Read a Lot, Forget Most of What You Read, and Be Slow-witted

I rarely read new books - don't think I read a single one last year - but when Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer turned up out of the blue at NigeCorp HQ, I jumped on it. The title really should be How to Live? as it's a question - the question - but no doubt the publishers were hoping the book would sell a few more for having a self-help title. A self-help manual is of course the last thing How to Live is. It's a throughly enjoyable and engrossing tour of Montaigne's life and essays, fittingly light-footed, curious and digressive, and, like its subject, chary of answers and certainty. (It's also a handsomely produced volume.) The title of this post is the title of one of the chapters (one of the attempts at an answer), which explores Montaigne's reading, and his claims to extreme forgetfulness and slow wits. It is consoling to think that reading a lot, forgetting most of it and being slow-witted might add up to a good way of living. Maybe, as my memory becomes ever more sieve-like and my wits ever slower, I am making a virtue out of necessity here - or is there something in it? Do forgetfulness and slow wits (and, of course, extensive reading) save us from worse things? Probably they do.