COVID, Montaigne, and Attentiveness

For many people in my circle of care and friendship, COVID has brought a profound sense of loss, a sense of fragility. I feel that too, quite acutely. But perhaps, right there, is an opportunity for reorienting. Perhaps such a seeping sense of impermanence reasserts an existential truism common to many wisdom traditions—the centrality of attention and mindfulness to a good life.

As Bakewell’s splendid biography highlights, Montaigne's essays repeatedly point us to that theme, so much so that the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes him as someone who put "a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence" (60). Such a commitment to attentiveness only intensified as Montaigne got older. "Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, 'I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it…. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it" (61).

Few life-truths press upon us with greater alacrity, regardless of age. But how to grow into it?