Something to read for a while

 Montaigne, the master of the essay, said:

Learned we may be with another man’s learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.

 

Eric Hoffer said he came to Montaigne by happy coincidence. He’d finished the season as a migrant laborer and thought he might spend the winder doing some prospecting. He had a premonition he would be snowed in. So he went to a used bookstore and asked the owner for a big thick book, small type, no pictures. It didn’t matter what it was. He just needed something to read that would last a while.

As in all Hoffer’s tales, something wonderful happens. He’s snowed in. He finds a book that not only carries him through the winter but intrigues him for a lifetime.

Hoffer claimed to have learned what a sentence was by reading Montaigne in Florio’s translation.

I think Hoffer learned Montaigne’s habits of mind: to find a question that interested him, to consider what others had said about it and then make up your own mind.

I came to Montaigne through Hoffer, through his barely believable claim that an uneducated or badly educated person could get an education by reading one book.

Barely believable and somehow true.

• Sources: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993. The quotation is in “On schoolmasters’ learning,” p. 155.  Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born Feb. 28, 1533. Today’s a feast day in my calendar.