Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Oxford World's Classics)

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Oh, if I could still enjoy a few moments of pure, heartfelt affection, even if only from a babe in arms, if I could still see in people’s eyes the joy and satisfaction of being with me, how these brief but sweet effusions of my heart would compensate me for so many woes and afflictions. Ah, I would no longer be obliged to seek among animals the kind looks that I am now refused by human beings. (pp. 97–8)

  There is here none of the God-like impassivity and self-sufficiency he claims for himself elsewhere in the text (pp. 7, 19, 55–6); on the contrary, this is the very human Rousseau who lays himself bare, in all his weakness and fallibility, through the words on the page.

  It follows, then, that this is no straightforward text about a man fleeing society and finding happiness in total seclusion. It is true that as early as 1756, as Rousseau records in Book 9 of his Confessions, the great critic of society felt the need to be on his own: ‘There I was at last, then, at home in my own pleasant and secluded retreat, master of my days, free to spend them living that independent, even, and peaceful life for which I felt I had been born’ (p. 403). But Rousseau’s love of solitude is not simply a form of misanthropy, since he also insists from the outset on his own sociability. What he turns away from is not society per se, but rather the forms of social contact and interaction that supposedly polite society expects of him, notably conversation, an art at which he feels he does not excel, as he makes clear in the Fourth Walk (p. 42). What he is opposed to is what he sees as the opacity that contemporary social relations impose between people. Solitude is a response to the specific realities of a particular society, since that society cannot in principle provide the kind of interaction he desires: the strictly codified norms of courteous behaviour are repellent for Rousseau, since they impede, according to him, true communication and undermine authentic sociability. It is precisely because his desire for authentic sociability is frustrated by conventional society that Rousseau feels alienated from it, and this is why he escapes the world of men in order to recover the true nature of things.

  From the demands of corrupt society Rousseau turns to the world of nature. Walking alone in nature guarantees and even intensifies his sense of self, as he observes in the Second Walk: ‘These hours of solitude and meditation are the only time of the day when I am completely myself, without distraction or hindrance, and when I can truly say that I am what nature intended me to be’ (p. 11). His happiness comes in part from his being at one with nature, which was a refuge for Rousseau from the anxieties of life, providing him with relative solitude and a rich source of distractions, both of which offer him peace of mind: the Île de St Pierre, described with such memorable intensity and poetic vividness in the Fifth Walk, is a kind of asylum, a prison where Rousseau would gladly be holed up for the rest of his days, the island’s isolation mirroring his own desire to live a carefully circumscribed life. Rousseau finds hope in the refuge of nature, and in so doing he offered future generations of people living with anxiety the possibility of an inspired cure.

  The diversity of nature keeps Rousseau busy and helps him not to think unpleasant, unwanted thoughts. Rousseau delves into this diversity through his interest in botany. If, in the Seventh Walk, Rousseau presents botany as an easy, even lazy pastime, this cannot hide the fact that he was, in reality, a serious, even systematic botanist, as suggested not only by the Fifth Walk, but also by his surviving herbaria, his correspondence with leading French botanists such as Pierre Clappier and Marc-Antoine Claret de La Tourrette, and such posthumously published works as the Elementary Letters on Botany (Lettres élémentaires sur la botanique), which he wrote to teach botany to Madeleine-Catherine Delessert, the daughter of his long-standing friend Mme Boy de la Tour, and the Fragments for a Dictionary of Botanical Terms (Fragments pour un dictionnaire des termes d’usage en botanique), both of which he worked on in the early 1770s. It is unsurprising, then, that Rousseau should posit a kind of parallel between his work as a botanist and his aims in writing the Reveries, for he is to be as scientific in one as he is in the other, hence the image in the First Walk of the ‘barometer’ and the soul as a kind of natural element to be measured (p. 9). He is the writer-scientist whose object of analysis is himself.

  This self-analysis is structured around a series of ten walks, the last left unfinished at Rousseau’s death. Walking was Rousseau’s preferred mode of transport. From an early age he developed what he calls in Book 2 of the Confessions a ‘passion for walking’ (p. 53), and the journeys he seems to prefer are those guided by chance: he delights in peripatetic randomness, or what he calls ‘the pleasures of going one knows not where’ (p. 57). Such walks, crucially, allow his mind to wander, too, as he tellingly observes in Book 9: ‘I can meditate only when walking; as soon as I stop, I can no longer think, for my mind moves only when my feet do’ (p. 400). To walk is to meditate and to muse. In the midst of nature, Rousseau finds freedom to think, as he explains in Book 4:

  There is something about walking that animates and activates my ideas; I can hardly think at all when I am still; my body must move if my mind is to do the same. The pleasant sights of the countryside, the unfolding scene, the good air, a good appetite, the sense of well-being that returns as I walk . . . all of this releases my soul, encourages more daring flights of thought, impels me, as it were, into the immensity of being, which I can choose from, appropriate, and combine exactly as I wish. (p. 158)

  These ‘flights of thought’ are the essence of the reveries that give Rousseau’s last work its title.

