THERE is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge. That is why, on a warm spring’s day at Columbia, the campus is dotted with itinerant tour groups wandering the grounds. These benighted young men and women crowd up in front of the grand old buildings and stare in awe. They stand before Butler Library and thirst for its books. It is a moment of hallowed reverence, free of mentions of the million volumes soon to be moved to New Jersey or the hundreds of pounds of bird droppings recently cleaned from the façade. There is only an air of exuberance tempered with awe, one that considers the outflow of neither books nor aviary waste.

        Columbia’s tour guides appreciate that they have a captive audience, usually seizing the opportunity to prevaricate a bit. There is, apparently, no housing shortage, nor is that housing anything but sparkling and stellar. No core classes have overcrowding problems, nor has adding a few thousand students without hiring new professors caused difficulty. The food is variegated and always delectable. These are things that the parents are old enough to accept with indifference and the high schoolers young enough to believe without question. They accept and they trust that Columbia is a place filled with cheery students and benevolent professors. They see the lively fountains, not hoary department heads given to peccadilloes and self-caricature. They look at the peaceful visage of Alma Mater, not the ugly face of academic infighting. They have confidence in themselves and belief in the university.

        What group of people is more ready to accept ideas than those on college tours, listening raptly to a guide? Who more quickly swallows anything they hear than high schoolers? These tour group members stand at a unique juncture in their lives. Parents proudly look on their children preparing for college. Sons and daughters breathlessly await the day when they can leave home behind and live in a community of learning. Those young people are blissfully misinformed and blithely misguided. Ignorant if not foolish and deceived if not delusional, the college-bound are a peculiar contradiction. Giddy at the prospect of gaining wisdom in college, they dutifully gobble down anything their college tour guides tell them. They are simple, and they are happy. It is a lovely, shimmering spring day in New York City. They imagine their college years ahead will be beautiful, and they bask in that expectation of joy.

        That expected joy is not a reality at Columbia. The intense academic environment manages to teach students just enough to make them realize how little they really know. The sedate frat parties allow just enough escape for a student to imagine how much more exciting things must be elsewhere. I learned at Columbia that I might find wisdom meditating on the banks of the Ganges or secluded in the Himalayas, but doubtfully here in New York. Nowhere does it seem more distant than in the shelves of Butler Library, where the endless books evoke my ignorance and the dimly lit stacks speak to my unilluminated soul.

        Man’s greatest pleasures lie in the anticipation of a better future. I myself was once a starry-eyed high schooler on college tours full of such anticipation. It is alone in the darkness where a man remembers best, and when I stand in the darkling corners of Butler Library, I remember my youth. A stentorian terror on college visits, I made my way to a host of schools and offered up a litany of snide remarks. I went to Penn and pointed out that they had carved the wrong Roman numerals on the wall. I traveled to Duke and helped the guide pronounce ‘Savonarola.’ I visited Harvard and encountered a tour guide whose fluff and all-around ditziness I ridicule to friends and family to this day. When I came to my last school, traveling to New York and laying eyes on Columbia, I passed up the tour. I was convinced I knew it all already. At the least, if I did not know it already, no guide was going to show me. I was that peculiar cousin of the egotist, the happy misanthrope, so if I did not have a high opinion of myself, I took great pride in making sure never to have a higher one of anybody else. I was at peace and felt I understood myself. I was satisfied with my life and awaited collegiate paradise. Even wisdom, I thought smugly, must be right around the corner.

        College taught me just how dauntingly elusive wisdom can be. A few glittering academics here or there might find it, but I remain as far afield as ever. Here at college, my failure to gain wisdom frustrates me. It was only at home, never at college, where I could realize contentment. At home, I slept, I ate, and attended to all things necessary to make the human animal as at ease as the dog. I was full of myself, and it was a beautiful world. What I have learned from long study, sleepless nights and bad food is that I knew Eden back home, blissful in pastoral splendor among loved ones and old friends:

        This desire to rediscover childhood in tour groups is not unique to myself. It expresses itself in all the antics college students put on for those tours. Students playact, declaim, and carry out games of all kinds. It is a sort of social contract; when they did their own college tours years ago, the college students there gamboled about and made everything seem new and exciting. It is all the college students of today can do to extend the same service to the students of tomorrow. College students create for those tour groups the illusion of the wild, unrestrained college atmosphere that every high school senior is convinced exists. My friend Angharad once slipped into a tour group and had some male friends stage her kidnapping. They dashed into the crowd, threw her over a shoulder, and raced off, she screaming in terror while they shouted merrily, "Fresh meat! I got some, I got some!" After a few frenzied minutes, they came back to the group and explained the artifice. These merry pranksters put on a show for that tour group to act out an exaggerated version of what those high school seniors, in their innermost hearts, wanted college to be.

        This is the pact between high schoolers and college students; the latter agree, for the benefit of the tours, to deny the banality of campus life, and the tour audiences, full of shock and wide eyes, refresh the players with new doses of youthful naivete. While I was at home in McLean, my old boss Ashley recounted to me another example of this sort of arrangement. In his college days, Ashley remembered fondly, he ran across a group of sweet-faced, innocent high school girls visiting campus with their parents; inspired, he announced boisterously to a friend, "And so she’s hanging from the ceiling with a bottle of Jack Daniels in her hand, and I told her, honey, if you want some, you gotta come down here!" He glowed at the girls’ incredulous stares, and they enjoyed imagining college life to be as absurdly ribald as Ashley portrayed it to be.

