The year is 1570, and we're in a forest on the outskirts of Bordeaux, in a France torn apart by violent and ceaseless religious civil war, Michel de Montaigne, a high-ranking legal councillor of the Parliament, and advisor to the royal court, a man who is rightly known today as the father of the Parliament and advisor to the Royal Court, a man who is rightly known today as the father of the

personal essay, though indeed I would go one further, and I would call this great Renaissance writer

the father of modern thought, and the close friend of all who read him, Montaigne, at the age of 37, has just been violently

thrown 12 feet from his horse. One of his servants had been showing off behind him, and his

powerful steed got away from him, and collided full pelt like a colossus

into the back of montaigne who is now torn and cut and bleeding profusely and judging from all outward

appearances he is dead not the best end to a life that up to this point had already been

filled with so much death, so much pain and trauma. Montaigne's 30s were quite the tragic

pageant. He had already suffered through the death of five of his six children.

He had suffered through the death of his brother. He had lost his best friend, who was very much

like a brother, and more recently, in the year before the horse riding accident, Montaigne had

suffered the death of his father. And that great

loss had ushered in a new cluster of stressful responsibilities as he was now tasked with managing

the family estate. Each death had compounded Montaigne's melancholy and increased his anxiety, and he found that he himself,

being so scared of death, was no longer truly living. But, though it looks bad for Montaigne, sprawled out

on the floor, this is not the end of his life. In fact, this is just the beginning.

Montaigne had completely lost consciousness after the collision, but after about two hours, his men

realized that he was still alive as he began to make violent movements. He was clawing at his clothes,

and he was throwing up bucketfuls of blood.

He may have been alive, but perhaps it would have been better that he had died given the extraordinary pain he was clearly in,

except he wasn't in pain. It would take several days for Montaigne to return to consciousness

and to remember what had happened, but he would recall later that his soul had gone elsewhere

...