I have no other marshal but fortune to arrange my bits. As my fancies present themselves, I pile them up; now they come pressing in a crowd, now dragging single file. I want people to see my natural and ordinary pace, however off the track it is. I let myself go as I am. Besides, these are not matters of which we are forbidden to be ignorant and to speak casually and at random.

From Montaigne’s Complete Essays, translated by Donald M. Frame, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1958, p. 297.