Audiobook version read aloud in the video. An Anti-Analytical Analysis It was Michel de Montaigne who came up with the word “essay” (“essai”) for this sort of writing, which in French means “attempt.” He wasn’t trying to construct a system; he examined the texture of lived experience—habits, impulses, memories, fears. An essai  wasn’t a declaration of truth but an experiment in thinking, a way to test an idea by exploring it, and admitting uncertainty. It was a genre built o