I’ve been having fun posting lines from whatever Montaigne essay I happen to be reading. The latest:

“Perhaps we really do live in a time which begets nothing but the mediocre.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

I like posting quotes like this without context or commentary, because people read into it all sorts of things, like, I quote, “bro living in the midst of the actual Renaissance.”

The major jolt I get from reading Montaigne is that over and over again this guy from 400 years ago has thoughts that I could be having right now.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” wrote James Baldwin, “but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

This is one of the great appeals of breaking bread with the dead.

And what is more comforting than realizing the feeling you’re having was had by someone so alien in space or remote in time?

My favorite example is from the afterword to Steal Like an Artist:

I’ve always wondered if Abraham Lincoln actually said, “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”

Here’s a little snippet from a 1924 — public domain! — book called Wit and Humor of Abraham Lincoln: Gathered from Authentic Sources (something about that subtitle makes me more suspicious, not less!)