The Life of Wisdom in Rousseau's "Reveries of the Solitary Walker"

THE LIFE OF WISDOM IN ROUSSEAU’S REVERIES OF THE SOLITARY WALKER

THOMAS L. PANGLE

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For the classical view, in which the Epicureans to some extent share, the object of contemplation is the truth; and the truth is the most common good. The most common good, which doesn’t mean that it is actually shared by all men, but in itself it is the most common good. It is something radically non-private; it cannot possibly belong to any individual, to any nation, or so. It is the common good. Now Rousseau’s common good is emphatically private; namely, the sentiment of existence, which is rooted in my feeling of my existence. It is radically private, and that is the deepest reason for Rousseau’s so-called individualism. In the highest respect, the highest good is a private good, whereas in the traditional view the highest good is in itself the common good.

—Leo Strauss, transcript of 16th class on Rousseau, course of 1962, University of Chicago

The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of individuality.

—Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History

CONTENTS

Preface

Author’s Note

Introduction

1. First Walk—Rousseau’s Introduction

2. Second Walk—Nature, Mortality, God

3. Third Walk—A Spiritual-Religious Autobiography

4. Fourth Walk—The Virtue of Truthfulness

5. Fifth Walk—Happiness

6. Sixth Walk—Goodness versus Virtue

7. Seventh Walk—Botany as Consuming Amusement

8. 8—Renewed Self-exploration

9. 9 and 10—The Solitary Walker’s Truly Loving Heart

Appendix

Notes

Works Cited

Index

PREFACE

What is the good life? What is human flourishing? Do these questions have answers? If so, are the answers singular or plural? What human wisdom, what life of wisdom, most adequately comes to grips with the vast range of our knowledge, and the equal or perhaps greater range of our ignorance, about ourselves? Socrates and his students, from Plato and Xenophon through Aristotle and then the Stoics and Cicero, made the study of the life and soul of the exemplary, independent sage as possessor of human wisdom, led by knowledge of one’s own ignorance, the supreme theme and source of norms for political philosophy and for humanity’s moral as well as civic existence. In medieval political and moral philosophy, from Alfarabi on, the phenomena of the prophets and of the saints forced this normative cynosure to the background; and on the peaks of the political and moral philosophy of the modern Enlightenment, from Machiavelli to Montesquieu, the life of the sage remained in eclipse¹—until Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He restored the classical centrality of the life and soul of the sagacious individual, as supremely normative for political philosophy. This restoration begins in Rousseau’s opening work of political philosophy, the First Discourse, with its vivid portrait of the sage Socrates and then its celebration of those who feel within themselves the strength to walk alone, in their own tracks.² In Rousseau’s subsequent writings, starting with the polemics over the First Discourse, the life of the sage takes on an ever more personal dimension that becomes elaborated in The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau and then in Rousseau Judge of/Judges Jean Jacques: Dialogues. The culmination is The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, where we find Rousseau’s most profound exploration and articulation of his own life, personality, soul, and thought as the human being of nature enlightened by reason—presented as a model for all modern humanity. In this sense it may even be argued that this is the dimension of Rousseau’s political philosophy that is intended to be the most practical, as offering guidance to individuals seeking inner liberation while living in the unfree world of late modernity:³

I have penetrated the secret of governments, I have revealed it to the peoples—not so that they would shake off the yoke, which is not possible for them, but so that they would become again humans in their slavery, and that, enslaved to their masters, they would no longer be enslaved to their vices. If they can no longer be Citizens, they can still be sages.⁴

Rousseau as the Solitary Walker is the embodiment of the peak of experience and of wisdom from which flows and to which points Rousseau’s political and moral philosophy, his theology, and his musical and literary art (cf. Newell 2022, chap. 1).

