Trying

Middle age is a good time to start reading Montaigne. He (1533-1592) was middle aged when he wrote his Essays (1580), and more than four centuries later they give a picture of someone who could very well be alive today. Not only did he start a whole new form of literature, but could he have been the world's first blogger? He kept revising his thoughts, throwing in the new ones regardless of contradictions.

A series of essays on his Essays, available on the Guardian website, includes this passage:

"More editions came out, and he left annotated copies for a vast posthumous one. He seems to have amazed even himself: "Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?"

"He preferred not to repent of choices he had made either in literature or in life. His past selves each had their own voice, even if the new Montaigne no longer understood them. Thus, within a paragraph or two of the Essays, we may meet Montaigne as a young man, then as an old man with one foot in the grave, and then again as a middle-aged mayor bowed down by responsibilities. We may listen to him complaining of impotence; a moment later we see him young and lusty and bent on seduction. "I do not portray being", he wrote; "I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another … but from day to day, from minute to minute." His let his thoughts lie where they fell."

By middle age, you expect your personality to be pretty much formed, but Montaigne didn't view things this way. The writing continued to re-form his personality; by examining himself and his world, he was forced to live differently.

And so it goes with blogging: "I know what I think when I hear myself speak".