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Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Penguin Classics)

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Aristotle said that, in order to lead a solitary life, one would have to be either an animal or a god. Nietzsche added a third alternative: one would have to be a philosopher. The "Reveries" is closely followed by the "Confessions" as my favourite of Rousseau's writings. In it, Rousseau gives reason to doubt that he himself has achieved real solitude in his life (and not just loneliness). It is nevertheless my favourite because it is here that Rousseau presents solitude, not as an escape from the world, but as the most philosophical way of embracing it and of living in it.

Although regarded as the unscocial misanthropist, it took J.J. Rousseau complete ostracism from society to understand what completes him and creates constant fullfilment in his soul. With eloquent lyrics that beautifully portray his sincere sentiments, this collection of contemplations shows the self-searching rewards evident in solitude and tranquility. His lingering frustration and distrust with humanity hovers over every word, yet it doesn't overshadow the wisdom with which the book permeates. For anyone looking to search deeper within themselves, this book offers great insight to what may help aid in that path for enlightenment.

I love this thing - I carry it around with me everywhere. If I'm feeling a little bored or in need of wordy inspiration, I pull it out of my backpack and open to whatever page flies out. I also use it to hold bills and other mundane paper goods.

Reveries of the Solitary Walker is a collection of "Ten Walks" (short essays" by J.J. Rosseau. The short book (155) pages was written in Paris in the last two years of the author's lifetime. Rosseau (1712-78) was Swiss born. Throughout his combative life he wrote classics such as "The Social Contract" on government and "Emilie" whose subject was the education of youth. Rousseau was a freethinker in a Roman Catholic France; a libertine and the father of several illegitimate children and a man who opposed monarchy. His works were controversial and were banned in France. Rousseau often had to flee to Switzerland to escape arrest by the police of French King Louis XVI.
Reveries of a Solitary Walker consists of ten short essays. Their chief theme is the need for solitude and the pleasures of self esteem against the busy social world. Rousseau writes in a manner which is reminiscent of Koheleth the Preacher's musings in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. The Swiss philosopher and Old Testament wisdom author both conclude that the enjoyment of nature, botanical studies and daydreaming are the best ways for a person to enjoy old age. Dreaming on a quiet lake is preferable to the hurly-burly of existence in the vanity fair of society. The book can be read in a few hours. You may not agree with Rousseau in many of his conclusions about life but he gets the reader to think! Rousseau was self-centered, overly sensitive and had a persecution mania. Rousseau h was generous to those in want and was a kind man. He professes to enjoy the company of children, the poor and elderly. Meet this fascinating and iconic figure of the Romantic movement in this short work of genius!

Aside from its philosophical worth, which I regard as marginal, this book was fascinating from a sociological point of view. Rousseau shows signs of what most readers would probably assume to be clinical paranoia, but it seems apparent to me that he was being harassed by They Who Must Not Be Named. Any direct mention of Them would surely have been expurgated before publication--funny coincidence that any edition of Henry Adams's letters is always edited by one of Them! But judging from clues in the narrative, I believe Rousseau was unaware of exactly who his persecutors were. On the other hand, he remains rather vague on the topic of who was persecuting him and why. It would seem that much of the psychological framework of Their behavior derives from this work of Rousseau. Take for instance, the scene when a visitor gets Rousseau to read a short excerpt of a work which contains reference to children, when Rousseau surmises that the entire purpose of the tiresome interview was to subtly bring up the memory of Rousseau's having put his children up for adoption, "turning white to black", in his words.

Several other curious points: They seem unwholsomely absorbed with this book, as a monument of Their machinations, trying to coopt it to Themselves in various instances. For example, there is a scene towards the end of the Ninth Walk, in which Rousseau descibes a young man throwing ginger bread into a crowd of peasants, who trample one another underfoot in order to get at the muddy candy. Rousseau expressed admirable disgust at the spectacle. This would seem to be the source of the parallel scene in Elie Wiesel's novel Night. Moreover, the great chess master Aaron Nimzovich, also one of Them, is often credited with the expression "The threat is more dangerous than the execution," also true in chess, which also derives from this book as a general observation about life. Nimzovich was notorious for switching around the drinking cups at any restaurant for fear of poisoning.

As for the general philosophical worth of book, I found it most useful for glimpses of Rousseau's intellectual life. He turned me on to Plutarch's Moralia and Jerusalem Liberated by Tasso. Rousseau obsesses too much about every little deed or misdeed of his, but of course finds himself on balance to be a decent person. This minute self-analysis strikes me as vain and egoistic, ultimately boring. But the book is fairly short, so it is worth reading.

I know it is your birthday, but two is all I can give. These final ruminations of 'the world's most gentle soul' try to shed light on a very universal question: "But I, detached from them and from everything, what am I?" A fine question, but one flawed from the very start as nothing can be truly detached from everything.

