CHAPTER 1

There are a few writers who are open to everyone at every age and in every epoch of life – Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy – and then there are others who only reveal their full significance at a certain hour. Montaigne is one of them. One must not be too young – and not without experiences and disappointments – to be able to appreciate him properly, and his free and unflinching thinking becomes most helpful to a generation which, like ours for instance, has been thrown by fate into a cataractous turmoil of the world. Only he who has to live through a time in his own shaken soul, which threatens the life of the individual with war, violence and tyrannical ideologies, and within his life again the most precious substance, individual freedom, knows how much courage, how much honesty and how much determination are needed to remain true to his innermost self in such times of herd folly. Only he knows that no one thing on earth is more difficult and problematic than to preserve one's spiritual and moral independence untainted within a mass catastrophe. Only when one has doubted and despaired of reason – of the dignity of humanity – can one praise it as an act when an individual upholds himself in an exemplary manner in the midst of a world chaos.

I have experienced for myself that Montaigne's wisdom and greatness can only be appreciated when one is experienced and has been tested. When I picked up his"Essais" for the first time at the age of twenty, the only book in which he left himself to us, I honestly didn't know what to do with it. I did have enough literary and artistic sense to respectfully recognise that an interesting personality was making himself known here: a particularly clear-sighted and far-sighted person, a lovable man and, moreover, an artist who knew how to give each sentence and each dictum an individual character. But my joy remained a literary and an antiquarian joy; it lacked the inner ignition of passionate enthusiasm – the electric leap from soul to soul. Even the subject matter of the"Essais" seemed rather absurd to me and, for the most part, without the possibility of overflowing into my own soul. What did the Sieur de Montaigne's rambling digressions on the"Cérémonie de l'entrevue des rois" or his"Considérations sur Cicero" concern me as a young person of the twentieth century? How school-like and out-dated the French seemed to me, already heavily browned by time and peppered with Latin quotations. And even to his mild, tempered wisdom I found no relationship. It came too soon. For what was the point of Montaigne's wise admonition not to toil ambitiously, not to become too passionately entangled in the outer world? What could his appeasing urge to be temperate and tolerant mean to an impetuous age that does not want to be disillusioned and does not want to be calmed, but unconsciously only wants to be strengthened in its vital impetus? It is in the nature of youth that it does not wish to be advised to be lenient, to be sceptical. Every doubt becomes a hindrance to it, because it needs faith and ideals to trigger its inner impetus. And even the most radical and the most absurd delusion will be more important to it, provided it only fuels it, than the most sublime wisdom, which weakens its willpower.

And then – that individual freedom, whose most determined herald for all time Montaigne became – did it really still seem to us to need such stubborn defence around 190