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Horses, of course, are not native to the Americas and were imported from Europe.

The Greek mythological figure of the centaur is not native to Brazil, either. Here Montaigne tries to adopt the perspective of the natives (they were scared by the hybrid horse-human creature) but at the same time inserts his own, Greek-myth-reading self into that perspective. This is likely less a mistake than an indication of the impossibility of truly putting oneself in another’s shoes.

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It was (and remains) a common conception among natural-lifestyle advocates that disease comes from civilization, not from nature.

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Even Plato’s Republic, often read as a utopian representation of an ideal society, wouldn’t be as perfect as the negatively defined society Montaigne has just described.

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This is a famous example of “negative accumulation”: instead of listing all this culture’s positive attributes, Montaigne lists the things they don’t have. This is Montaigne’s way of implying that happiness, or even real wealth, might be measured by the bad things we don’t have, instead of by the “goods” we do have.

“Pardon” is a strange addition to this list: it makes sense that, if there aren’t words for transgressions like lying and treachery, you wouldn’t need a word for the forgiveness of those transgressions, but it still feels like the word that doesn’t belong.

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Montaigne is speaking a bit freely here; the “native” and “pure…simplicity” that he supposes the natives of the Americas to have is not, strictly speaking, something “we by experience see to be in them”; he’s relying on what his servant has told him, as well as the written accounts of André Thevet and Jean de Léry’s travels in Brazil.

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Montaigne’s nostalgia for a land “not as yet much vitiated” by the corruptions of modern society would be right at home in our contemporary landscape of farmers markets, Paleo dieters, and Crossfitters, where “natural” is automatically equated with “good.”

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Montaigne’s criticism of those who would overburden (feminized) Nature with artificial enhancements echoes contemporary criticisms of women who wear too much makeup or otherwise “falsify” their appearance. A woman who relied on cosmetics and cheap rhetorical charms instead of “her own purity and proper luster” might be disloyal, diseased, or worse.

This misogyny-tinged statement of preference for natural purity also maps onto the general French disdain for Italian artifice and degeneracy. After the invasions of Italy earlier in the 16th century, French soldiers brought back tastes for finer things (as well as syphilis, from Italian women who, the thinking went, must have cunningly hid the signs of disease) along with humanist learning.

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A popular folk etymology has the Greek “barbaros” referring to the sounds non-Greeks made when they talked, which to the Greeks sounded, supposedly, like “bar bar bar bar bar.”

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Montaigne frequently digresses on tangents, then promises to return to his subject. What his subject is, though, is not always clear; in this essay, for example, he’s talking about far more than cannibals.

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This may be why Montaigne, as he famously claims in “To the Reader,” aims to write only about himself, a subject he’s pretty comfortable with.

It’s questionable, though, how closely he sticks to that.

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