With his ten walks over forest and dale, Rousseau attempts to melt himself into his beloved 'nature,' but he never succeeds. The 'I' always gets in the way of things. The Solitary Walker is the arch-subjectivist. Every perception, every thought, every plant he examines, every rock he stumbles over is hopelessly locked in an internal prison that remains distant and inpenetrable to others. True enough, we all do much the same, but thankfully, few of us ever write books about our self-absorbed fancies and fantasies. Rousseau's complete oeuvre is one long monologue between him and the world. And this monologue can only achieve meaning in those rare moments when Jean throws a life-line across the chasm of solipsism and allows others to swing across to his vibrant jungle of ideas. The Social Contract and especially, Emile, are two such works where Rousseau made contact with his world. By choosing two objective territories, politics and education, he managed to find a fixed rod around which to weave his very original thoughts and musings. And because these two works have a common core, Rousseau's fecund imagination never gets the better of him. With the Reveries on the other hand, Rousseau and reader get mired down in a swamp of delusion and meaningless speculation.

I was hoping that the Reveries' central theme of man and his environment would anchor this work and lend to insight upon insight. Nothing of the like came about. Those seeking an examination of our connection with nature will be greatly disappointed in this work. Nature here is just a backdrop, the faintly sketched background to Rousseau's internal dialogues. Why do people hate me? Why do they persecute me? What did I do to enflame such passion against myself? Why is such a noble man so loathed by his society? These are the questions Rousseau, mantra-like, constantly churns over during his walks in the woods. Rousseau's agile mind goes in circles chasing its tail, and soon the reader too gets a bit dizzy. Where are the answers to such questions? Jean provides defense after defense, each more noble-sounding and indignant than the last, but all equally flaccid and wrong-headed. And through it all, the nature he so loved and which could have cured him of his delusions had he truly surrendered to it, remains an impotent canvas.

What this work so lacks is what so many of us lack as well: distance. Had Rousseau been able to view himself as only a part of the whole---a significant and individual one at that---but nothing more, than this work could have become a guidebook of self-transcedence: How to Break the I. As it remains though, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker is nothing more than the diary of a captive mind, denied its fair share, crying out for the whole. A whole which it can never have, nor become.

Alas, let us not be too hard on this sensitive soul, for most of us walk through life with our own daily routine of solitary reveries which keep us from tipping over the cliffs of despair. Jean-Jacques' Reveries warn us that it is precisely our reveries that send us over the edge.

A reader will love then short stories described by JJ Rousseau. For me, JJR's writings about his internal feelings are less interesting; however, this is one of the most beautiful books in all the literature I have ever read. I highly recommend the tenth (and unfinished) Reverie - I have never read more touching words.

Rousseau was, along with Schopenhauer and Richard Nixon, one of the great paranoids in human history. There is ample evidence of this in REVERIES OF THE SOLITARY WALKER, but vastly more from any solid account of his life or of one of the people with whom he came in contact. I have read multiple bits in Maurice Cranston's acclaimed scholarly biography of Rousseau's life and it can be a depressing affair. I also many years ago read Mossner's biography of David Hume. It is heartbreaking to read the parts where Hume went out of his way to give Rousseau safe haven during a period of prosecution, but Rousseau's paranoia flamed and he accused Hume of offering him a place to stay merely so that he could still Rousseau's ideas. Paranoia is not a disorder that leads to rational reflection on things. Why Rousseau could possibly have imagined that a philosopher the stature of Hume would want to steal his ideas is difficult to imagine, but Rousseau needed little reason to build up conspiracy theories. Rousseau puts me in mind of the famous quip: Just because your paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get you. Unfortunately, many people were out to get Rousseau, which with his preexisting paranoia was very much like pouring gasoline on an open flame.

This book is very important for understanding Rousseau's psyche, but I find it almost impossible to read as a book of wisdom. It reads very much, if you know much about the details of Rousseau's life, as a map of advanced mental illness. There is no question that Rousseau had had very real problems, but the book records so many fantasies of abuse and mistreatment that it is painful at times to read. Painful yet fascinating. He writes constantly of "traps" throughout the book. He talks constantly of the conspiracies and plans that others have concocted with him as their intended victim. The result is that you can't quite trust whether any of his accounts of any of the events he describes in the book are true or not. He writes that upon playing with a small child he spotted one of the men sent to follow him about. Truth or paranoia? He writes that a man gives him a obituary written by d'Alembert of a patron of the arts that talks of how deeply she loved children and despite the fact the man finds the review hysterically funny it is, to him, badly written, Rousseau interprets his reading the piece to him as a thinly veiled attack on him. Rousseau had taken his own children to a foundling home. Although Rousseau attempts to defend himself, it was an act that any minimally civilized human being will rightfully find abhorrent.

