'Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your time on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore farewell.'
And so begins French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne's Les Essais, a forensic and at times eye-popping examination of himself. There's a small Gallic shrug as he gazes straight at his reader — it's all about me, so see you later.
It's cheeky, but for my money, he gets away with it — I can't help running after him as he walks off to his tower study. Like hundreds of thousands before me, I've fallen for him already.
What is it about Montaigne? Why am I seduced by a small, provincial Frenchman who lived near enough to 500 years ago, and only wants to talk about himself? Why has he stimulated and fascinated so many through the centuries? I'm finding it difficult to answer because Montaigne is so resistant to categories, so hard to fix as a character. For someone who claims to have written all about himself, he is elusive.
And that is partly the point. To even try to pin down Montaigne, to organise him, seems an anti-Montaignan exercise. He saw himself, and by extension, human beings as in a state of constant flux. 'I am unable to stabilise my subject: it staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness ... I am not portraying becoming, but being.'
His sense of a self that can never truly see itself is the beginning of modernism, the beginning of the idea of the self as a construction.
Once in Paris I went to an exhibition of self-portraits by Van Gogh, Matisse, Magritte, Kahlo and many others. They were astonishing, but what struck most was a sentence in the exhibition notes, 'I have never seen my face'. It was both obvious and a startling revelation.
Of course we never see our own face, only a reflection. Any portrayal of the self has to be a layered and messy reflection rather than a few spare and beautiful lines. How can it be anything else when we never see our face, and when the mirrors we gaze in are tinted, cracked, murky?
This is what Montaigne knew; observing the self must always be a hall of mirrors exercise, fragmentary, reflecting infinitely.
It's partly this uncertainty that I find so appealing. I have always felt guilty about an inability to commit to any belief system, any