All in all, Louis Theroux is an interesting person. He looks and acts like a wooden Englishman, but due to this, I feel he often gains access to the most bizarre people, whether they be neo nazis, UFO addicts, prostitutes, former cult members, Ike Turner (!) or porn stars; Louis covers it all.

It’s basically a bunch of conversations with people that he met during a stint ten years prior to writing this book. He wondered what had happened to some of them since, so he looked them up.

And indeed, they are still weird. And some are quite demented:

We drove up a rough driveway through a pine forest, past a sign saying “Whites Only,” into a clearing with a church and a guard tower and scattered mobile homes. The walls of the pastor’s office were lined with racist leaflets in metal holders. Cold and cluttered, it was like the office of an underfunded charitable organization, albeit one dedicated to the eradication of world Jewry. A pair of German shepherds called Hans and Fritz prowled around. There was a stack of flyers with Adolf Hitler wearing a Santa Claus hat.

…

At one table, hearing that I was from England, the talk turned to David Icke, the Coventry City goalkeeper who reinvented himself as a New Age prophet. “Doesn’t he believe there are twelve-foot lizard people running the planet?” I asked. “He believes the reptilian people have an agenda here, that’s correct,” said Darrell, a success coach from Las Vegas. “But lizards?” “Reptilians,” Darrell said.

And then there’s great lucidity from the most odd people, as from UFO enthusiast Thor:

“I think our threats are much greater from our politicians than from extraterrestrials.” This turned out to be Thor’s new theme: the disaster of the Bush presidency. “Quite frankly, I’ve come to sympathize with the aliens. If they need the human crud we have on this planet to propagate, they’re welcome to it. I just wish they’d start by abducting Adolf Bush and his cronies. The guy did not win the election. If he was a president in Central America we would have invaded by now . . . We’ve got body bags coming back from a no-win war where all the people hate us. He’s a stumblebum moron. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a clone because his chip ain’t working right.” He said he lived an hour or two outside Vegas, in Nevada, in “an isolated location,” still with Liz. He didn’t seem averse to meeting up. We made a plan to go for coffee in September. We spoke for an hour or so, mainly about politics, finding much to agree on. That I should find so much political common ground with a one-time alien hunter struck me as curious.

From meeting “porn stars”:

“It’s an industry of lonely people in a crowd,” Bill Margold was saying. “They’re scared to get close to each other. You’re far better off having someone to sleep next to than having someone to sleep with, because you have to trust someone you sleep next to. I don’t think these people can maintain relationships. They don’t want to let their guards down long enough to get to know the people they’re having sex with, so they keep avoiding getting to know them by fucking them.”

On more white-power idiots:

A little later, we went out to a Mexican restaurant called Fiesta Guadalajara. I asked Jerry about Butler. “I like him but he’s getting old. And I think he’s going a bit senile. Sometimes when he’s speaking he’ll be in the middle of a story and he’ll forget what he was saying.” “What if he gets so senile that he forgets who he’s supposed to hate?” I said. Jerry ignored this remark. “I suppose there won’t be any Mexican food in the whites-only homeland,” I said. “Hmmm, I’d never thought of that possibility,” Jerry said. He paused. “They wouldn’t be allowed to vote, but they could cook and clean for us. After all, we’re not extremists.” Jerry paused again. He made a Benny Hill face of coy mock-seriousness. Then he giggled: “Hee hee hee hee.”

On trying to maintain a hardcore image, the rapper David Banner:

Unlike Mello, Banner is someone with whom it is relatively easy to draw the line between persona and real person. On his albums he raps about pimping and stomping bitches, but he is in fact highly educated, a former schoolteacher and student-body president, who is, as he put it, “a semester and a thesis away” from his master’s degree. In between making tweaks on a track where the phrase “that’s why we get crunk in this bitch” was fractionally too low in the mix, Banner lamented the double standard that dictated that rappers should have experienced firsthand the episodes they describe in their raps. “You don’t go to Will Smith and see if he really can fly a flying saucer before he does Independence Day. And besides, the person who really did those things may not be the best storyteller.” And yet even Banner, with his studious bent, wasn’t immune to hip-hop machismo. He hinted that he might have a criminal background that he couldn’t reveal (“I would never tell about the things I really did”) and was a little sheepish about having been a teacher.

