\"When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. And when I\nam walking alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts\nare sometimes preoccupied elsewhere, the rest of the time I\nbring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness\nof this solitude, and to me.\"\n--\"Montaigne\"\nIn the year 1570, \"\"at the age of thirty-seven, Michel de Montaigne gave up his job as a magistrate and retired to his chateau to brood on his own private grief--the deaths of his best friend, his father, his brother, and his firstborn child. On the ceiling of his library he inscribed a phrase from the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius: \"There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer.\"\nBut finding his mind agitated rather than settled by this idleness, Montaigne began to write, giving birth to the \"Essays\"--short prose explorations of an amazingly wide range of subjects. And gradually, over the course of his writing, Montaigne rejected his stoical pessimism and turned from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life. He erased Lucretius's melancholy fatalism and began to embrace the exuberant vitality of living, finding an antidote to death in the most unlikely places--the touch of a hand, the smell of his doublet, the playfulness of his cat, and the flavor of his wine.\nSaul Frampton offers a celebration of perhaps the most enjoyable and yet profound of all Renaissance writers, whose essays went on to have a huge impact on figures as diverse as Shakespeare, Emerson, and Orson Welles, and whose thoughts, even today, offer a guide and unprecedented insight into the simple matter of being alive.