To the journey

 LISTEN. In our Happiness reading today we find Montaigne audaciously telling the king that if he likes the book he must like the author. But is that so audacious? Of course books convey the core humanity of their creators. The good ones do, at any rate. Montaigne must have inspired Whitman's “This is no book, / Who touches this touches a man . . . ”

We noted of Kant, in CoPhi, that he'd never ranged further than forty miles from his native Konigsberg. But Susan Neiman reminds us what an ordeal it would have been, to traverse such "stony excuses for roads" in the 18th century. Travel must have been even more of an "extreme sport" in Montaigne's day, never knowing when you might happen upon plague or pirates... (continues)