I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

In his later years Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) withdrew from public life to his estate in the Périgord, devoting himself to writing the Essays and to the ordinary management of his household and lands. The line about wanting death to find him “planting my cabbages” appears in the Essays in the context of his reflections on mortality and the art of living well under the constant possibility of death. Montaigne argues against theatrical preparations for dying and in favor of continuing one’s customary, modest tasks—so that death arrives amid life’s everyday occupations rather than as a special, staged event.

The remark encapsulates Montaigne’s ideal of a natural, unpretentious relationship to death. By imagining himself engaged in a humble chore—planting cabbages—he rejects both morbid fixation and heroic posturing. The point is not indifference but steadiness: live so that death does not interrupt some grand performance, but simply ends a life that has been fully and ordinarily lived. The cabbages stand for the quotidian duties and small pleasures that anchor a person in the present. In Montaigne’s ethic, wisdom lies in maintaining this everyday attentiveness while acknowledging mortality without letting it tyrannize one’s mind.