STEFAN ZWEIG ON READING MONTAIGNE’S ESSAYS
“There is a select group of writers who are accessible to
anyone, at whatever age or stage of life – Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac,
Tolstoy – and then there are those whose significance is not properly revealed until
a particular moment. Montaigne is one of these. In order to recognize his true
worth, you should not be too young, too deprived of experience and life’s
deceptions, and it is precisely a generation like ours, cast by fate into the
cataract of the world’s turmoil, to whom the freedom and consistency of his
thought coveys the most precious aid. Only he whose soul is in turmoil, forced
to live in an epoch where war, violence and ideological tyranny threaten the
life of every individual and the most precious substance of that life, the
freedom of the soul, can know how much courage, sincerity and resolve are
required to remain faithful to his inner self in the time of the herd’s rampancy.
Only he knows that no task on earth is more burdensome and difficult than to
maintain one’s intellectual and moral independence and preserve it unsullied
through a mass cataclysm. Only once he has endured the necessary doubt and
despair within himself can the individual play an exemplary role in standing
firm amidst the world’s pandemonium.”
A TROPE FOR OUR TIME
