Another gem from high school history class

This one from European History, senior year:

On Montaigne's Essay "XVII. That to study philosophy is to learn to die"

"Cicero says that 'to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one's self to die.'" So begins Michel de Montaigne's twenty-seventh essay, in which he attempts to train his mind to overcome fear of death. Ignoring death, decides Montaigne, doesn't work -- first of all, death is impossible to ignore, because it surrounds us; secondly, if one ignores death, it is all the more devastating when it appears. Let us then try the opposite: thinking constantly of death. Constant awareness of death causes the mind to numb to its horror; what is more, it prompts one to order one's affairs in anticipation of death, so that when death arrives, nothing is left undone. Montaigne believes that he has found his solution:

"For my part, I am, thanks be to God, at this instant in such a condition, that I am ready to dislodge, whenever it shall please Him, without regret for anything whatsoever. I disengage myself throughout from all worldly relations; my leave is soon taken of all but myself. Never did any one prepare to bid adieu to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and to shake hands with all manner of interest in it, than I expect to do."

But if Montaigne were indeed so reconciled to death, he would be able to let the matter rest. He belies his professed comfort by listing many other reasons that death is harmless -- far from being fearless, he is still trying to convince himself not to fear. Death cannot be so bad, he says; like birth, it is merely a transition from one world to another; the worth of a life is not measured by its length; death is natural; death and life are equally pleasing; nothing is known about the afterlife, so it should not be feared, etc. At the very end, he realizes that he is still uncertain: exasperated, he concludes with the sentence, "Happy is the death that leaves us no leisure to prepare things for all this foppery."

My first scathing book review

I just found a cache of my high school papers, and here's one gem (written for a US History course in my junior year):

The Metaphysical Club: A Herculean Feat of, Well, Research

In the middle to late nineteenth century, four great men were born. They came of age during the Civil War, and in their adulthood, they contributed to a great transition of ideas. These four men were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey. In The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Louis Menand follows the threads of these men's lives, in the process revealing the growth of a new way of thinking: pragmatism. Menand's book is a magnificent specimen of research, describing not only the ideas but also the denizens and characteristics of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century; however, the book offers little beyond simple information.

The central focus of the book is the progress of philosophy. The great transition of belief that was made was essentially from the idea that truth was something hidden and discoverable to the idea that all accessible truth was defined by our beliefs. Advances in science and mathematics helped trigger this transition, especially Darwinian evolution and probability theory. Darwinism provoked philosophers to ask whether the world was evolving toward a particular planned state, or whether the progress was random. Probability theory and its bell-curvian statistics led to two thoughts: first, just as more scientific trials lead to a more accurate measurement, more people thinking might lead the collective consciousness closer to the truth; and second, society has certain habits at any given time: murder rates stay relatively constant, for example.