Memory and Experience

Abstract

During the final period of his life, Michel de Montaigne produced a series of essays which have become famous for their shrewd insight, practical wisdom and digressive, conversational style. They covered a wide range of topics, but their key underlying topic was Montaigne himself. In writing them, what he was studying most of all was his own self, his own formation and development as an individual subject: ‘I am myself the matter of my book’. His reading and thinking were assessed against his own experience, but never egocentrically, never as a means of burnishing his own opinions or stoking his pride. As he reflected on his experiences and the contingent, unpredictable ways in which he understood himself through them, he drew on past events and his own memory, defective though he felt it to be, at one point citing Terence: I am full of cracks and leaking everywhere.1 ‘On Experience’, the last essay of the third volume of the essays, begins with the acknowledgement that experience and the memory by which it is recalled are both finite and fragmentary, and this has to be the basis for how we proceed, with the mind always stretching out and trying to exceed its capacities.