Opening paragraphs............................

      The twenty-first century is full of people who are full of themselves.  A half-hour's trawl through the online ocean of blogs, tweets, tubes, spaces, faces, pages, and pods brings up thousands of individuals fascinated by their own personalities and shouting for attention.  They go on about themselves;  they diarize, and chat, and upload photographs of everything they do.  Uninhibitedly extrovert, they also look inward as never before,  Even as bloggers and networkers delve into their private experience, they communicate with their fellow humans in a shared festival of the self. ... By describing what makes them different from anyone else, the contributors reveal what they share with everyone else:  the experience of being human.
     This idea - writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity - has not existed forever.  It had to be invented.  And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person:  Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Perigord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592.

-Sarah Bakewell,  How To Live - Or- A Life Of Montaigne:  In One Question And Twenty Attempts At An Answer