Montaigne had room for thumbs

I went looking through Montaigne’s table of contents and got stuck on thumbs.

Fear, friendship, death. Fair enough. You expect those at the philosopher’s table. But thumbs? I like that he pulled up a chair for them. Smells too. Drunkenness. Sleep. The clothes we wear and the things we keep putting off until tomorrow. Reading the list, I get the feeling I could turn up with whatever was bothering me that morning and we’d find somewhere to begin.

I’d asked for a list of everything he wrote about in the Essays, which is a hopeful thing to ask of a man who could start with one subject and wander into half a dozen others. A chapter title gives you a place to enter. After that, you follow him and see where you end up. Even the contents page had me wondering how much of my own life I leave outside the writing because I’ve decided it doesn’t belong.

Blogging can get strange like that. You build yourself a little patch of the internet, then start policing the gate. Does this fit? Is this what I write about? Meanwhile, I’m reading something that unsettles me, getting older inside a body with its own opinions, or following a conversation somewhere I hadn’t intended to go. I want to bring more of that in. I want room to think on the page before I know what I think, including room to contradict something I wrote last week.

So I’ve made a small, browsable version of his contents page. I’m approaching it in the spirit of a fellow wanderer, curious about what he made of the things he noticed. Open a leaf. Follow a title that catches you. There are 107 places to begin, and I’m still standing here looking at my thumbs.

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The Essays / 3 books / 107 starting points

A table of contents to wander through

Choose a book, then open a leaf. Each title links to its essay on HyperEssays. These English subject labels are paraphrases, not quotations or complete summaries.

Book I · 57 essaysBook II · 37 essaysBook III · 13 essays

Book I

Leaf 01 · Book I, essays 1–10

1. Reaching the same outcome by different means
2. Sadness and grief
3. Our feelings reaching beyond our own lives
4. Taking out our emotions on the wrong objects
5. Whether a besieged commander should leave his fortress to negotiate
6. The dangers of negotiations during warfare
7. Judging actions by their intentions
8. Idleness
9. Liars and lying
10. Speaking spontaneously versus speaking after preparation

Leaf 02 · Book I, essays 11–20

11. Predictions and prognostication
12. Steadfastness
13. Ceremonial meetings between rulers
14. How our opinions shape our experience of good and evil
15. The consequences of defending a position beyond reason
16. Punishment for cowardice
17. The conduct of ambassadors
18. Fear
19. Why a life’s happiness cannot be judged before death
20. Philosophising as learning how to die

Leaf 03 · Book I, essays 21–30

21. The power of imagination
22. One person’s gain being another’s loss
23. Custom and the difficulty of changing established laws
24. Different outcomes from the same policy
25. Pedantry
26. The education of children
27. The folly of measuring truth by our own understanding
28. Friendship
29. Twenty-nine sonnets by Étienne de La Boétie
30. Moderation

Leaf 04 · Book I, essays 31–40

31. Cannibals
32. Caution in judging divine purposes
33. Avoiding pleasures at the cost of one’s life
34. Fortune achieving what reason might have planned
35. A shortcoming in public administration
36. The custom of wearing clothes
37. Cato the Younger
38. Laughing and crying about the same thing
39. Solitude
40. Reflections on Cicero

Leaf 05 · Book I, essays 41–50

41. Refusing to share one’s glory
42. Inequality between people
43. Laws regulating luxury and expenditure
44. Sleep
45. The Battle of Dreux
46. Names
47. The uncertainty of our judgments
48. Warhorses
49. Ancient customs
50. Democritus and Heraclitus

Leaf 06 · Book I, essays 51–57

51. The emptiness of rhetorical display
52. The frugality of the ancients
53. A saying of Caesar
54. Pointless cleverness and subtleties
55. Smells
56. Prayer
57. Age

Book II

Leaf 07 · Book II, essays 1–10

1. The inconsistency of our actions
2. Drunkenness
3. A custom of the island of Ceos
4. Putting business off until tomorrow
5. Conscience
6. Practice and self-training
7. Honorary rewards
8. Parents’ affection for their children
9. Parthian weapons and armour
10. Books

Leaf 08 · Book II, essays 11–20

11. Cruelty
12. A defence of Raymond Sebond
13. Judging how other people face death
14. The mind obstructing itself
15. Difficulty increasing desire
16. Glory
17. Presumption
18. Being accused of lying
19. Freedom of conscience
20. The mixed nature of everything we experience

Leaf 09 · Book II, essays 21–30

21. Opposition to idleness
22. Postal couriers
23. Bad means used towards good ends
24. Rome’s greatness
25. Why one should not pretend to be ill
26. Thumbs
27. Cowardice as a source of cruelty
28. Everything having its proper season
29. Virtue
30. A child born with bodily abnormalities

Leaf 10 · Book II, essays 31–37

31. Anger
32. A defence of Seneca and Plutarch
33. The story of Spurinna
34. Julius Caesar’s methods of warfare
35. Three admirable women
36. Outstanding men
37. Children’s resemblance to their fathers

Book III

Leaf 11 · Book III, essays 1–10

1. Usefulness versus moral integrity
2. Repentance
3. Three kinds of companionship
4. Diversion
5. Reflections prompted by verses of Virgil
6. Coaches
7. The disadvantages of high rank
8. The art of conversation and discussion
9. Vanity
10. Managing one’s will

Leaf 12 · Book III, essays 11–13

11. People who limp
12. Physiognomy—judging character through appearance
13. Experience

Numbering follows the University of Chicago’s Montaigne Project. HyperEssays, where the reading links lead, also shows an alternative Book I sequence: the chapter on good and evil is I.14 here, I.40 in that sequence. Match the title if your edition’s number differs. Historical titles and attitudes can be unsettling; the label for II.30 is modernised here. This is a complete chapter list, not an index of every subject discussed.