On what the Heaven’s Gate cult did days before committing mass suicide:

Having made money designing websites, the group splurged in its last few months on outings to the San Diego Wild Animal Park and Sea World and a UFO conference in Laughlin, Nevada. They kept itemized ledgers of all their expenditures. They traveled to Las Vegas, saw Cirque du Soleil ($2,661), gambled (winning $58.91), and ascended the Stratosphere, the second-tallest structure west of the Mississippi. Among their last acts, three days before the suicides began, was a group outing to see the Mike Leigh film Secrets and Lies.

On the racist band Prussian Blue, since then disbanded due to growing up:

The name Prussian Blue came a couple of years later. The girls read the name of the color in a magazine, April said—“and since their eyes are blue and my dad’s side of the family are Prussian Germans they thought it would be a good name for the group. Prussian Blue is also a compound that should be present in the residue left over from Zyklon-B and which is not present—get this—not present at the so-called ‘gas chambers’ in Auschwitz. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek.”

And a nice, introspective conclusion to it all:

I’d hoped the trip might be an opportunity for me to get in touch with my own weirdness. Without a camera, I wondered if I might become more immersed in my stories and therefore more open—forced to acknowledge my shadow side. But if anything, I found myself less susceptible to the call of the weird the second time round. The Nazis seemed more lamentable; the gangsta rappers more irresponsible; the gurus more manipulative. Instead of an inner weirdo, I was surprised to find an inner curmudgeon. Perhaps it’s understandable to be more jaded on one’s second exposure to something strange. I also suspect the protection of the camera and crew on my first TV-making sorties had allowed me, in a dilettante-ish way, to imagine I had more in common with my subjects than was really the case. In going back unarmed, as it were, I was forced to be more realistic. As Mello T himself said, when it comes to pimping he’d rather go to bed early and do a crossword puzzle. And yet in one important respect I did start to recognize a kind of weirdness in myself. Occasionally, I saw parallels between the seductions of some of the strange worlds I was covering and my own journalism. In reporting these stories over the years, maintaining relationships partly out of genuine affection and partly out of the vanity of wanting to generate “material” for a program or a book, I realized I too had created a tiny offbeat subculture, with its own sincerity and its own evasions. A little like a cult leader or a prostitute, I had been working in a gray area somewhere south of absolute candor . . . but like the other cults and subcultures contained in these pages, I have also been pleased to find a depth of feeling in our group. Though occasionally I’d been rebuffed by my old subjects, or shocked by their beliefs, and though I’d sometimes questioned my own motivations, in general I was more amazed by their willingness to put up with me a second time, and surprised by my affection for them. I’d been moved at times, and irritated, and upset, but the emotions had been real. This is my Weirdness.

All in all: nice if you want to see the innards of very weird worlds, and at its worst is like a freak show, where you are an enabler. Keep an open mind and get a few laughs and frights.

“I regularly receive letters now from people who had not even been born the last time I saw a sunset.”

Reading this book is akin to reading tomes from survivors of the concentration camps during the Second World War. Echols was abused by the law (both in jail and out of it) and by other adults, tortured, his eyesight was ruined for life due to spending years in solitary confinement, not to mention the fact that he was wrongfully imprisoned and his seemingly demented parents’ upbringing. Despite this, he has written a quite beautiful book with loads of disgusting, fulfilling bits, e.g.:

In the movies it’s always the other prisoners you have to watch out for. In real life, it’s the guards and the administration. They go out of their way to make your life harder and more stressful than it already is, as if being on Death Row were not enough. They can send a man to prison for writing bad checks and then torment him there until he becomes a violent offender. I didn’t want these people to be able to change me, to touch me inside and turn me as rotten and stagnant as they were. I tried out just about every spiritual practice and meditative exercise that might help me to stay sane over the years.

The book has been written over his entire jail term, and then a little. His journals have been stolen and even destroyed by the prison guards, which means that a lot of stuff has probably been rewritten just for this book.

