"To be or not to me?"
What Have You Become?
Sophia: Michel, I’ve been reflecting on your words — “I quote others only in order the better to express myself.” It’s a curious confession. Do we ever truly speak for ourselves, or are we always an echo of others?
Montaigne: (smiling gently) My dear Sophia, I have never trusted pure originality. We are built of borrowed voices. The wiser we become, the more we recognize how little is ours. Quoting others is simply the honest way to admit it.
Sophia: Then what have you become — a mosaic of others’ thoughts?
Montaigne: (chuckling) Precisely that! A mosaic, perhaps, but one arranged by my own hand. Each borrowed stone reflects a part of me — my sympathies, my resistances, my affections. To quote is to choose, and in that choice lies the self.
Sophia: So identity isn’t invention, but arrangement — composition rather than creation.
Montaigne: Well said. We are not sculptors shaping something from nothing, but gardeners tending what history has already sown. Even our most private thoughts grow from ancient soil.
Sophia: Yet I wonder — doesn’t too much quotation risk hiding behind others’ wisdom? To live entirely through others’ words could make one a ghost in a library.
Montaigne: (nods thoughtfully) True, but better a haunted library than an empty one. The danger lies not in quoting, but in failing to digest. If another’s thought lives in you, transformed by your own experience, it is no longer theirs alone. It breathes anew.
Sophia: Then selfhood is not a fortress, but a dialogue — an ongoing conversation between what we inherit and what we become.
Montaigne: Yes! The mind, if honest, is a council chamber. Plato sits beside Seneca; Plutarch debates with me over supper. And now you, Sophia, add your voice to the noise — and thus, I become something else again.
Sophia: (smiling) Then perhaps the question “What have you become?” can never be answered. You are perpetually rewritten by the company you keep.
I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
— Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Montaigne: As are you, my dear. To converse is to exchange a fragment of oneself. By speaking with you, I lose a little of Montaigne and gain a little of Sophia.
Sophia: (quietly) And perhaps that’s the highest form of expression — not to assert oneself, but to be changed by understanding.
Montaigne: Ah, yes. We quote not to repeat, but to continue. That is how thought survives — in the living chain of minds reflecting one another.
Sophia: Like mirrors facing mirrors — each reflection revealing a new angle of the same light.
Montaigne: (grinning) A fine image, Sophia. Perhaps I shall quote you on it — but only, of course, to better express myself.
They laugh softly, their words lingering in the quiet air — fragments of others, of each other, and of themselves, all glimmering within the infinite mirror of dialogue.
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