When I became a dedicated reader of the 16th-century French writer Montaigne, in 2005, I was new to writing and relatively new to motherhood, with a 3-year-old and a newborn, and about to publish my first book. I had purchased copies of Montaigne’s essays from secondhand bookstores before, but I decided to jump into the deep end right away with the 900-page volume of The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame. For the next 10 years or so, I would read Montaigne every day, sometimes for only 10 minutes, and later, when my children were older, for 30 minutes to an hour in the afternoon, before I picked them up from school. I might not have understood the significance of this routine at the time, other than that Montaigne’s work provided a brief reprieve from a life overcrowded with the responsibilities of being a mother, a wife, a writer, and a professor. The volume of The Complete Essays was in no need to be finished in one sitting, or within a specific time frame. What could be better for any author than for his lifework to become a reader’s lifework, too?

I found Montaigne, whose encyclopedic writing touched on every aspect of the world—philosophy, history, literature, medicine, friendship, love—among the best conversational partners one could dream of: always available, often entertaining, never predictable. That he was knowledgeable meant that I learned something new any time I opened his book; that his thinking meandered yet maintained an innate logic demanded that I read with an active mind instead of being a passive recipient; and best of all, he was writing not for me (or any specific audience) but for himself. About himself. “Reader, I myself am the subject of my book,” Montaigne stated in his introduction to his work. “There is no reason why you should devote your leisure time on so trivial and unprofitable a topic.”

[Margaret Atwood: Murdered by my replica?]

Rightly so! Yet there is no reason why one should not defect from the pressing (and sometimes profitable) tasks of everyday life and dwell on a more pressing (but definitely less profitable) subject: selfhood. There are many ways to elaborate on Montaigne’s work. For me, his writing serves as a reminder, a prompt, even a mandate: A regular meditation on who one is, like daily yoga, is a healthy habit.

But what is selfhood? And what is the right amount of attention one should pay to it—that is, if there is a way to measure—without straying into the quagmire of self-absorption?

I’ve been pondering over these questions while reading a sleek new volume of Montaigne, translated by David Coward and published under the title What Do I Know? Essential Essays. “What do I know”—Que sçay-je, or Que sais-je in modern French—was a key question for Montaigne, which these days people might ask jestingly and colloquially. The quandary demanded exploration and deliberation on Montaigne’s part. I do often wish for two things: that people would ask themselves the question What do I know? before opining, and that people would give a thoughtful answer, instead of using it as a witty remark.

What do I know about Montaigne? A little, as a lay reader of his work. A philosopher frequently called “the first modern man,” Michel de Montaigne is credited with inventing essays as a literary form. In 1571, on his 38th birthday, he retreated to a tower on his family estate in Bordeaux and spent much of the next 21 years reading, thinking, and writing. Few authors can be equated to their work, but the essays Montaigne wrote were the man.

I picked up What Do I Know? nearly three years into the coronavirus pandemic, and years after I had last spent time with Montaigne. But he will always be among the writers I return to; his words provide one of the best anchors for an ever-changing mind. My immediate reaction, while immersing myself in the familiar language rendered anew by Coward’s translation, was happiness, bliss even. If this sounds preposterous, it’s a preposterousness for which I am willing to endure misunderstanding and ridicule.

What a great moment when, a few pages in, I encountered this line: “The places I see again and books I reread smile on me by seeming fresh and new.” Indeed, Montaigne’s words have smiled on me this time, not only by seeming fresh and new after my sojourn from his work, but also by reminding me that by now I know a little better where and how I can locate my selfhood. Dare I say I’ve become a better reader of his work as a result?

[Read: Michel de Montaigne, father of jazz]

The longer we live, the more places we accumulate that we will never revisit. For instance, the army camp in central China where I spent a year at ages 18–19. There, once, during a night exercise, I hid in an abandoned ditch, shooting blank ammunition at my comrades who played my enemies, while around me thousands of fireflies twinkled. Or, another example, a hospital corridor leading to the morgue in Beijing—it was winter 2018, and the world was still innocent of one looming catastrophe; the crowd, murmuring with curiosity and sympathy, parted as I followed my father on a gurney, which was elaborately adorned for the afterlife. And these places that I will not see again underline my thinking, just as the words offered by re-readable writers do.

“The mind that has no firm anchor point is lost for, as is commonly said, it is nowhere if it is everywhere,” Montaigne writes in “On Idling.” Considering this, it occurs to me that the happiness I feel while rereading his work has not much to do with any worldly matter but a sense of finally knowing where I am: I am not at that dreaded place called nowhere, nor am I—nor do I aspire to be—at that illusory place called everywhere.

Nowhere-ness—I don’t think I’m alone in having now and then been trapped by the feeling of being in no specific place; the world seems to have experienced a collective version of that during the pandemic. This is different from being lost. The latter implies an opposite state of existence, of being unlost, of being found again. Being nowhere, however, feels bleaker: The past and the future merge into an everlasting present, and the present is where time and space take on a permanent stillness.

Sometimes the feeling of nowhere-ness calls for the ambition of everywhere-ness. Incidentally—and do allow me to meander in a Montaigne-esque manner—ambition, from its etymology, has a lot to do with everywhere-ness. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word comes from “Latin ambitiōn-, ambitiō soliciting of votes, canvassing, striving after popularity, desire for advancement, ostentation, pomp”; “ambit-, past participial stem of ambīre, to go round or about.” (Sharing that latter etymology are two other words: ambient and ambience.) In our contemporary world, the desire to be everywhere is assisted and exacerbated by technology, which is faster, more connected, more ubiquitous. People on social media travel to many countries, dine at different restaurants, read 300 books a year. And yet: “He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere,” Montaigne repeats in “On Idling,” quoting Martial’s Epigrams. Perhaps as a collective, we dwellers in today’s world, pressed by the need to be everywhere, easily slip into nowhere.

Between these two spaces, there is somewhere. This time, rereading Montaigne, my intense happiness comes from knowing where I am in life. It’s not an ideal or a perfect place, but a place that I accept as mine: I’m a more experienced writer since my first encounter with these essays; I’ve known sorrows in many forms, including the loss of a child; I have accumulated a handful of writers to whom I return regularly, just as the roses in my garden return to blossoming every year. I am somewhere.

I compared the new translation with other editions on my shelf—a 1947 edition, translated by Charles Cotton and selected and illustrated by Salvador Dali, displays not only Montaigne’s wisdoms but also Dali’s whimsies: a cluster of grapes, each a happy skull; naked bodies (or are they naked souls?) in deep conversation; headless warriors embracing each other. The edition of The Complete Essays translated by Donald M. Frame has superscript letters in the text, indicating the work done at different times: Montaigne had returned to the same subjects at several stages of his life. Reading that collection always gives me a concrete sense of how Montaigne’s mind changed over time and yet remained, or became more of, Montaigne’s mind.

Then I noticed underlining by a blue ballpoint pen in a 1958 Penguin Classics edition. The book had been brought by a friend who had visited me in a psych ward near New York City where I, entrapped by the bleakest nowhere-ness, stayed for three weeks. (The pens given out to the patients were ballpoint-pen fillings wrapped up in paper—cheap, and the least dangerous.) But I see now, looking over the annotations done in the hospital, that even then I was somewhere—I might not have known my own mind, but I trusted Montaigne’s words and saved some of my memories between his lines. This somewhere-ness is perhaps the closest I can define as selfhood.

This article has been excerpted from Yiyun Li’s introduction to the new book What Do I Know? Essential Essays.