Echols seems to have been an intelligent, seeking kind of child, who wanted to live life to the full, and hence, experience all types of things. Living in Arkansas, USA, as he did, must have provided a real strain on him, seeing that his neighbours and the police deeply frowned upon anything other than the ordinary (of course, that’s found anywhere that you also find people who love the word “normality” and desperately believe that being normal, whatever that is to them, is being Perfect). His own words:

If a man is a little too intelligent for the taste of the locals, he will soon find himself ostracized. Most don’t have either the self-discipline or the self-respect to better themselves, and they despise anyone who does, because it makes them feel small and inadequate. Unless you want to be the target of resentment you have to keep your head down and shuffle your feet along with the rest of the herd. The one thing above all else that is not tolerated is magick. Any trace of wonder or magick must be snuffed out at all costs. Then instead of mourning its loss, they’ll pat themselves on the back. Nothing can be mundane enough to suit the herd. Bland country faces in bland country places.

Yes, he was a seeker. And wanted excitement, just like any kid. He read a lot, partly because he was intrigued, but also because his family was extremely poor and referred to some people who lived in trailer areas as “rich people”:

Oddly enough, that same children’s book was where I first encountered Aleister Crowley. Now I know it was all propaganda, but at that young age I was amazed that someone could be so brazenly hedonistic and “sinful.” I’ve read much about this man and his life’s work over the years, and it’s incredible how people have misunderstood him. One of my favorite examples is his “How to Succeed / How to Suck Eggs” wordplay. It comes from chapter sixty-nine (wordplay: get it?), in which he talks about sexual practices; anyone not reading closely won’t pick up on the “suck seed” reference. His words have been misconstrued, twisted, taken out of context, and misunderstood continuously. If you don’t know the key with which to decipher him, then you’ll never understand what you’re reading. Others don’t even want to understand, and would rather use his name or image to sway and scare the ignorant, just as the prosecutor did during my trial.

He is today a catholic and zen buddhist, among other things. He writes the following about correspondence from idiots that he has received while in jail:

Most people who spew hatred aren’t very intelligent or motivated. They tend to be lazy, and if for some reason they are coaxed into picking up a pen, their messages are mostly incoherent and largely illiterate. Their spelling and sentence structure tends to be atrocious, so it’s hard to take offense at anything they’d say even when they do write. After all, if they’re not motivated or intelligent enough to research the simple spelling of a word in a dictionary, then you know they certainly aren’t going to take the time to research the case. Still, all in all, hateful people just don’t seem to like writing, I guess. Either that or there simply aren’t many people in the world who wish me anything but good fortune.


[…]


Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t think Jesus’ words were meant to be tied to a brick and chunked through your neighbor’s window at midnight. Anytime you drop a picture of Christ in the mailbox while muttering a self-righteous “This’ll teach ’em,” something has gone terribly wrong.

And while in school, suddenly a magazine meant a change of things, like music, friends and a little of a way of life:

One day a week during study hall we were allowed to spend thirty minutes in the school library. It was on one of these excursions that my life was drastically changed when I came across a superior literary publication called Thrasher. For those who don’t know, it was the skateboarding magazine. This was the first time I was exposed to the world of skateboarding. It wasn’t just an activity—it was a culture. I don’t remember seeing any skaters in our school, so I don’t know how the magazine found its way into those humble archives. That magazine became my bible. All I could think about was skating, and after months of begging I received my first skateboard for Christmas. It was a cheap, heavy thing, with no nose and very little tail. It was piss yellow, with a Chinese dragon graphic on the bottom. Definitely not the best of equipment, but it gave me my start. Day and night I did nothing but practice tricks and read Thrasher. I would stare at the ads for the new decks like a sex fiend in the porn section. I also became acquainted with a different world of music I’d never before heard of, and discovered The Cure, Dinosaur Jr., Primus, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and many other classics.

His words on momentum in jail are beautiful:

I can vaguely remember life in what I call the real world. It seemed to be a chain of events that flowed one into another, not always seamlessly but at least naturally. There is nothing natural about my current situation. Nothing flows—or even moves—without someone applying a tremendous amount of willpower to one of reality’s pressure points. Even then, it’s like trying to keep a beach ball aloft just by blowing on it. Life without momentum is not truly life. A person needs movement, or they eventually begin to forget that they even exist.

