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TIL that Michel de Montaigne was born in Château de Montaigne, Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, and he died in Château de Montaigne, Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne. Damn... this guy was rich, huh https://t.co/1J6egcau31
@visakanv I stayed in one of these chateaus this summer and it really helped me get a feel for this part of history. Now I'm reading about late 1800s Hungarian nobility and I feel like I have a backdrop for the story to play in my imagination.
during his lifetime he was "admired more as a statesman than an author", and people thought he was a self-indulgent digresser at age 38 he went into isolation for almost 10 years to get his writing done https://t.co/SVn75BSGCE
couple of years after he came out of his decade of self-imposed isolation and social distancing... new plague just dropped 😂💀 https://t.co/WSKDB1EA37
he died of quinsy – first i'm hearing of this, it's peritonsillar abcess... basically a bad mouth infection. yikes. for all his wealth, he didn't have access to antibiotics. these days you don't even need hospital admission for this. you just need Alexander Fleming, born 1881 https://t.co/S1J9CFqppL
my man michel figured out the problem with traditional schooling almost 500 years ago and we still here indoctrinating kids https://t.co/Zw1WgCptv6
he influenced Pascal, Emerson ("so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience"), Nietzche ("That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth"), Eric Hoffer. Some scholars suggest that Montaigne even influenced Shakespeare https://t.co/orYa0ph5ef
"If my humors happen to please some worthy man... he will try to meet me. I give him a big advantage... for all (the) long acquaintance and familarity could have gained for him in several years, he can see in 3 days in this record, and more exactly." https://t.co/xDaLzqcQh2
"achieving the highest honors, but preferring life alone in his library, and frequently retiring to do just that, only to be dragged back into politics actually by popular demand..." "it must have been as difficult as it was wonderful to be Montaigne" https://t.co/YaMmPSNGa4
"...our fine philosophical speeches may be only an outward show... But in this last scene between ourselves and death, there is no more pretence. We must use plain words, and display such goodness or purity as we have at the bottom of the pot." https://t.co/2Z67oioHqT
here's a catalogue of his ceiling beams: https://t.co/Sl8VL5U7uM there are several quotes from Sextus Empiricus, and several from Stobaeus's anthology (Plato, Euripides, Sophocles, Epictetus...) https://t.co/UoeqMzH8vG https://t.co/XrXYDQPamH
mischief https://t.co/1AM6rUFBTe
"Man is wholly and throughout but patchy and motley. Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice..." https://t.co/L3O6zHynvP
book thread https://t.co/IK1ieqCZda
@visakanv oh whoa, i had a peritonsillar abscess once. i went to the emergency room and they literally stabbed it! said if i hadn’t come in it would have blocked my airways within a few hours. they’re rare and we still don’t know much about them or why the occur