, reflect on yourself and your life, don't waste time on regrets, stop trying to control everything, make peace with being imperfect and so on.

None of this new or radical. Many people besides Montaigne have come to the same conclusions about living a good life. What makes this book different is the manner in which these ideas are presented. Each section tells a story about Montaigne's life, something that he did, or something that happened to him, that gave him an idea or led him to an insight.

This book is as much about Montaigne the person, as it is about what he believed and what he wrote. It's a biography, but not a linear one. In the first section we find the man in his thirties, having a near-death experience. It is in section three that we read about his childhood and his education. Section five finds him confronting the loss of one of his closest and most intimate friends.

Sarah Bakewell writes about each of these experiences in Montaigne's life and goes on to describe how the experience influenced his thinking and what he went on to say about it in his essays. This becomes the medium to answer the question, How to Live? She weaves together the threads of biography and philosophy with a great deal of skill. As you read, you get to know Montaigne. You get a close up look at this one person's life, and somehow, it becomes a look at yourself as well.