I had an interesting experience recently while creating a PowerPoint for a client. This client had delivered a speech to audiences in the past in a different language and he had me translate it into English, then sent along the deck he had used so I could update that as well.

My PowerPoint skills are weak, but I had to complete at least 90 percent of the work before passing it onto graphics experts because they strictly gatekeep their availability and I do not. Anyway, I noticed something in the graphics that didn’t catch my attention in the text.

There was a quote embedded in one slide from Leo Strauss, a mid 20th century philosopher whose prime focus was on unearthing the “philosophy between the lines” from greater writers and thinkers in the past. The quote — which I could not find in an internet search, so it likely was a composite of his thoughts — made the point that the personal freedoms that began in the Enlightenment have created a paradox, where we are more free, but the freedoms have less meaning.

It made me think that maybe there is more to this speech than it appears on the surface — maybe he’s applying esoteric writing of the type Strauss seemed to find everywhere. This reminded me that I’ve covered this subject before in my Montaigne work.

The 2013 book “Philosophy Between the Lines” written by Arthur Melzer handled this subject in depth and made numerous references to how Montaigne both commented on classical philosophers who hid the true meaning of their thoughts in their writing, and that he was likely using that method in places as well.

The book was frustrating to me because it makes a claim at one point that Montaigne was hiding a deeper philosophical system within his digressions, but it made no attempt to spell out what that system might be.

I have written about the esoteric writing in Montaigne’s Sebond essay and my translation project is attempting to make an argument that Melzer didn’t — that if he had a philosophical system in mind that tied the essays together, it was the Discourse on Involuntary Servitude by his friend Etienne de la Boetie.

It’s all an interesting subject to me because of how seductive esoteric writing and secret knowledge can be. Montaigne didn’t just dance around his political and religious views in his essays, he dropped enough breadcrumbs that some modern writers think he was in love with Etienne de la Boetie, some think he loved Marie de Gournay and others are sure that there’s an unnamed mistress in the text who he alludes to a couple times.

And the entire subject of esoteric writing, oddly enough, ties all of my writing projects together. The religious and political views that cannot be written explicitly in 16th century France aren’t so different from the things that must be left unsaid in communist-era Poland. The secrets that Kafuku tried to unravel in “Drive My Car” have similarities to relationships Proust cannot fathom and the rules Stendhal has to create to avoid mentioning the object of his affection.

You could even argue that every essay I’ve written in the past five years has been a coded love message to someone — and that like Montaigne, perhaps the object of my affection shifted without me even understanding when or how it happened.

The one thing I know for sure harkens back to a quote from Nietzsche that I once misattributed to Montaigne — that we write to conceal as much as to reveal.