        Men will carry out hasty and often unreasonable acts to gain sovereignty over their lives. They will race off to college to deny that their parents rule them. They will perform for tour groups to prove college life does not have them in its yoke. They will drink to lose the inhibitions that hold them back.

        This piece is a dialogue with Montaigne’s "On Experience." Specifically, it takes on a quote of Plutarch he offers near the close: "You are a god only in so far as you recognize yourself to be a man." (Montaigne, Essays, 406.) In that reference and throughout his Essays, Montaigne champions modesty. I set out to play devil’s advocate and hold the opposite position. I have thus penned a piece celebrating the power of egotism. I give summary to my response in my final paragraph, writing, "There is something wonderful about the rosy self-images and sanguine sensibilities of high schoolers."

        As I am reacting to Montaigne, I have sought to capture elements of his style in my own writing. I adopt his broadly ranging discussion style, segueing from telling an anecdote to offering a new argument to recounting a personal experience and back again. I have added a slightly stiff edge to my prose, even if that is likely more in keeping with J. M. Cohen’s translation than Montaigne’s original. I have tried to only use implements from Montaigne’s rhetorical toolbox. Montaigne’s prose style allows for a fair degree of flourish in matters of word choice and sentence structure. His writing is rich with near-synonyms and cleverly crafted parallelisms. One such parallelism, appearing in "On Repentance," is, "[C]ircumstances and things are always moving and changing." (Ibid., 246.) One comparable line in my text is, "I made my way to a host of schools and offered up a litany of snide remarks."

        Montaigne revels in near-synonyms and neat oppositions. A representative duality is, "I neither deplore the past, nor fear the future." (Ibid., 249.) In a number of cases, I have worked such structures into my own prose, if not quite as transparently; one such specimen is, "These are things that the parents are old enough to accept with indifference and the high schoolers young enough to believe without question." Another such opposition of mine is, "[Students] look at the peaceful visage of Alma Mater, not the ugly face of academic infighting."

        Montaigne is often eloquently epigrammatic. He composes clever platitudes on the spot, such as "It is a rare life that remains orderly even in private." (Ibid., 239.) I tried my hand at pithiness, including, "It is alone in the darkness where a man remembers best." I also matched Montaigne’s use of rhetorical questions. In "On Cannibals," he writes, "What captain ever rushed with a more glorious and ambitious desire to win a battle than did Ischolas to lose one? Who in all the world took more ingenious plains to ensure his safety than he for his own destruction?" (Ibid., 116.) I took on such an approach in my second paragraph, writing, "What group of people is more ready to accept ideas than those on college tours, listening raptly to a guide? Who more quickly swallows anything they hear than high schoolers?"

        Montaigne delights in his erudition, tripping gaily through the corpus of Latin literature. He cites freely from illustrative passages, both in the original and in translation. These quotes are both relevant and elegant, if sometimes more the latter than the former. Montaigne quotes from Justinian and Tacitus, among others, in translation, and provides extended Latin passages from such figures as Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian, and others. I quoted Montaigne himself, in translation, for my first line. For extended passages, I chose a pertinent Eclogue of Virgil and, in keeping with Montaigne’s at times impressively fluent and not entirely to-the-point use of the classics, a tangentially pertinent excerpt from Caesar’s Gallic War. "On Repentance" features the instructive tale told by a peasant living on a relative’s estate: "The other day, when I was on the estate of a kinsman of mine in Armagnac, I saw a peasant . . . [who] told us his story." (Ibid., 243.) Drawing from that, I reinforced my arguments with the testimonial of my old boss Ashley.

        One of the paradoxes that makes Montaigne such a pleasure to read is that although he is on the one hand profoundly self-obsessed, reflecting almost exclusively on his own dilemmas and answers to his own questions, he is at the same time not immodest and often drolly self-effacing. He is that rarest of breeds, the self-conscious, self-loathing megalomaniac. A perfect statement of his nonchalant worldview appears in "On repentance": "I do not much value my own opinions, but I value those of others no more. Fortune pays me as I deserve." (Ibid., 247.) To mimic this, I dwelled on my own experiences, opinions and acquaintances. At the same time, I made certain that none of the references to myself were flattering or at all positive. As I write recalling my youth, my outlook was not unlike Montaigne’s: "I was that peculiar cousin of the egotist, the happy misanthrope, so if I did not have a high opinion of myself, I took great pride in making sure never to have a higher one of anybody else."

        "On repentance," in particular, abounds with reminiscences of Montaigne’s sensual, adventurous youth. He reminisces at length about that poignantly remembered time when he was full of life and sinning was easy. "When I give my mind a jolt and observe [my sensuality and vice], I find that it is the same as it was in my most licentious days, except, perhaps, that it has weakened and deteriorated as it has grown old." (Ibid., 248.) I seek to maintain that gently crotchety spirit, recalling my own sinfully carefree earlier years trekking around the country to visit colleges and harass tour guides. As I write of my remembrance, "In the faces of these sprightly youths, so full of life, I recall the energetic, irrepressible ignoramus of a youth I once was."

        Lastly, Montaigne often closes his essays with a dryly ironic twist. The end of "On Cannibals" is typically wry: "All this does not seem too bad. But then, [the cannibals] do not wear breeches." (Ibid., 119.) If I have parlayed some fraction of that brilliantly sardonic line into the close of my own essay, I can feel I have succeeded: "Watching those sweet, wide-eyed kids fills me with false hopes and new delusions."