< p>Before you, reader, is a book written in good faith. I immediately warn you at the beginning that I wrote it solely for personal and private purposes. I did not consider serving you or promoting myself. My abilities were not up to such a task. […] I want my book to show me as I am, in a natural and everyday way, without pretense or embellishment…
This is how Michel de Montaigne, a French Renaissance writer, philosopher, and translator, wrote in the introduction to his work Essays. He wrote in a completely unique style. He loved ancient literature, history, philosophy, and these were the sources of his thoughts. He was beloved among great writers and thinkers from his time to the present day.
He was born in 1533 in a wealthy family, near Bordeaux. He spent the first years of his life in the countryside with a nanny and a tutor who taught him Latin before French. At the age of six, he went to the famous College de Guyénne, and after ten years, he went to college where he studied humanities. Nothing about Marca Antoinea Mureta. According to some sources, he also studied law.
He found inspiration for writing in biographies of famous people from the past, friendship, old customs, human judgment, parenting, he wrote about prayer, glory, freedom of conscience and self-confidence, about feelings, repentance and experience, about virtues such as courage and flaws such as laziness, vanity and emptiness of speech and words.
There is nothing that nature directs us more towards than socializing. That’s why Aristotle says that creators of good laws care more about friendship than justice. And the highest point of perfection is in this: all those friendships that are forged or sustained by passion or desire for gain, public or private service, are therefore less beautiful and noble, so they are less friendships because they mix other motives, other purposes and other fruits, and all that is not true friendship. […]
And that between children and parents will be rather respect. Friendship is nourished by bonds. There can’t be friendship between them due to the significant difference between them, and it would certainly go against natural obligations. Not all paternal thoughts can be transmitted to children, as they would result in inappropriate intimacy, and neither can warnings and reprimands, which are the first obligations of friendship, come from the child to the father. […]
Father and son can have completely different natures, just like brothers. He is my son, he is my brother, but he is a terrible person, evil or foolish. In addition, as friendship is the one imposed by law and natural obligation, there will be less of our choice and free will in it.[…]
We cannot compare the love for a woman to that… I admit, her ardor is more powerful, it burns more and is more bitter. However, that ardor is blind and fickle, whimsical and changeable, an ardor of embers, subject to ascent and waning, which holds only a part of us. In friendship, everything is different: it is general and comprehensive ardor, moderate and uniform, constant and measured, all in gentleness and smoothness. There is no harshness or pain. […]
In friendship, one enjoys as much as it demands; friendship is nurtured and nourished, and it does not grow solely in enjoyment, because it is something that belongs to the soul, and the soul is strengthened by its duration.
Old Menander said that a man is fortunate if he has succeeded in encountering only the shadow of a true friend. He surely had the right to say that, even if he himself had experienced true friendship. Because, truly, if I compare the rest of my life, although I have lived it, thank God, in peace and abundance, and if I exclude the loss of such a friend, devoid of heavy calamities, and in the fullness of inner peace, content with my innate and natural capabilities, never seeking others; if I compare, therefore, that whole life with those four years that were given to me to enjoy the dear presence and company of that person, everything else is smoke, a dark and monotonous night. Since the day I lost him […] I lead a miserable life, and even the pleasures that are offered to me, instead of comforting me, only increase it further.