His school life progressed more:

I completely quit skating and became what people now call “goth,” though I had never heard the word, and there were no goths in our school. I did what I did because it was aesthetically pleasing to me. In addition to Slayer, Testament, and Metallica, my musical taste expanded to include things like Danzig, The Misfits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Depeche Mode. All the old skateboarding posters disappeared from my room and were replaced with old prints I found in odd books. Most of them looked a great deal like images from Goya’s etchings and sketches. I caught a couple of filthy, vindictive pigeons and allowed them to fly around the room as they pleased.

He’s really funny at times as well:

My sister could not sing to save her life, but that never stopped her from trying. The problem was that every song sounded the same as the last one when it came from her mouth. My mother said it was because she was hard of hearing, but I have my doubts. I’m more inclined to believe it was simply a lack of talent, but no mother wants to tell her daughter she sounds like a bag of cats being beaten with a stick. Michelle was allowed to join the school choir only because the policy was to refuse no one who signed up.

A police named Jerry Driver continually harassed Echols, ddeperately trying to get him to feel uncomfortable, trying to pin various crimes on him, and actually got him admitted to a mental institution. Later, Echols was imprisoned for being in an abandoned bus, and was sent to jail:

I was chained and shackled for the entire trip. When we arrived, the other patients were quite disturbed by the sight of me. Some later confided that they had believed I must be a madman of the highest order to require all the restraints. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when mental patients question your sanity.

Still, he was a seeker. And he tried to check out christianity:

I turned to leave and heard someone call out, “Hey! I want to talk to you for a minute!” The preacher was staring at me without blinking as he approached. He stood before me with crossed arms, not offering to shake my hand. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a pin on my jacket. It was the iron cross from the cover of the Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction. “That some sort of satanic thing?” I told him it most certainly was not, but he still looked dubious. “I don’t want you coming here making people uncomfortable.” He looked like he was working himself up into a state of anger. “Don’t worry, I won’t be back.” I walked away, still trying to figure out what it all meant.

When the three children were murdered:

Instead of conducting a real murder investigation and checking the forensic evidence, the police started immediately chasing stories of black-robed figures that danced around bonfires and chanted demonic incantations. Beginning that day, that’s all anyone talked about. The entire town was petrified because they were convinced hell had broken loose in Arkansas. Every redneck preacher in the area was preaching sermons about how we were in the “end times,” so you better get right with God or else the devil would come for you, too. You must keep in mind that this is a state in which one out of every four people can’t read above a fifth-grade level. Ignorance breeds superstition. People believed these stories and helped them grow. After being shown my picture, one man swore to the police that I had caused him to levitate. Another swore that the police told him they had found body parts under my bed. These sorts of stories passed for investigation. The constant harassment continued to escalate. Within days, instead of coming to my house they were taking me to the police station. It was easier for them to play good cop, bad cop there. One of them (usually Sudbury, whose breath smelled as if he ate onions morning, noon, and night) would get in my face and scream, “You’re going to fry! You may as well tell us you did it now!” The other cop would then pretend to be my friend and act as if he were rescuing me from Sudbury’s “wrath.” I was only a teenager, and the whole thing looked pretty pathetic even to me.

And in the middle of it all, Echols spews forth the following weird phrenological thing, that seems to be from Hitler’s 1940s:

He had no neck, and his nose was turned up like a snout. I’ve learned over the years that sooner or later a person’s physical appearance comes to resemble whatever is in their heart.

On his court-appointed lawyer:

The same court that was putting me on trial was also paying my lawyer. Look at it this way—are you going to employ someone who makes you look stupid and rubs your face in your own mistakes? No. You’re going to pay the guy who knows his place and sticks with the program. These guys get paid the same amount whether they win or lose, so why try too hard? Later, during the trial, when I asked why they didn’t push a point or challenge a ruling, they answered, “We have to work with the judge on a daily basis and don’t want to piss him off.”


