Why do Michel de Montaigne’s Essays include frequent digressions?

Michel de Montaigne’s Essays include frequent digressions because he intentionally refused to impose a false, artificial structure on his writing. Instead, he sought to maintain fidelity to the spontaneous, immediate, and authentic workings of his own mind.

As Montaigne famously noted, "As my mind roams, so does my style." His wandering developments and multiple digressions reflect the natural, shifting movement of his thoughts as they occurred and reoccurred to him. Rather than presenting an organized intellectual evolution, the Essays serve as a record of continuous accretion, where anecdotes and quotations are integrated to spark or reinforce his trains of thought without impinging upon the autonomy of his ideas. By allowing his writing to follow the flow of his changing moods and associations, he ensured that his work remained a faithful testimony to his living, "undulating" self.12