Earlier this week I started reading The Art of Not Always Being Right by Martin Desrosiers — a book about the value of genuine intellectual exchange and the importance of stepping outside our own dogmas to truly understand the world and other people. To make his case, Desrosiers turns to one of history’s most disarming thinkers: Montaigne.

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was a French Renaissance philosopher who invented a new literary form: the essay. In 1571, he retired to the tower of his château near Bordeaux, surrounded by a library of a thousand books, and spent years putting his own mind on paper. Not to teach. To examine. His motto: Que sais-je? “What do I know?” He wrote about friendship, fear, education, death, and the strangeness of being human with a candour that felt radical then and still feels rare today. Descartes credited him. Shakespeare borrowed from him. He was, as Desrosiers suggests, perhaps the first truly modern mind.

Desrosiers’ book, along with this personal project by Jean-Marc Denis, gave me the nudge I needed. I spent a couple of hours vibe coding a small tribute: Montaigne’s Tower, a minimalist website where you can browse 107 excerpts from his essays, one for each chapter he wrote, on topics ranging from solitude to vanity to the art of conversation.

Whether you’ve never heard of him or you’ve read the Essays cover to cover, there’s probably something in here that will stop you mid-scroll.

I hope you enjoy it.