Since the dawn of humanity, first religion and then philosophy have tried in every possible way to answer the question of how to find happiness. A question that also worried the man whom the recently deceased Jorge Edwards, who dedicated his novel The Death of Montaigne to him, defined as "one of the freest men of all time."
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Ghibelline for the Guelphs and Guelf for the Ghibellines, or what is the same, a traitor to everyone. This is how Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) felt in France in the second half of the 16th century, poisoned by the fanatical religious struggles between Catholics and Huguenots. In that unbreathable climate, the humanist thinker, locked in his tower, gave birth to his seminal Essays, which, in addition to giving birth to an entire literary genre, continue today to question the reader who seeks to discover how to live a human life happily.
Relying on well-chosen fragments of the Montaigne corpus, Pablo Sol Mora (Xalapa, México, 1976), doctor of Hispanic Literature, literary critic and expert on the Golden Age, breaks down the keys to this personal, free and dispersed meditation and offers us to delve into in the thought of one of the greatest connoisseurs of the human soul.
"The subject of the book is myself," he says before beginning to break down the world through the tactic of looking into various mirrors: to the one who returns his own reflection, to memory and to all those past authors who did the same. Knowing that to philosophize is to doubt, Mointagne examines the world and does not consent to any dogma that cannot be subjected to examination.
That is, it explores the ideology of good sense, equanimity and humility. In this daring enterprise of painting himself, of knowing himself thoroughly and making himself known to others, Montaigne discovered the whole man: going out in search of himself, he found us all.
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