  Rousseau was not the first to write about reverie. We know from Book 1 of the Confessions (pp. 8–9) that Rousseau was from an early age an avid reader of romance fiction, including the works of Madeleine de Scudéry, who, in Part 2 of her Clélie (1654–60), shows Cléodamas and Bérélise in a garden, giving themselves over to the charms of reverie, a state of heightened sensibility and inner pleasure, freed from social constraints. For these characters, reverie is a passing moment of release and interiority. A similar sense of release is conveyed, albeit in a very different form, in Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 1686), which also figured amongst Rousseau’s early reading: the philosopher conversing with a Marquise in her garden at night gazes up at the stars and is plunged into a reverie, a delightful ‘disorder of thoughts’. This notion of the lessening of the power of reason and the emphasis on feeling also appeal to the sensualist philosophers of the eighteenth century, amongst them Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, who evokes the freedom of reverie in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, 1746): after a hard day’s work, he argues, the mind enjoys seeing ideas ‘floating around haphazardly’, particularly when this ‘disorder’ is matched by the freedom of nature as opposed to the manicured order of landscaped gardens. Momentarily removed from the world and its preoccupations, the one who gives himself over to reverie finds the pleasure of freedom in nature.

  But whereas all these earlier writers envisage reverie as a kind of momentary escape, for Rousseau, by contrast, reverie is a way of life, an ongoing means of triumphing over the grim realities of the existence that others seek to impose on him. He makes of it, not a passing phase, but a key to his existence, and crucially a key to his overcoming his enemies: meditation and (self-)mastery are as one. And more than that, for Rousseau reverie is also a means of storing up a treasure trove of happy memories that will in turn bring him happiness in the future. Reverie revives the past and ensures its survival; writing, reading, and rereading are all integral to Rousseau’s pursuit of happiness, as he explains in the First Walk:

  The leisure of my daily walks has often been filled with delightful thoughts which I am sorry to have forgotten. I shall preserve in writing those which come to me in the future: every time I reread them I shall experience the pleasure of them again. . . . If, as I hope, I have the same cast of mind when I am very old and as the moment of my departure approaches, r
eading them will remind me of the pleasure I have in writing them and, by thus reviving the past for me, will double my existence, so to speak. In spite of men I shall still be able to enjoy the delights of company, and, grown decrepit, I shall live with myself in another age, as if living with a younger friend. (pp. 8–9)

  The memory of past happiness creates pleasure for him in the present of writing and will, in turn, create pleasure for him in a later present as a reader. Reverie is part and parcel of a search for lasting happiness: Rousseau’s vision of happiness takes root in, and is a means of coming to terms with, the realities of unhappiness and anxiety. Reverie is also an epistemological project: writing down his thoughts is a way of his establishing the truth about himself. Whereas in the Confessions Rousseau was concerned with historical fact, in the Reveries he is concerned with the sensations of the past and happiness in the future. Writing becomes for Rousseau a means of recovering lost time: it is, in that sense, its own cure.

  The idea that the Reveries are a kind of remedy for Rousseau finds an echo in the way in which, in the First Walk, he positions his text vis-à-vis Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (Essais, 1580–95). Having, in Book 10 of the Confessions, poured scorn on what he saw as ‘the false naivety of Montaigne, who, while pretending to confess his faults, is very careful to give himself only lovable ones’ (p. 505), at the beginning of the Reveries, Rousseau at once likens his project to, and distances it from, that of his sixteenth-century predecessor: ‘My task is the same as that of Montaigne, but my aim is the exact opposite of his: for he wrote his essays entirely for others, whereas I am writing my reveries entirely for myself’ (p. 9). Of course, Montaigne’s Essays were not quite so public as Rousseau wishes to present them: in his prefatory address ‘To the Reader’ (‘Au Lecteur’), Montaigne stresses that he has set himself ‘no other end but a private family one’, adding: ‘I have dedicated this book to the private benefit of my friends and kinsmen so that, having lost me (as they must do soon), they can find here again some traits of my characters and of my humours.’3 This notwithstanding, the numerous links between Montaigne’s Essays and Rousseau’s Reveries are important and add further levels of meaning to the later text.

