Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I share many a fascination, and one of them is Michel de Montaigne, who makes his appearance in Chapter Twelve, which is in praise of ignorance.[1] Delighted, I immediately searched for Montaigne in my magnum opus, where I found many references to the French sage stretching from 1980 to 2008. His love of ignorance has fascinated me all these years. As soon as I returned to Taleb, though, I read that Montaigne retired to his estate in the countryside of southwestern France at the age of thirty-eight to dedicate the rest of his life to his essays on all and sundry.[2] Having been a businessman, a magistrate, and even the mayor of Bordeaux, he had had enough of worldly affairs. To my shame, I was presently overwhelmed by envy. In fact, I was bursting with it. For crying out loud, he beat me to retirement by nearly two decades! It took me a while to simmer down, but my appreciation of Montaigne has only grown. In no time, too.

Addendum (February 19, 2011)

My beloved was at work when I finished this piece and posted it on the World Wide Web. “Check out my last bit of wisdom when you get a chance,” I send her a mobile-phone text-message. “It is about you, too.” She is forty-one, and work is not exactly her cup of tea. “He was dead by your age,” she replied soon afterwards. “No need for envy.” I checked Montaigne on Wikipedia at once. “You are right,” I responded to my beloved, “he was fifty-nine when he died.” Born in 1533, he died in 1592. “But he was retired for twenty-one year already,” I added. “Eh,” she wrote back a while later, “you will surely beat him here, as well!” At sixty-four, I have been fully retired for seven full years, and counting. “But,” I replied, “your own retirement is still pending!” To this she had little to say, except that we would talk about it when the time is right. Enough about retirement, though. Montaigne remains an example for me in many other, and much more important, ways. I will return to his essays as soon as I come back to Motovun, where his magnum opus is waiting in my library.

Footnotes

1. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, London: Penguin, 2010 (first published in 2007), pp. 190-200.

2. Op. cit., p. 191.