
Last Things
“To philosophize,” said Michel de Montaigne in the sixteenth century, “is to learn to die.” And philosophize about death he did—as often as Seneca, his intellectual ancestor in the first century. Both the “French Seneca,” as Montaigne is sometimes called, and the Roman original believed in the paramedical responsibility of thinkers. They contended, as Seneca said in his famous letters to a young man named Lucilius, that “what philosophy holds out to humanity” is not intellectual acrobatics but “counsel”—“good advice” on life and death.
“What’s the point of concocting whimsies?” Seneca railed