ABSTRACT
Michel de Montaigne speaks of having begun the Essays as an act of infidelity, betraying his own otherwise changeable and melancholic nature. Montaigne’s use of agricultural imagery in the formulation of his ideas on the work of the artist has been given considerable attention by Carol Clark, in particular, on the question of the respective contributions of nature and nurture to a good outcome. ‘Of Idleness’ opens with an eccentric movement surveying the wilderness, the cultivated farm, woman before and after childbirth, the unbridled imagination’s monsters and chimeras, Montaigne’s busy life and travels before his retirement, and the turmoil of his imagination when idle. It turns out, then, that Montaigne’s idleness is the product of a lively balance or a dance of thought in which reflection and imagination avoid overtipping the scale upon which Montaigne has set himself.
