When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?

"When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. And when I am walking alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts are sometimes preoccupied elsewhere, the rest of the time I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me." --Montaigne In the year 1570, at the age of thirty-seven, Michel de Montaigne gave up his job as a magistrate and retired to his château 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." But 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...