Rousseau's "Reveries of the Solitary Walker"

René Magritte - Les reveries du promeneur solitaire - 1926

In as much as I disliked Rousseau - not his ideas, but Rousseau himself - in his public essay Discourse on Inequality, I found him charming, or at least harmless in his private Reveries of the Solitary Walker. It comes down to the old adage "write what you know", and he clearly didn't "know" much about the complexities of foreign communities. He does, however know about being the pauvre  Rousseau.

In the pages of his private journal, Rousseau is charming, bitter, idealistic, arrogant, paranoid, witty and pompous, and has made me laugh out loud several times (both with and at him).  Rousseau's musings sometimes closely resemble those of Marcus Aurelius - although their public personas dealt with political thought, their journals deal with the questions raised regarding being a good man and living a virtuous life. By exposing his intimate details, joys, confessions, fears, and doubts, Rousseau softened my harsh judgements of his character and opened my mind to the prospect of considering his philosophies. With age, he has gained wisdom as he recognises, and pardons his past fallibility (64), and he uses this knowledge to apply to the larger lesson of personal vs. empirical truths. As he acknowledges that his youthful hubris was a factor of his immaturity, so must I. I may still not like him as a person, but by gaining insight into his very human perceptions, I can better accept his flaws.

What he couldn't sell me directly, he can sell me in metaphor. The concept of "ignorance is bliss" is well represented in Rousseau's amusing anecdote about his collision with the great Dane in his second walk. For a split second, he forgets who he is, a relief as his premature obituary shows that he clearly does not hold a comfortable or respected place in his society.

This text is incredibly quotable... here are a few of my favourite lines:

• "Youth is the time to study wisdom, age is time to practice it" (47)
• "Since the days of my youth I had fixed on the age of forty as the end of my efforts to succeed, the final term of my various ambitions" (50)
• "But patience, kindness, resignation, integrity and impartial justice are goods that we can take with us and that we can accumulate continually without fear that death itself can rob us of their value." (61)
• "To judge men's words by the effects they produce is often to misjudge them." (68)
• "I often found my good deeds a burden because of the chain of duties they dragged behind them; then pleasure vanished and it became intolerably irksome to me to keep giving the same assistance which had at first delighted me." (94)
• "I have never believed that man's freedom consists in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do" (104)
• "Under pressure from all sides, I remain upright because I cling to nothing and lean only on myself." (126)
• "A tile that falls off a roof may injure us more seriously, but it will not wound us so deeply as a stone thrown deliberately by a malevolent hand.  The blow may miss, but the intention always strikes home" (128)

Works Cited:

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Trans. Peter France. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print.