Beach of a Moonlit Night

On a moonlit night, a single button
lay fallen on the surf-tossed shore.

I picked it up,

not because I thought that I could use it,

but

I could not bring myself to toss it away;

I tucked it inside my sleeve.

On a moonlit night, a single button 

lay fallen on the surf-tossed shore.

I picked it up,

not because I thought that I could use it,

but

I neither cast it to the moon

nor did I cast it to the waves;

I tucked it inside my sleeve.

On a moonlit night, this button that I found

entered my hand, and entered deep into 

my heart.

This button I found on a moonlit night

how could I ever let it go?

                  
                          – Nakahara Chuya 

Commonplace Books

In her book How to Live: or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer,  Sarah Bakewell draws the comparison between Montaigne's essays and commonplace books or collections of "thematically arranged quotations and stories."  He developed habits and skills as a young man, creating notebooks with snippets encountered in reading "setting them in creative juxtaposition."  She also, in a related entry on the Paris Review blog, connects his writings to that of modern day bloggers:

"In his Essais (“Attempts”) . . . he wrote as if he were chatting to his readers: just two friends, whiling away an afternoon in conversation. . . . 'I cannot keep my subject still,” he said. “It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.' His writing followed the same wayward path.

In reading Montaigne, many thinkers and writers feels a sense of recogntion. Ralph Waldo Emerson felt this shock of familiarity the first time he picked up Montaigne in his father’s library: 'It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke my thought and experience.”'

For Bakewell "the Montaignean willingness to follow thoughts where they lead, and to look for communication and reflections between people . . . flourishes most of all online, where writers reflect on their experience with more brio and experimentalism than ever before. Bloggers might be surprised to hear that they are keeping alive a tradition created more than four centuries ago. Montaigne, in turn, might not have expected to be remembered so long, least of all in the English language—yet he always believed that 'this great world is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.'"