  First, both texts offer self-portraits of thinking, reflective, meditative men. In his chapter ‘On Practice’ ( ‘De l’exercitation’, II. 6), for example, Montaigne identifies an organic link between thinking and being that will lie at the heart of Rousseau’s text: ‘I am chiefly portraying my ways of thinking, a shapeless subject which simply does not become manifest in deeds. . . . It is not what I do that I write of, but of me, of what I am.’ 4 Secondly, both texts take the form of reveries. On several occasions Montaigne uses the French term ‘rêverie’ to describe his own writing, though he deliberately plays with the negative connotations of the term (which persisted in eighteenth-century dictionary definitions, too). For example, he begins his chapter ‘On Educating Children’ ( ‘De l’institution des enfants’, I. 26) with the witty disclaimer: ‘These writings of mine are no more than the ravings [rêveries] of a man who has never done more than taste the outer crust of knowledge.’ He goes further still in his chapter ‘On Books’ ( ‘Des livres’, II. 10): 5

  These are my own thoughts, by which I am striving to make known not matter but me. . . . I have no sergeant-major to marshal my arguments other than Fortune. As my ravings [rêveries] present themselves, I pile them up; sometimes they all come crowding together, sometimes they drag along in single file. I want people to see my natural ordinary stride, however much it wanders off the path. I let myself go along as I find myself to be.6

  For Montaigne, ‘rêverie’ is a self-mocking term used with ironic modesty both to justify the fragmentary nature of his work and to invite a playful reading of it. Montaigne appears to be saying that it is sheer madness to write what he does and, worse still, to offer oneself as the subject.

  Montaigne’s playfulness here, evoking the movement of his thoughts and his own wanderings, points to a third link between his Essays and Rousseau’s Reveries: they are both texts written ‘on the go’. In his chapter ‘On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse’ ( ‘De trois commerces’, III. 3), he describes how, in his library, ‘sometimes my mind wanders off, at others I walk to and fro, noting down and dictating these whims of mine’;7 and in his chapter ‘On Some Lines of Virgil’ ( ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’, III. 5), Montaigne describes how sometimes he thinks best while he is on the move:

  But what displeases me about my soul is that she usually gives birth quite unexpectedly, when I am least on the lookout for them, to her profoundest, her maddest ravings [rêveries] which please me most. Then they quickly vanish away because, then and there, I have nothing to jot them down on; it happens when I am on my horse or at table or in bed—especially on my horse, the seat of my widest musings.8

  For Rousseau, too, musings and movement go hand in hand. Walking is, as he notes in Book 3 of the Confessions, thought-inspiring: ‘Seated at my table, with my pen in my hand and my paper in front of me, I have never been able to achieve anything. It is when I am out walking among the rocks and the woods, it is at night, sleepless in my bed, that I write in my head’ (p. 111). This link between musings and movement, mentioned incidentally in the Essays and the Confessions, is fundamental to the Reveries, both etymologically—the French term rêverie is derived from the Latin verb vagari, meaning to wander or to roam about—and even literally, since Rousseau based his text on notes he had scribbled down on twenty-seven playing cards while out walking, which were found amongst his papers after his death.9

  Perhaps the last and potentially most far-reaching thing that Montaigne’s Essays and Rousseau’s Reveries have in common is that both texts attempt to portray the twists and turns of each writer’s mind. Like Montaigne before him, Rousseau forges his identity through a process of spontaneous mental combustion, through the accumulation of thoughts and memories: like the Essays, the Reveries paint the portrait of a thinking man as he thinks—and, crucially for Rousseau, as he walks and feels. Each of the ten walks in the Reveries is grounded in the everyday, and it is precisely their anecdotal, down-to-earth quality that makes them so appealing. The things Rousseau does, the places he visits, the people he encounters: all these are spurs to creative introspection. It is as Rousseau observes his fellow human beings and even interacts with them that he sets about analysing himself and, in so doing, reflecting on fundamental questions about life and human nature: the experience of suffering and death; the search for individual happiness and inner peace; the need for personal morality; sociability and misanthropy; love of others; the authenticity (or otherwise) of the individual in society. For example, Rousseau’s clear-sighted examination in the Sixth Walk of the mental processes that determine people’s behaviour, and particularly his own, begins with his going on one of his familiar walks to the south of Paris, encountering as usual the woman with her stall and crippled son, whom he unthinkingly avoids, an instinctive action that suddenly pulls him up short and leads him to analyse the subtle mechanisms of obligation and duty at work in society. The structure of the text is determined by the chance association of ideas as Rousseau’s mind wanders in tandem with his feet. In both Montaigne and Rousseau, everyday details and personal examination are the springboard for broader moral reflection.

  Not that that springboard necessarily propels the two writers in the same direction, however. On the contrary, it is revealing, for instance, that Rousseau’s account in the Second Walk of his accident at the paws of a Great Dane, while echoing in some respects Montaigne’s account of his fall off a horse in his chapter ‘On Practice’ (II. 6), makes him think quite differently from Montaigne: whereas Montaigne’s accident prompts him to reflect on, and prepare for, death, Rousseau’s, paradoxically, makes him feel as if he is being reborn into life (p. 14).