Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Reveries of the Solitary Walker; Transl. Peter France; Penguin Classic, London, 2004

Rousseau wrote these reveries towards the end of his life, after many many years of feeling persecuted and seeing his books criticized and rejected, even burnt in Paris and in Geneva, his birthplace.  He had been travelling around Europe and England, without finding anywhere he felt at home or fully accepted.  His 1st revery is full of extravagant language about being persecuted, tormented, victimized until there is no more torment possible and he finally gives up and accepts he will never be understood and accepted, not during his lifetime and not even by future generations.  His only peace, and the only time he is truly himself, is on his daily solitary walks.

In his 2nd walk, he writes "the source of true happiness is within us."  He is walking along the Rue Chemin-Vert.  I stayed right near there when I was in Paris last year.  I was one block up on Rue Amelot, staying at the Hôtel Bastille de Launay, in the Marais district, 11e arrondissement, and Sara and Cam's hotel was right around the corner, on the Rue Chemin-Vert.  Rousseau walks up the Rue Chemin-Vert towards Menilmontant.

Gate: Menilmontant

It was countryside with vineyards and several villages that are now Metro stops (such as Menilmontant).  It is autumn, October 24 1776, and the countryside is deserted and the harvest over.  Rousseau feels the melancholy common to autumn and compares the changes to the changes of age   "at the close of an innocent and unhappy life, with a soul still full of intense feelings and a mind still adorned with a few flows, even if they were already blighted by sadness and withered by care."

Rousseau is knocked over by a Great Dane and wakes up not knowing who he is at first and feeling immense delight.  He was near the temple of the Knights Templar, 3rd arrondissement, now a market.

"situated on the former site of the enclosure of the Knights Templar, which gained notoriety as the prison where the Royal family were held during the French Revolution. In 1811 a wooden structure was erected on the site to house a permanent market, which was replaced by the current cast iron, brick and glass structure in 1863."

Temple : Knights Templar

Area of Temple 1734

I enjoyed reading in his reveries about various places he walked to from his home in Paris (Rue Platrières); once villages and edifices, now metro stops; once rural and now in the middle of Paris: Montmartre, Clignancourt, Place D'Enfers (now Denfert) etc.

He writes in his 3rd walk about not being able to refute the arguments of the French thinkers and intellectuals of the time, saying: "my heart answered them better than my reason".  His heart was his conscience.  He knew they were wrong but he didn't know why and he writes about "basic principles adopted by my reason, confirmed by my heart and bearing the seal of my conscience uninfluenced by passion."

Sadly, Rousseau seems to feel in his 60s that his powers of reasoning are not up to his former capacity and so he has to hold fast to his earlier conclusions about things and must "refrain from the dangerous ambition of learning what [he is] no longer capable of knowing properly." 

In his fourth walk, Rousseau examines truth and falsehoods.  He took as his life motto a saying of Juvenal's: vitam impendere vero ; to devote one's life to the truth.  He says that truth is "the eye of reason"

In his 5th reverie, Rousseau writes about living on Ile-St-Pierre, in a small lake near Neuchatel.  Days of far niente, doing nothing.  He describes rowing out into the middle of the lake and stretching out on the bottom of the boat and drifting.  I used to love doing that on long kayak trips: either early in the AM when everyone else was still sleeping in their tents, or on lazy days when we stayed in camp.  Just drifting and being rocked by the motion of the ocean, sun on my face and daydreaming.

I enjoyed the 5th Reverie.  The 6th one was not as enjoyable.  Rousseau's paranoia shows but even if I try to make allowances for that, it's hard to sympathize much less admire his odd of combination self-congratulation and self-justification for when he doesn't do all the good things he at heart feels he is predisposed to do - it's always someone else's fault when he fails to reach the goodness he says is natural to him.  He is quite scathing about other people "formerly frank and truthful, [who] have followed the general example in becoming what they are now [...] How could I preserve the same feelings for them, when they display qualities opposed to those that first produced these feelings. [...] I cannot repress the scorn which they deserve, nor prevent myself from letting them see it."  
He acknowledges that he might have changed as well but is more forgiving of himself "What sort of character could withstand a situation like mine without deteriorating? [...] all good inclinations which my heart received from the hands of nature have been twisted by my fate."  He seems to be a bit blinkered when he looks at his own actions and character.  He then goes on to blame all the people conspiring against him for the fact that now he avoids doing good because his enemies are trying to deceive him and he can't trust anything even doing good.  While this is sad, to live such a paranoid existence, the discongruity, between how he sees his actions and the effects of Life on his nature compared to how he judges others, makes him seem hypocritical.  He feels that traps were being laid for him even as a child but says that he "was born the most trusting of men and for forty whole years this trust was never once betrayed." Not only that but he feels that all his friends and acquaintances "seek their own happiness in my misery"

