You must compose your character - it's your duty

Tonight is the beginning of Passover.  It is Monday in Passion Week as well.  But instead of addressing a reading from Exodus or Zechariah or the Gospels, for some reason I am drawn to Montaigne.  Maybe it's a reflection of my own distraction (Of Idleness and Of Diversion are two essays that attempt to address the subject, but are victims of their named subjects).  Montaigne was an essayist, but would not likely have passed a modern course in writing an essay. He was a proto-blogger.  Or maybe we bloggers are deconstructed essayists.  I read many comments in the essays that make me think our forms are similar.

"I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it."  (from "Of prayers")

"I cannot keep my subject still.  It goes along befuddled, and staggering, with a natural drunkenness." (from "Of repentance")

But the message I would like to leave you with tonight comes from the great essay "Of Experience."  Montaigne writes the following:

"To compose our character is our duty..."

Elsewhere ("Of the art of discussion") he says

"It is a practice of our justice to condemn some as a warning to others.  To condemn them because they have done wrong would be stupidity, as Plato says; for what is done cannot be undone."

And so on.  Notwithstanding that this sentiment seems to be headed down a suspicious moral path, I use it as a precedence to say that perhaps I have not composed my character - but here I am an example to you even in that failure.  Compose your character - not blogs or books or essays, but first your own personal character.  You may now ask yourself how you are to do this.  So here I do not "establish the truth", but ask you to seek it.

Montaigne source: Donald Frame's translation, Stanford University Press.