This article explores embodied experience and reflective distance in the personal essay and specifically in works by Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Through a reading of Montaigne's 'Of Practice' and 'Of Experience', it argues that, in the personal essay, sensory experience is often the starting point for a movement of thought that, engaging in what may be described as a form of tentative philosophising, connects the particular bodily experience to abstraction while constantly being aware of the limitations of both. This tension between embodiment and reflection is then pursued in several essays by Woolf that are shown to be in the tradition of Montaigne in their sensitivity to the ineluctability of the human body and its sensory experience of the world in any conception of knowledge and experience but that also radically puncture ideas about the embodied human self by dissolving the temporal and spatial borders that would establish the centrality of the 'I'. Unravelling further intertextual relations, the article moves to a reading of Borges's 'Funes the Memorious', which is not an essay but an essayistic thought-experiment in short-story form that tests concerns that are fundamental to the essay explored in this article.
