This idea - writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity - has not existed forever. In How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer ( public library), British biographer and philosophy scholar Sarah Bakewell traces “how Montaigne has flowed through time via a sort of canal system of minds” and argues that some of the most prevalent hallmarks of our era - our compulsive immersion in various forms of lifestreaming, our incessant social sharing, our constant oscillation between introspection and extraversion as we observe our private experiences more closely than ever so we can record and frame them more perfectly in public - can be traced down to this one proto-blogger, the godfather of the essay as a genre: But this is an art best understood not as a set of prescriptive techniques but, per Susan Sontag’s definition of art, a form of consciousness - which means an understanding that is constantly evolving. “Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts,” Karl De Schweinitz wrote in his 1924 guide to the art of living.
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