If he had lived in our time, Michel de Montaigne, the great sixteenth-century essayist (the originator of the essay genre, in fact), would have been an admirer of Grant. Montaigne spent most of his adult life learning how best to live through charming, playful, sly, skeptical, contradictory, improvisational, forgiving verbal experiments. As his mood took him, he might one day write about cannibals, another about the way to die well, still another on smells, and so on: warhorses, sleep, praying, drunkenness, cruelty, thumbs, monstrous children, cripples, vanity.
He loved thought games that startled him out of intellectual complacency; they sometimes got Dada: “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?”
Montaigne was comfortable with such silliness. “If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot, without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off—though I don’t know.”