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…