of its existence, the human consciousness finds itself 
     reduced to existence without duration. It is always of the 
     present moment. (95)

     This is Macbeth’s world of “Tomorrow and tomorrow and 
tomorrow.” This, says Poulet, is the experience of modern man, 
and Montaigne, in his Essays , was the first to depict it. He set 
out to snapshot his own mind in the act of reading and 
reflection by way of la peinture de la pensée . In this respect 
Montaigne more than anybody else, perhaps, carried out the 
lesson of print as by a kind of applied knowledge. He bred up a 
great race of self-portrayers by means of the mental snapshot, 
of the sequence of the arrested and isolated moments of 
experience which anticipate the cinema: “At first, on this island 
of the moment which isolates him but which he fills with his 
presence, man still keeps something of the joy he experienced