[…]


“Beyond a reasonable doubt” disappeared, and “Innocent until proven guilty” had left the building. Once they go through all that trouble to accuse and arrest you, you’re going down unless you’ve got a couple million dollars on hand to hire some real gunslingers to come to your aid. I was a fool back then, though. Still wet behind the ears. I thought the purpose of the justice system was to see that justice is done. That’s the way it works on TV. While I was counting on divine intervention, they were plotting my demise.

Yes, on the importance of reading:

My father or grandmother would bring me five paperback books from a local secondhand bookstore every week, and I’d usually have read them all by their next visit. I had always loved reading, but at that point those books became my only way to forget about the nightmare of my life. I would hide in them and go someplace else for hours at a time. The other guys were amazed by how much and how quickly I could read. It was a trend that has continued to this day. I’ve read a few thousand books over the time I’ve been locked up. Without books, I would have gone insane long ago.

He doesn’t write much about the details of the crimes or his case, which is intelligently put:

It would be redundant to go over every detail, because the murder case and the trials have been documented at length in four documentaries and several books—in fact, you can read more about the proceedings at damienechols.com, wm3.org, freewestmemphis3.org, or at my publisher’s website. Many of the details that came to light during the trial I wasn’t informed about until much later, and much of the evidence (or lack thereof) that finally established my innocence was not found or introduced until many years after this time.

After being sentenced to death row he ended up in prison:

Gene was a remarkable artist, and I once saw a canvas he had painted to look like a giant dollar bill. If you looked closely, you’d notice it wasn’t George Washington in the middle, it was Jesus. Look even closer and you’d realize Jesus had a penis for an ear..


He told me everything I needed to know in order to move and operate within the system. He also sold me my first radio. After not hearing music for a year, Lynyrd Skynyrd sounded like a choir of angels.

On people caring about his case:

On a daily basis I started receiving letters and cards from people all over the country who had seen the film Paradise Lost, and were horrified by it. The overwhelming sentiment was, “That could have been me they did that to!” If you are to understand the impact this had on me, you have to understand that up until that point I had received no sympathy or empathy from anyone. Everywhere I turned, I found nothing but disgust, contempt, and hatred. The whole world wanted me to die. It’s impossible to have any hope in the face of such opposition. Now I was suddenly receiving letters from people saying, “I’m so sorry for what was done to you. I wish there was something I could do to help.” A single letter like that would have been enough to kindle a tiny spark of hope in my heart, but I received hundreds. Every day at least one or two would arrive, sometimes as many as ten or twenty. I would lie on my bunk and flip through the letters, savoring them like a fat kid with a fistful of candy, whispering, “Thank you. . . . Thank you,” over and over again. I clutched those letters to my chest and slept with them under my head. I had never been so thankful for anything in my entire life.

On which people have actually been sentenced as murderers and their mental skillset:

I’ve never come across a single murderer who possessed the mental faculties required to fully comprehend the horror of what they have done.

…and of some of the actions of these people:

Nu-Nu shot and killed a man in a coin-operated laundry. When the cops came to investigate they found a security tape with footage of Nu-Nu break-dancing around the body.

…and of how the state actually tried to make people sane enough in order to legally murder them:

Another potentially dangerous schizophrenic was recently executed after spending twenty-two years on Death Row. He was here so long because he had been judged too insane to execute. The state finally medicated him so that he would be sane enough to appreciate the fact that he was about to die. There was no question about his insanity for those who met him. I’d known it since the day he spit in my face and accused me of giving him ingrown toenails. He was still screaming at me as the guards took him to the hole.

Quotes:

One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from Oscar Wilde. When someone asked him if he believed in God, his response was “No, I believe in something much bigger.”


[…]


Someone sent me a letter that had one of the best quotes I’ve ever read. It said “What is to give light must endure burning.” It’s by a writer named Viktor Frankl. I’ve been turning that quote over and over in my head. The truth of it is absolutely awe-inspiring.

