I can read this one in three major translations, and I'm going to try Florio first. Of Solitarinesse: Let us leave apart this outworne comparison, betweene a solitarie and an active life!
You wanna write some discussion questions, IDP?
(p.s. people still participating in the drunkenness thread, esp. Emerson, JWC, and Mike, should check back, because I am still confused, and asked a question)
No, sorry, I've got a deadline. Thanks for asking.
Here's what "Nouvelle Garnier Classiques" (1965) suggests:
1. Lame, skip it.
2. Suffices it for Montaigne to detach oneself from familial and social bonds? What is the condition necessary for which that this solitude is rich? What is the sense of the asceticism Montaigne is describing?
3. How Montaigne develops him the theme of our alienation?
4. The portrait of the pedant: why is Montaigne so severe towards him? Does not one there already find the severity of classicism towards erudition?
5. In what the detachment that Montaigne proposes us is it Christian? In what also does he distance himself from the Christian ideal?
6. Montaigne criticizes successively the desire immoderated of goods of this world and the morals of renunciation. Why? Montaigne understands he the worth of ascetism Christian? What is, in this meditation, the role of the imagination? Why does Montaigne make he confidence in the power of reason for supporting unhappiness?
7. How Pascal has he transformed the analysis of Montaigne in the fragments consacrated to amusement (269, 270, 271, 272)?
Can you put a link to the Drunkeness thread in this one, that may help keep it alive (I was a couple of days late getting to the Drunkeness thread and I wasn't sure anyone would still be reading comments).
Crap, I still haven't waded into the On Drunkenness thread. Crap. This leaving my job business is taking up more time than I thought it would, but I'm golden for next week.
*I* think the literal translation is hilarious, but if you want, you can clean up the grammar.
Is there a link-able version that we can read?
Follow the link to the prior thread, and click the "On Drunkenness" link in the title. I think that gets you to all of them.
Do people have a link for an online version of On Solitude?
11 isn't such instructions -- I just looked and it doesn't work. I'm sure googling for it would find something.
It's in the Gutenberg edition of the Cotton translation, but you have to search for "solitude" to find it or do a lot of scrolling.
Whilst Googling for Of Solitude and coming up with eb's link (a dollar short and a day late as always -- Damn you eb!), I found this essay which might be a useful companion piece.