The Essayist's Notebook

To speak from certainty requires only a grid; to speak from fidelity requires a threshold.

I have slowly arrived at the view that when Montaigne claims to write de bonne foi, he is not offering a guarantee of accuracy, but a pledge of presence. He is acknowledging that the landscape of human experience is volatile, shifting beneath our feet like the allegiances of this Gascon village.

Yet, by planting his feet in that very instability, foi ceases to be an unbending dogma and becomes a structural pivot. It is the agreement that we may not know the end of the sentence, or the resolution of the chord, but we will remain true to the trajectory of the movement.

Which is to say that foi becomes the foundation on which a man may speak honestly about uncertainty