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Sarah Bakewell Biography

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“Montaigne and Shakespeare have each been held up as the first truly modern writers, capturing that distinctive modern sense of being unsure where you belong, who you are, and what you are expected to do. The Shakespearean scholar J. M. Robertson believed that all literature since these two authors could be interpreted as an elaboration of their joint theme: the discovery of self-divided consciousness.”

SelfLiteratureConsciousnessShakespeareMontaigne
Book:How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
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“If a child says, "I don't care about anything", that is not a sign of a wise child but of a troubled and depressed one. Similarly, adults who withdraw from the world soon get bored. Even lovers, if they retreat to their private love nest for too long, lose interest in each other. We do not thrive in safety and rest. Human existence means "transcendence", or going beyond, not "immanence", or reposing passively inside oneself. It means constant action until the day one runs out of thing to do - a day that is unlikely to come as long as you have breath.”

LifePhilosophyLife LessonsExistentialism
Book:At the Existentialist Café
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“As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance. [On witchburning in France during the 16th Century.]”

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Book:How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
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“Over the centuries, this interpretation and reinterpretation creates a long chain connecting a writer to all future readers- who frequently read each other as well as the original. Virginia Woolf had a beautiful vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how "minds are threaded together- how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's & Euripides... It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind." This capacity for living on through readers' inner worlds over long periods of history is what makes a book like the 'Essays' a true classic. As it is reborn differently in each mind, it also brings those minds together.”

Interpretation Of Literature
Book:How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
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