Imbecile - “Of Sorrow”
Montaigne writes, “And for a more notable testimony of the imbecility of human nature, it is recorded by the ancients—[Pliny, ‘ut supra’]—that Diodorus the dialectician died upon the spot, out of an extreme passion of shame, for not having been able in his own school, and in the presence of a great auditory, to disengage himself from a nice argument that was propounded to him.” The metaphor of imbecility accentuates the imprudence of human beings that sponsors preventable bereavements.
Horse - “Of Idleness”
Montaigne illuminates, “it is like a horse that has broken from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to, and creates me so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself.” The horse denotes the human mind that must be satisfactorily disciplined during leisure to keep its apparent unruliness at bay.