So it is a book that most readers -- unless they know little or nothing about Rousseau's life -- will find trouble trusting. There is substantial evidence that Rousseau was not merely paranoid -- in a modern clinical sense -- but a borderline sociopath. Cranston's biography recounts numerous instances when Rousseau was ungrateful, unkind, or downright nasty to even his closest friends and would be benefactors. So we have Rousseau's account of his kind heart and his profound sympathy for others on the one hand and the almost universally contradictory accounts of those who met him. It is quite likely that Rousseau, as mean-spiritedness and cruel as he was, truly did think of himself as a kindly soul.

So this book is valuable mainly for the light his sheds on Rousseau's broken and shattered soul. The book is, with his great masterpiece THE CONFESSIONS and his less widely read but still important dialogues, the third piece of what could be viewed as his ongoing autobiographical project. For the reasons I've stated, I find it very difficult to read for any philosophical content. Besides, the great subject of the book is Jean-Jacques himself. If you want to delve into Rousseau's ideas, the places to go are the early discourses, ON THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, CONFESSIONS, and EMILE. You go to this book to learn about Rousseau himself.

So what do we get in the end? We get a portrait of a man whose life has been destroyed as much by his own refusal to see anything but the direst hatred and most insidious intentions of his fellow human beings, his (in his mind) so-called friends as much as his most vociferous enemies. Although in another sense, he truly was as much of a victim has he believed. Surely no one willingly chooses to believe that all of one's friends are truly enemies. Surely no one by choice interprets every well-intended gesture as a devious trap. Yet this is where Rousseau's life ended up. The key word in the title is "Solitary." Rousseau's dire illness cut him off from other human beings. In the end he isolated himself from the rest of humanity more effectively than his most avid enemy -- and like I said, even though he was paranoid, there were a lot of people truly out to get him -- could even have hoped to achieve. To me this reads as one of the saddest books I've ever worked my way through.

Many people often assume that they are the final authority on what goes on in their heads--after all, who is anyone else to tell me what's going on inside *my* head? However, the continued dissolution of depth psychology (esp. Freud) into popular culture, as well as a growing body of research by cognitive psychologists, is starting to make this assurrance suspect. I mention this because *Reveries of the Solitary Walker* is an excellent example of a literary version of this; here it is the readers more so than the author that can see what's going on in these "meditations".
Aristotle once thought that one's best tinking was done while walking, a sentiment later echoed by Nietzsche. In that same spirit, Rousseau offers this small book as recording of his "meditations" performed during his solitary walks. Instead of giving us some profound wisdom that comes from solitude and philosophy, this book instead serves as an amazing first-person look at paranoid schizophrenia. Rather than wise musings, we get instead Rousseau's ruminations about the extensive plot to (1) isolate him from others and politically marginalize him, (2) have him killed--witness his attribution of a near-fatal carriage accident to a deliberate attempt to run him down, and (3) systematically alter his writings and misrepresent him after his death.
As a book of reflective wisdom, this small treatise of Rousseau's is an utter failure. (One reviewer claims that this book changed his life, but how it could do so I have no idea.) However, this book succeeds in doing two things Rousseau did not mean it to do. First, it gives us incredible insight into Rousseau the man--more so even than his vaunted *Confessions*. Second, Rousseau's literary style and incredible gift for expression help to make concrete how the world looks to one suffering from paranoid delusions. (Sure, even paranoids have enemies; but this is probably because persecution complexes are likely to become self-fulfilling.)
This is not a book that is of much use to those looking for spiritual or philosophical wisdom, but in other ways it is indispensible. For understanding Rousseau the man, there is nothing better in his own words. Psychologists and psychology students (esp. those involved in clinical psychology) have much to gain from studying this small book. Rarely, if ever, will one find a victim of mental illness so eloquently able to bring you to an unerstanding of his world.

When I read Rousseau's 'Confessions' I admired the man so much. But two issue compromised my view of him. Firstly his report of assigning his five children to the Foundling Hospital soon after birth - what a thing to do (and if he had investigated that prospect he would surely have realised that would have been as bad for them as any shortcomings he saw in what he could provide) - and what a thing to impose on his partner! Secondly was the negative view he had of people. Maybe some were against him, but somehow what he wrote didn't really convince me.

In Peter France's introduction to his translation he suggests that some historians have wondered if Rousseau actually did have children - something I wondered about in my review. Am I making too much of this?

In these ten reveries the matter of the children does recur. And in one of them he discusses what it means to tell lies - not without real insight - and how it can be justifiable. In the same breath he talks about his children. Perhaps we can draw our own conclusions. Something is not quite right for me here - the thinking processes of one of the world's great thinkers - at least as he committed them to paper. But strangely, after reading the reveries I am less convinced that there were, in fact, no children.

These reveries 'scared' me a bit - there was a lot of what I see for myself as I get old - and I'm not ready for that yet! But I did enjoy Rousseau's puzzles, his anecdotes, his travel tales.