The Draft You Keep Current
A siege yields to tears in one story and to stubbornness in the next. Montaigne opens by stacking cases until the tactic manual collapses. The first essay is not a lesson in how to surrender. It is a lesson in how little you know about the mind doing the surrendering, including your own.
Key Insight
Self-examination starts when you stop expecting a single move to work twice. If people are fickle, you are people. The first honest page is admitting you misread rooms as often as they misread you.
“Man is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.”Full analysis