On prison regulations:

Many people have asked me why I cut my hair. The answer is because I didn’t have a choice. One day the prison decided it was a “security risk” if my hair were to touch my ears or my collar. If I refused to let them cut my hair, I would be thrown in the hole for thirty days, my visits would be taken for one year, and I would not be allowed to use the phone for one month. Same deal with facial hair. Sideburns that extend beyond mid-ear are “detrimental to the order and discipline of the unit.”

There is much to this book. It is among the better autobiographies I have ever read. Even though there is a tinge of “I’m better than you”, it’s still not like that. Echols has experienced so much in his relatively short existence, and he seems not to be filled with hatred or bitterness, but has in fact tried to change his life to one of enjoyment. I know he wants to move on and leave the past behind him. I hope he can succeed at that, and live a long and healthy life – and finally get exonerated by the state of Arkansas, where a terrible injustice still brews, until Echols and his two companions are declared completely innocent from the murders they are sentenced for.

Highly recommendable for all.

As revenge films go, this is more of a mashed-up tribute than an original work. I have always loved Tarantino’s dialogue, but this feels more like a pastiche of “Inglourious Basterds” than anything else. The plot is thinner than a wafer, and still, it’s fun and easy to like. Foxx’s character gets trumped by Waltz (more due to the script than anything else) and they’re funny and loveable together. Sum total maximum? The adage: xenophobia is idiocy and should be combatted for as long as you breathe.

For me, this film touched a nerve. A relationship between two people displayed non-chronologically, all over the place – it’s disgusting, lovely, horrid, sweet, funny and awful. Excellent direction and acting.

A German film on the life of a family, starting a few seconds after the ending of the Second World War, it focuses on the near-imaginary way of thinking in children – and, indeed, delusionally speaking in nazis – while being forced to grow up at an extremely fast pace. It’s a dreamy way to wake up. I shan’t say more about the plot or progression, but hard as it is to keep a non-Hollywood film afloat, this film is both airy and highly lucid. Very recommendable.

If I were 12 years old, I’d be ecstatic about this film: fables, monsters, heroes, weird worlds… I’d give it 9/10, if not full marks. But here, it’s simply nice if you can look beyond the obvious signs of racism, nationalism and xenophobia.

I did an NME cover with Morrissey once, and Morrissey said, ‘To some people I’ll always be Morrissey from The Smiths, no matter what else I do. And you’ll always be Carl from The Libertines.’

Yes, but these are not the words from a panicked man, even though Carl Barât seems to be frazzled and afraid at times. In a good way, because he lets his emotions go and reveals himself as another person than the confident man onstage, as he says he often comes across as, according to other people.

He writes about his special relationship with Peter Doherty, about the greatness, of the “brown” and other drugs that helped to spoil it all (even though all of the responsibility of that use is of course due to Peter himself), and at the very end, on how they reformed. That actually makes this book seem rushed, as though a deadline was set. I’d love to have read more about the Libertines’ reformation after the fact, but then we have Roger Sargent’s visual documentary, “There Are No Innocent Bystanders”, for that.

Barât delves into what made him and Doherty gel, love and live. The former’s heroes – notably Oliver Reed and David Niven – are referred to but mainly, this tome is a book on his own life.

Even though he’d ultimately kick my door in and try to steal my stuff, Peter gave me security and confidence to go out and do that, to believe that I could go out on a limb, even in prosaic, financial matters. When we were really firing on all cylinders and were together then it really felt like no one could touch us, and that nothing else mattered. As much as I try to deflect it, play it down and be English about it, there was a very powerful romance and beauty to our friendship.

Yes, and it spawned The Libertines’ brilliant first album with a very good second one.

All in all: reflecting on some Days of Yore while his girlfriend expects their first child, having disbanded Dirty Pretty Things and en route to releasing his debut album, Barât has written a scattered yet very honest book about his life, mostly his musical life, that is.

One of Ozon’s better films. From the eyes of a self-confessed bitter school teacher, a young student is repeatedly berated and goaded to write a page a day on what is happening in his life. The teacher and his wife are involved, and the story unravels. Great tempo, good interaction, and as usual with Ozon, everything feels otherworldly.

In one of the logs that I use to note and review books there are “tags”. These tags are words and terms used to describe the book, e.g. “analysis”, “philosophy” and “war”. I’ve I have never attributed a book so many tags as I have used here, and I’m not exaggerating a single thing.