Rousseau has an interesting definition of freedom, that it doesn't consist "in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do."
I do feel compassion for his feelings of rejection and betrayal as during his lifetime his works did not receive general acceptance and acclaim - and his former friends shunned him.  In his 7th Reverie, he muses on the healing powers of nature, natural beauty: "sweet smells, bright colours and the most elegant shapes."
"I feel transports of joy and inexpressible raptures in becoming fused[...] with the great system of beings and identifying myself with the whole of nature."
He describes nature in its ideal form for him: "meadows, water, woods, solitude and above all the peace and tranquility".
Rousseau is, again, quite scathing on those who reduce appreciation of plants to just the value of their medicinal qualities, writing "it is no good seeking garlands for shepherdesses among the ingredients of an enema."
He sees nothing wrong in viewing nature's abundance as a good source of food however - it's only the medical aspects he disapproves of.  He goes on to say "it is out of sheer malice that our invalids fail to recover, for of all the illnesses that men give themselves there is not one that cannot be totally cured by twenty different herbs."

I'm not sure whether I could fairly characterize his descriptive passages in his seventh walk as clichéd.  Back in the 18th c. this imagery may have been fresh but I think picturing nature as "loving shepherds" and garlanded shepherdesses, sturdy labourers etc was probably unoriginal and trite - even then.  His imagery about mining, though not unexpected, seems more powerful: "quarries, pits, forges, furnaces and a world of anvils, hammers, smoke and flame"  though he again reverts to cliché "take the place of sweet rustic labour." I'm not sure the farmer or field-worker would have agreed with his rosy view of the farming life.

Biology does not get off much easier than metallurgy or chemistry, with its necessary study of anatomy via dissection.

I bounce between sympathy for him - because some of what he complains of is borne out by history - the notes mention his house in Switzerland being stoned due to the efforts and antagonism of minister Montmollin, a local pastor.  His books were banned and burned and he did have former friends reject his ideas and his work when his publications criticized them and their work.  But then he goes and writes a sentence like "even now, amidst the most miserable fate ever endured by mortal man." I'm sure the miners, those press-ganged or in prison & the majority of poor women (and many well-off ones) would disagree with Rousseau claiming the "most miserable fate" prize.  The 8th walk is tough to read because he bounces back and forth between saying how well he deals with adversity (when he was "invariably full of affectionate, touching and delightful emotions which poured a healing balm over the wounds of my injured soul and seemed to change its pains into pleasures") and how indifferent he is to his situation which he then describes as "infamy and treachery", "incredible tortures my persecutors are constantly inflicting on themselves,"  "the despair that was engulfing me."
It would be one thing to write such highs and lows and inconsistencies in one's private diary but many think that Rousseau wrote this for possible publication.  Some of it may be him writing about what he has been through and trying to contrast it with some measure of acceptance and contentment that he has currently and finally achieved, being resigned to his current lot in life, a quiet life which he professes to prefer.

Towards the end he achieves a somewhat Stoical outlook, realizing that much of the pain comes from his own mind and emotions, that it should stop looking for "intention, purpose, or moral cause."
Still feeling unhappy, he determined that his dissatisfaction came from his self-love "which having waxed indignant against mankind, still rebelled against reason."  "An innocent and persecuted man is all too inclined to mistake his own petty pride for a pure love of justice"  "self-love [...] can often creep in under the guise of self-esteem."

In his 9th walk, Rousseau addresses the issue of his having sent all his children (apparently 5 illegitimate children with his long-time companion Therese whom he eventually married) to a Foundlings' Home.  He justifies it saying he was so concerned about what would happen to them that "since I was not in a position to bring them up myself, I should have been obliged by my circumstances to leave their education to their mother, who would have spoiled them, and to her family, who would have made monsters of them." Even looking at this action and justification through 18th c. - glasses, it is unforgivable: the depth of Rousseau's self-absorption, his lack of feeling, lack of justice.
"I am sure that no father was more affectionate than I would have been towards them once habit had had time to reinforce my natural inclination."  Oh lucky lucky children!  I wonder about Thérèse, the mother who lost her children and yet spent the rest of her life with their self-absorbed, self-pitying father.

Only once or twice in all Rousseau's laments about his solitary life, cut off from his fellow man, does he even briefly refer to Thérèse  the woman who bore him 5 children and was his companion for decades and who gave up her life to be his companion.  He did have some advanced and revolutionary ideas, and was very talented but he also seems a self-absorbed, bitter and difficult man.