Scribbling as a symptom

Montaigne observes, as a doctor, the society of his time plagued by civil wars. Even if he does not know what treatment to prescribe to this big sick body, he sees the proliferation of superfluous writings as a symptom of a social pathology. Although he is not a sociologist, his experience of local floods provides him with the metaphors enabling to account for it: “scribbling” is analogous to a flood. He even wonders if he is not himself subject to this addiction.