David Montagne, reappointed to the Board of Regents in 2015, is executive vice president & general manager for the Sabine River Authority of Texas, for which he has worked since 1986. He is responsible for the overall operations of the Sabine River Authority, which include reservoir operations at Toledo Bend, Lake Fork and Lake Tawakoni, as well as canal operations at Gulf Coast Canal System. He executes the policy and program directives of the Board of Directors, oversees the budget, and serves as the liaison between SRA and the Legislature, as well as other governmental agencies. He also represents the interests of Texas as project administrator for Toledo Bend Project Joint Operation.

In a War with Iran, Aircraft Carriers are Sitting Ducks Posted by David Montaigne ⋅ November 28, 2020 As U.S. Election controversy dominates the news, the assassination of Iran’s nuclear chief yesterday fails to get the attention it deserves. There are rumors that Trump wants to attack Iran before Inauguration day in late January 2021. Source: https://www.spreaker.com/user/rtfproductions/ep-29-end-times-and-2019-david-montaigne.

Montagne has been with the Authority for more than 27 years, previously holding the positions of assistant general manager, controller and general office manager. He is very active in statewide water resource planning efforts. He was appointed as a board member of the Texas Water Conservation Association’s (TWCA) Risk Management Fund Board of Trustees and is also a member of the TWCA Reuse Water Committee. From 2004 until 2009, he served as a Texas Ethics Commissioner. In 2009, Mr. Montagne was appointed to the Texas State University System Board of Regents by Governor Rick Perry and in 2015 was reappointed for a six year term by Governor Greg Abbott.

Born and raised in Orange County, David Montagne is a graduate of Lamar University in Beaumont with a BBA in Accounting. His wife, Janet, is the CEO of Texas Healthcare Management and River City Hospice. David and Janet have four children and five grandchildren and reside in Beaumont, Texas. His term on the Board of Regents expires in 2021.

These essays are an attempt to communicate a soul.
—Virginia Woolf

The soul selects her own Montaigne, and nearly every soul can find the Montaigne she needs. Especially in terrible times, we look to him for ordinary sanity in extraordinary prose. Immune to dangerous idealism, he invented his wonderful essais from a seemingly complete being. “The soul that entertains philosophy,” he wrote, “ought by its health to render the body beautiful too.”[1] He loved health but hated doctors, and there’s something therapeutic about reading him in barbarous times. He was steeped in philosophy, yet as William Hazlitt wrote, “he did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or moralist, but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his mind, in its naked simplicity and force.”

Writers have always made of Montaigne what they needed, generally finding him adaptable to their requirements. In an unsigned review published in 1925, T. S. Eliot argued, “Montaigne is just the sort of writer to provide a stimulant to a poet; for what the poet looks for in his reading is not a philosophy—not a body of doctrine or even a consistent point of view which he endeavours to understand—but a point of departure.” He had Shakespeare in mind, but also himself. In the same decade, Virginia Woolf reviewed a new edition of the essays:

. . . this talking of oneself, following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection—this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne.

It’s hard even in our jaded generation not to be similarly wowed. The essays Montaigne wrote between 1572 and his death twenty years later are unlike anything else I have read—a book of one man and a book of the world. They present textual problems because of their author’s technique of revision and accrual over three editions—making new pearls out of old irritations—but they delight because of the breadth and brightness of his being. He allowed for contradiction and contrariness. “We are, I know not how,” Montaigne wrote, “double in ourselves.” W. H. Auden would borrow that line for The Double Man (1941), his verse dissection of modern psychology and history. Woolf, too, had noted these inner and outer realms:

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. The soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite of what other people say.

We are at liberty to discover more than one Montaigne, including the political freethinker who saw beyond the sectarian wars of his own century to something like our postcolonial perspective. As Woolf put it, Maya machindra serial full episode download.

Again with politics, statesmen are always praising the greatness of Empire, and preaching the moral duty of civilizing the savage. But look at the Spanish in Mexico, cried Montaigne in a burst of rage. “So many cities levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated. . . and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down for the traffic of pearl and pepper! Mechanic victories!”

No wonder we call him our contemporary. Montaigne was a man of the Renaissance, but he speaks powerfully to our own era of religious division, tribalism and global instability.

Readers dismayed by current politics should read Montaigne’s essay “Of Cruelty”:

Among other vices I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extreme of all vices. But it is to such a degree of softness that I cannot see a chicken’s neck slit without trouble, and I cannot bear to hear the cry of a hare beneath the teeth of my dogs, though the chase is a stirring pleasure.

Our terrorists and torturers would not have surprised him. He lived through the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and other Christian atrocities, witnessed plenty of killing and public execution. His love of beauty and poetry arose partly in response to the cruelty surrounding him:

I live in a time wherein we abound in incredible examples of this vice through the license of our civil wars; and we see nothing in ancient histories more extreme than what we experience every day. But that has not at all accustomed me to it. I could hardly persuade myself, before I had seen it with my eyes, that there could be found men so monstrous who would wish to commit murder for the sole pleasure of it, would hack and lop off limbs of others, sharpen their wits to invent unusual torments and new kinds of deaths, without hatred, without profit, and for the sole end of enjoying the pleasant spectacle of the pitiful gestures and motions, the lamentable groans and cries of a man dying in anguish.

Montaigne can be funny and beautiful as well as outraged, but he is never deluded about the world. It is what it is, and the human part of it appalls as much as it edifies.

Many have made their own Montaigne. Escaping Nazism in World War II, the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig found solace in the Essays. Here I turn to Sarah Bakewell’s excellent book, How to Live: or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010). Bakewell quotes a letter Zweig wrote to a friend from his “enforced exile in South America”:

The similarity of [Montaigne’s] epoch and situation to ours is astonishing. I am not writing a biography; I propose simply to present as an example his fight for interior freedom.

To Bakewell, Zweig’s essay represents the usefulness of Montaigne for readers of vastly different historical periods. She writes,

In a time such as that of the Second World War, or in civil-war France . . . ordinary people’s lives are sacrificed to the obsessions of fanatics, so the question for any person of integrity becomes not so much “How do I survive?” as “How do I remain fully human?” The question comes in many variants: How do I preserve my true self? How do I ensure that I go no further in my speech or actions than I think is right? How do I avoid losing my soul? Above all: How do I remain free? Montaigne was no freedom fighter in the usual sense, Zweig adm