Why did montaigne write in this way he had an unusual

Why did Montaigne write in this way? He had an unusual educa-
tion, learning to read and write in Latin before he did so in his native
French. He had read a lifetime’s worth of classical literature when he
was still very young. But this learning did not always console him.
“I would like to suggest,” he wrote, “that our minds are swamped by
too much study and by too much matter” (151). With minds stuffed
with knowledge, Montaigne argued, students did not learn to think
for themselves. “We know how to say, ‘This is what Cicero said’; ‘This
is morality for Plato’; ‘These are the ipissima verba of Aristotle.’ But
what have we got to say? What judgments do we make? What are we
doing? A parrot could talk as well as we do” (154). Montaigne also

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complained that the teachers of his day “keep us for four or five years
learning to understand words and stitch them into sentences; as many
more, to mold them into a great body, extending into four or five
parts” (189). Sound familiar? As a student, Montaigne had learned the
formal structures of classical rhetoricians, who also had their version
of the five paragraph essay, and Montaigne came to hate it. Tired of
having his head crammed with other people’s words, and tired of the
strict formalism he had been taught, Montaigne sought a way to write
that was informal, skeptical, and unsure.
Montaigne wasn’t the only person who wrote what we might call
“essays.” He may have coined the term in the sixteenth century, but
even centuries before, people were writing short nonfiction pieces
about their experiences and thoughts. In thirteenth-century Japan, for
example, Kenko wrote Essays in Idleness. The original Japanese title
reads, “With Nothing Better to Do” (29). “What a strange, dement-
ed feeling it gives me,” he wrote, “when I realize I have spent whole
days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at
random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head” (30).
Kenko wrote about a wide range of topics, including sexual desire,
longing for the past, board games, and parades. One of his shorter
pieces makes the strange claim that one “should never put the new ant-
lers of a deer to your nose and smell them. They have little insects that
crawl into the nose and devour the brain” (36). I don’t know whether
this is true, but it shows that even before the term “essay” existed, some
writers chose to “essay” about whatever floated into their minds.
In fact, essayists often write about small and minor things like
mashed potatoes and ketchup, sidewalk chalk, going for walks, turtles,
and even chasing after a hat that’s blowing away in the wind. Other es-
sayists take on more serious problems like alcoholism, migraine head-
aches, hunger, and other forms of suffering. Perhaps the only similarity
that these essays share is that they recount the authors’ own attempts
to understand their experiences. In these essays, the writers don’t start
with their conclusion; they think through what’s happening on the
page. And while these essays have an organization, they are not orga-