![]() ‘Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book,’ he opens, with a letter of warning about the 1,000-plus pages that follow: ‘you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.’ Since I took my dad to be also involved in so vain and frivolous a subject – namely, himself (right down to the urinary tract diagrams he drew for me on paper napkins at the dinner table) – I figured they’d have a lot in common. His writings, autobiographical in nature but highly argumentative, have survived him as somewhat radical (for the time) self-experiments. By all accounts, it was a happy one, at least if his Essais (1570-92) – rangy discourses on varied subjects from thumbs to cannibals to the nature of ‘experience’ itself – are anything to go by. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92) lived a good, long life for a man in early modern France. ‘I love you.’ When that didn’t help, I sent him some Montaigne. ‘But Dad,’ I said, for the first time in our 32-year relationship. ![]() ![]() ‘Dorian,’ he said, one morning over breakfast, the grapefruit cut up indeed with his special knife, ‘I hate myself.’ He was 86 years old and, I felt, nearing the end of life, so I took it upon myself to help him die as well as he could, a kind of Ars moriendi for the old man. ![]() By the time his health really started failing, his arthritis so bad he could no longer get out of bed, his condition became all he complained about. He used to complain about the slightest thing being out of place – a pen, the honeypot, his special knife with the fattened grip. ![]()
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