| Michel de Montaigne |
My hero:
Michel de Montaigne
by Yiyun Li
He looked at everything with curiosity, and tried to make sense of everything he studied – for the benefit of his readers, says Yiyun Li
Saturday 13 November 2010
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othing comforts me more than the thought of living an unobserved life, and for at least an hour a day I achieve that, reading Montaigne's essays. It's good to know that in this Montaigne-land, which I discovered when I turned 30 and haven't abandoned since, I am a nobody. There are other nobodies, but one does not have to exchange pleasantries or small talk with them, nor does one have to worry about who owns what – in Montaigne-land, everyone owns each brick, each tree, every bird. Try as you might, you cannot possibly be in other people's way.