“If you ask me why I loved him, I feel that it can only be explained by replying: ‘Because it was him; because it was me’.”
The 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s summation of his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, who was also a gifted philosopher, was so often reproduced that eventually it passed into popular cliché – it even makes a rather crass appearance in the 2017 film ‘Call me by your name’ – partly because it fuses pithiness and banality. Truly great friendships assume some sort of mystical universal significance.
Montaigne and de La Boétie were young men of extraordinary talents and inhabited the same intellectual world
