Montaigne: The Art of Life

Live your own life rather than just live

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, 1890 (source: Wikipedia). Toulouse-Lautrec’s beauty lies in making art of everyday life. In the same way that Montaigne deemed anything worthy to write about, Toulouse-Lautrec captured the life around him no matter how trivial or whimsical it may have seemed.

If you read any of the new breed of self-help gurus — the “Silicon Valley Stoics”, the “brain-hackers” and futurists of our hyper-competitive age — you’d be led to think that life was a science.

Best-selling self-help authors give us advice riddled with the jargon of technology and high finance. They purport to teach us how to “optimize” our lives, “hack” our minds, how to “leverage” our gifts. Just as the child raised among wolves becomes half-wolf, successive generations are taking the electronic tools around us to be a model for human consciousness.

We see a warped reflection of our own humanity in the “black mirrors” we stare into every day. Some would have us believe the mind and body is just like a computer. With the right inputs, we can become more efficient at achieving our goals, even if our ideas of our goals — happiness, health, and wealth — are fuzzy and ill-conceived. Because many of us never have the time to consider what would really make us happy, we pin our hopes on what we’re told will do so.

Michel de Montaigne by Daniel Dumonstier, c. 1578. (source: Wikipedia)

For anybody who finds the idea that life is a science depressing, refuge awaits…