2016年4月7日 星期四

Michel de Montaign 1 533 – 1592)



Journey to Italy by Michel de Montaigne 1580-1581



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (/mɒnˈtn/;[3] French: [miʃɛl ekɛm də mɔ̃tɛɲ]; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592) was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes[4] and autobiography with serious intellectual insight; his massive volume Essais (translated literally as "Attempts" or "Trials") contains some of the most influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on writers all over the world, including Francis BaconRené Descartes,[5] Blaise PascalJean-Jacques Rousseau,Albert HirschmanWilliam Hazlitt,[6] Ralph Waldo EmersonFriedrich NietzscheStefan ZweigEric Hoffer,[7] Isaac Asimov, and possibly on the later works of William Shakespeare.
In his own lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that, "I am myself the matter of my book", was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne would come to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, "Que sçay-je?" ("What do I know?", in Middle French; now rendered as Que sais-je? in modern French). Remarkably modern even to readers today, Montaigne's attempt to examine the world through the lens of the only thing he can depend on implicitly—his own judgment—makes him more accessible to modern readers than any other author of the Renaissance. Much of modern literary non-fiction has found inspiration in Montaigne and writers of all kinds continue to read him for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal storytelling.



Portrait of Michel de Montaigne by Dumonstieraround 1578.
The Tour de Montaigne(Montaigne's tower), mostly unchanged since the 16th century, where Montaigne's library was located

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