Montaigne is grateful that he’s too stupid (again, we might not take him at his word) to register mental disturbances, but he has a very low threshold for physical pain.

Montaigne wishes he suffered from literally any other affliction.

But he shouldn’t be surprised he ended up with kidney stones, which he had long feared because – as we’ll soon find out, as we gradually reach the nominal subject of the essay – his father had them in old age.

Passing kidney stones really, really hurts.

Montaigne ironically notes that the passing of time has earned him an “acquisition”: kidney stones.

In his vagueness, Montaigne is both giving us information and expressing indifference to it; age is just a number!

Montaigne would seem to mean that the thief gained just as little as Montaigne lost; and yet he’s just said he wishes he had better records of his “mutations.” This is a paradox typical to Montaigne: he can say something is very important to him at the same time admitting that it doesn’t really matter.

As Montaigne announces at the beginning of the Essays, in “To the Reader,” his goal is to represent himself in as naked and natural a state as possible. This would seem to include representing his processes of becoming, as well as the essence of his being.

The second half of this sentence is a correction of the first, added in a later edition; he corrects, in essence, his claim that he never corrects himself.

While it’s true that, in the two subsequent editions to the 1580 version, Montaigne only very rarely deleted anything – the vast majority of the time he simply adds on bits of new text to the existing edition – he occasionally did, and one example comes later in this very chapter.

This reads like an apology for the incoherent style of the essays, which Montaigne says he’s haphazardly bundled up like wood logs.

But we could question his sincerity. As many critics have shown, Montaigne’s essays are in fact carefully constructed, and even if he only worked on them at odd hours, they aren’t the hodgepodge collection he claims them to be.

Europeans imagined the Americas to be a new Garden of Eden, full of delicious fruits and requiring no labor to cultivate, as opposed to the fallen world of scarcity and greed in Europe.