Four Essays by Michel de Montaigne – The Essays of Montaigne https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-essays-of-michel-de-montaigne-on.html are among The 100 Best Books of All Time - 10 out of 10

 Four Essays by Michel de Montaigne – The Essays of Montaigne https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-essays-of-michel-de-montaigne-on.html are among The 100 Best Books of All Time

10 out of 10

 

 

These essays are not just an immense pleasure to read but they are also inspirational, awe inspiring, offer readers wisdom of classics – Seneca, Socrates, Plato, Plutarch, Lucretius and others – that are often quoted by the majestic author, this is the best possible guide to life, and a rather complete one at that, with 1344 pages in all

 

One of the best rules for good living is that we should consider the end of life, for a happy life could be assessed only after it will have finished, we must try and consider character strengths and remember that ‘the happy man or woman is a virtuoso man or woman’ and at the end of the day, we must not say I have done nothing

Michel de Montaigne refutes that, writing that ‘you lived, that is enough, a good achievement in fact’, words to that effect, it is what, or how I remember it…we need to concentrate of the Character Strengths and you find a list compiled by Martin Seligman, co-founder of Positive Psychology and author of wondrous books

 

In Authentic Happiness https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/july-12th-from-authentic-happiness-by.html we find some of the virtues that we should cultivate, such as Love of Learning, curiosity, creativity, open-mindedness, perspective…in another cluster there is courage, integrity, vitality, resilience…for the next there are social intelligence, munificence, love…justice has teamwork, fairness and leadership

Transcendence includes hope, gratitude, spirituality, humor and appreciation of excellence and beauty and last but not least would be temperance, with forgiveness and pity, self-control, humility and modesty, prudence – if we nourish these traits, then we could quote Michel de Montaigne and say we have lived well

 

One other topic is Habits, how we get used with aspects of our lives – the author writes how his perfume stops being noticeable for him after some time – and here Aristotle offers us a splendid definition ‘we are what we regularly do, excellence is not an act, it is a habit’ and we could add to this from Tal Ben Shahar

Tal Ben Shahar is the Harvard Professor of Positive Psychology  https://realini.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-pursuit-of-perfect-by-tal-ben-shahar.html who said that, just like we wash our teeth two or three times per day, every single day, we must practice exercises that are necessary for the mind

 

Ergo, we have to create rituals, one would be to consider the strengths we have and insist on them, be generous, Tal Ben Shahar explains that being kind is ‘the most selfish thing you can do’, because it comes back, generating a virtuous spiral, you make somebody mirthful and he shows some gratitude, even if this is not the object

That will in turn increase your level of felicity and you get ever more munificent and so on…the care we have to show is so that we do not get to Hedonic Adaptation, the phenomenon through which we take the things we have for granted, thus, spending on experiences, travel is better than consumerism, for we ignore the material objects we keep accumulating

 

Another brilliant Harvard Professor, Daniel Gilbert, has looked at this Hedonic Adaptation in his Stumbling On Happiness  https://realini.blogspot.com/2013/06/stumbling-on-happiness-by-david-gilbert.html dismantling myths of happiness – we think that we would be merry, if only we were to move to California

It could also be on a Caribbean Island, Pacific – in my case, it used to be Corfu, maybe Crete, but knowing about the Myths of Happiness, I am not so sure anymore, however, if you have a space, I can crash into there, send a note – but the result is the same, after some months of joy, new arrivals get used to the good, and then notice the bad

 

One ingredient that we need to add to the habits that are analyzed by Michel de Montaigne is change, as defined by Tal Ben Shahar in his Lasagna Effect explanation – he loves this dish, especially the one made by his mother, but he could not eat it all day, every day, and something similar is included in another stupendous book

The Science of Happiness: How Our Brains Make Us Happy-and What We Can Do to Get Happier by Stefan Klein https://realini.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-science-of-happiness-how-our-brains.html has some overwhelming discoveries, rules to share, stories – one tells readers about some extraordinary letters, filled with euphoria

 

The enchanted letter writer was in…prison, this was Rosa Luxembourg, sharing her buoyancy, exhilaration, from within the walls of a jail…jumping from here to Tal Ben Shahar – who uses fragments from classic movies, Dead Poets Society, Pay It Forward, comedy stand ups, Seinfeld – there is the tale of the rabbi

One unhappy farmer comes to the rabbi for advice, because he is so gloomy, exhausted, and the rabbi asks if he has chicken and then he instructs the farmer to get them into the house, to the protest of the latter…well, the rabbi says, if you want my suggestion, you take the advice or you do not, this is what I have to offer

After a week, the poor man is told to put the horse in, then the cow, but at the end, after some weeks, when he is allowed to get the animals out, he tells the rabbi that life is a bliss now, which maybe suggests we must think of those who have it so much worse than we do, those in the wars of Ukraine, the Middle East…