This book is about Michel de Montaigne, a sixteenth-century nobleman who wrote down his thoughts and ideas in ways that very few other people had done so far. This book provides a somewhat chronological walk through the life of Montaigne, while issuing 20 attempts to twist the question “How to live?” as seen through his ways and eyes, and while being fairly complex, it’s extremely simple to read. And I think a huge portion of why it’s so accessible and laudable, is because it’s unique and understandable:

From page 293 in the book, where Bakewell describes how Marie de Gournay felt when she discovered Montaigne’s “Essays”:

Some time in her late teens, apparently by chance, she came across an edition of the Essays. The experience was so shattering that her mother thought she had gone mad: she was on the point of giving the girl hellebore, a traditional treatment for insanity – or so Gournay herself says, perhaps exaggerating for effect. Gournay felt she had found her other self in Montaigne, the one person with whom she had a true affinity, and the only one to understand her. It was the experience so many of his readers have had over the years:


How did he know all that about me? (Bernard Levin)


It seems he is my very self. (André Gide)


Here is a ‘you’ in which my ‘I’ is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished. (Stefan Zweig)

Time and time again, Montaigne struck me as quite marvellous, simply because of his reasoning; he maintained that everything should be experienced with fresh eyes no matter how many times it has been seen before. And also, he believed that everything should be questioned. Yes, everything, but with a purpose.

As Virginia Woolf was, according to Bakewell, prone to quote, this is a line from Montaigne’s last essay:

Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.

In his writing about everything, his examinations of everything, people who read his gigantic work – which I have yet not read – seem to love and critique it, simply because Montaigne continually examined his own flaws, errors and problems – and he stirs, and quickly traipsing from one subject to another in his writing, by following a trail of thought – not because he’s trying to be difficult, but rather because he is human; I believe he was truly trying to discover what being human was about, and I think that’s why people love his writing, not to forget his fantastic, amazing and provoking reason. All of this is superbly put into historical context by Bakewell; when Montaigne questions that he could have been killed for, it’s clear to see that he meant what he said and did (also, while being flawed enough to go against himself at times; what the hell, he was human and knew it).

Another quote from this book:

But Montaigne offers more than an incitement to self-indulgence. The twenty-first century has everything to gain from a Montaignean sense of life, and, in its most troubled moments so far, it has been sorely in need of a Montaignean politics. It could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgement, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict. It needs his conviction that no vision of heaven, no imagined Apocalypse, and no perfectionist fantasy can ever outweigh the tiniest of selves in the real world. It is unthinkable to Montaigne that one could ever ‘gratify heaven and nature by committing massacre and homicide, a belief universally embraced in all religions.’ To believe that life could demand any such thing is to forget what day-to-day existence actually is. It entails forgetting that, when you look at a puppy held over a bucket of water, or even at a cat in the mood for play, you are looking at a creature that looks back at you. No abstract principles are involved; there are only two individuals, face to face, hoping for the best from one another.

Perhaps some of the credit for Montaigne’s last answer should therefore go to his cat – a specific sixteenth-century individual, who had a rather pleasant life on a country estate with a doting master and not too much competition for his attention. She was the one who, by wanting to play with Montaigne at an inconvenient moment, reminded him what it was to be alive. They looked at each other, and, just for a moment, he leaped across the gap in order to see himself through her eyes. Out of that moment – and countless others like it – came his whole philosophy.

This book is radiant, a marvellous excursion for a Montaigne neophyte like myself, and I recommend this to everybody.

This film is a mixture of kitchen sink, compressed drama, an open mind, brilliant direction, very strong acting, a laudable script and wonderful colours. I loved the tempo. The story flowed. You laugh, maybe cry, you’re angry, the characters speak to you. It said a lot to me about my life. It’s very carnal and now, and this film will probably seem relevant to a lot of people for a very long time. Highly recommendable.

The only bad thing about it would be the aspect of false accusations. Even though they exist, it’s interesting to see facts about it: http://theenlivenproject.com/the-truth-about-false-accusation/