Status Updates From Il gatto di Montaigne

And with this Montaigne's essays grow out of their stoical adolescence – their obsession with battlefield and military tactics – and instead begin to explore the mindset of friends and enemies, animals and cannibals, Catholics, Protestants and Jews – even asking himself ‘When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?’

Montaigne’s essays thus bring with them an acceptance of variation and difference, but a difference built around our similarities in the first place. He collects Brazilian love songs from the New World, making him perhaps the first fan of world music. He admires the Turks’ provision of hospitals for animals and wonders whether elephants have a religion. His scepticism arrives at sympathy rather than certainty.