Of that literary art, The Reveries is widely acknowledged to be an acme. Yet, this aesthetic appreciation has not been accompanied by an adequate interpretation of this writing’s complex and multileveled intended teaching, about the normatively best way of life. This hermeneutic failure is no doubt due in great part to the initially bewildering form of the work, in its unprecedented and never again replicated character. The leitmotif of most scholarship was expressed by the scholar of French literature Lionel Gossman writing in Daedalus (1978, 69): in The Reveries, anything is now possible and no order seems natural or proper. As for Rousseau’s attempt to make order, that has only aggravated disorder. Or as Huntington Williams put it (1983, 166), "The Reveries in no sense develop. In the work as a whole, there is little thematic or logical progression discernible. For Pierre Saint-Amand, the examination of the subject" in The Reveries is concerned only with the ephemeral, the day-to-day. The Reveries are written in the lightness of inconsequence (2010, 248). Others go further. For the biographer Leo Damrosch (2005, 100, 471), we have here a release from conscious thought and an openness to experience that bypasses conscious thought. For the editor of a recent critical edition, The Reveries represents a plunge into the meanderings of the unconscious (Eigeldinger 2010, 29). Such conceptions of The Reveries have been a contributing factor in encouraging studies that treat the work as a sort of quarry into which excavation equipment may be wheeled in order to carve out blocks in which the commentator can sculpt his or her own creative reading or inspired reaction. As early as 1964, Michel Launay protested the tendency of many French studiers to "make pseudo-mystic commentaries on the Reveries—in brief, reveries on the Reveries (86). Surveying the previous literature, Raymond Trousson (1992, 489) asked, So ought one to be astonished to encounter analyses in which the author deploys treasuries of ingenuity in order to force the text to produce or perilous acrobatics in order to impose, from the exterior, a prefabrication? A leading twenty-first century study avows, through Rousseau’s Reveries I fantasize what it would be like for Wittgenstein to write the book for which he chose the title ‘The World as I Found It.’ … I seek in the future of the Reveries (that is, in our present) the possibility of bringing its meaning to an end—all of which makes the revelation of truth of this text independent of reaching an understanding with its author (Friedlander 2004, 7, 114–15). Other interpreters have imposed on Rousseau’s text, sometimes against its plain meanings, their own images of philosophic eros and of the philosophic life"—drawing on and inserting their own spiritual autobiographies. This is not to deny that the scholarly literature affords many instructive insights into the text, nor is it to deny that some helpful steps have been taken in discerning Rousseau’s overall, artfully sequential design of The Reveries—and I have tried conscientiously to acknowledge the aid that I have received in these regards from previous studies.

What has been missing, however, and is very much needed and is my goal in the interpretation that follows, is to bring fully to light the unfolding (if not always perfectly sequential or coherent) order and plan that governs and helps explain both the design and the intended teaching of the work, as an ultimately integrated if highly complex whole, whose artful unity emerges only for the painstaking reader who follows the text chapter after chapter, paragraph after paragraph, sentence after sentence, even word after word, while constantly conducting a detective-like philosophically and psychologically reflective, self-reflective, and circumspect interrogation—a dialogue with the author—in the light of Rousseau’s oeuvre in its entirety.⁵ What is needed and missing is meticulous textual exegesis that scrupulously abstains from textual eisegesis: interpretation that resists every temptation to read into the text what we assume must be what Rousseau as the philosopher—or as unphilosophic—meant to convey. But this is not enough. To fully appreciate, and to come to terms with, the education that Rousseau offers in The Reveries requires that one constantly confront Rousseau’s teaching in this work with the profound alternative teaching of that exemplary sage to whom Rousseau throughout his writings points back in gratitude and in contestation: Socrates, as presented not only by Plato but also by Xenophon and by Plutarch. As Pierre Hadot has passionately contended, even by the title of his book Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (1995), we need to become much more intimately aware of those philosophical texts that have been written not so much with a view to studying and explaining systems and doctrines but rather in order to illuminate and to revivify, as vibrant models or guides, what Hadot calls spiritual exercises leading toward and constituting deliberately paradigmatic ways of living that philosophers have enacted and promoted, in deed and in word. It is, Hadot justly insists, the figure of Socrates that causes such exemplary spiritual exercises to emerge into Western consciousness (89, 91). The point of Socratic dialogue is not to set forth a doctrine, but rather to guide the interlocutor (and indirectly, the reader) towards a determinate mental attitude; it is a combat, amicable but real. In an artfully written text of this character, as Laurent Pernot (2021, 49) has put it, readers are not limited to a passive role as recipients; they "cooperate in developing the meaning, are secretly flattered to assist, and, through a phenomenon of self-confidence joined to self-regard, cling more firmly to what has been suggested to them." Such, I contend, is the character of Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (consider esp. Confessions, OC 1:408–9). I mean to engage in and to attract others into the amicable combat to which this unique writing invites us all.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Citations from primary sources are by standard pagination and line, or section and subsection, of standard critical editions. Specific editions of primary sources are listed below for cases where references have made peculiarities or page numbers of the editions significant.

Abbreviations for Works Frequently Cited

CC: Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau. 52 vols. Edited by Ralph Alexander Leigh. Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1965–98. Vol. 52, Index, by Janet Laming.

CW: The Collected Writings of Rousseau. 13 vols. Edited by Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990–2010. Contains the highly accurate Butterworth translation of The Reveries (see Butterworth 1979). Running page heads show correlated page numbers in OC.

OC: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, oeuvres complètes. 5 vols. Edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959–95.

Clear photos of Rousseau’s polished manuscript of the first seven walks of The Reveries (Neuchâtel library, 7882.MsR78) are available for viewing at https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/bpun/R0078/3/0/Sequence-211.

Clear photos of Rousseau’s somewhat rough manuscript of the last three walks (Neuchâtel library, 7883.MsR79) are available for viewing at https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/bpun/R0079.

For descriptions of the preceding manuscript materials, see Butterworth 1979, Appendix A and Spink 1948, which has in footnotes a careful presentation of Rousseau’s alterations, interpolations, and marginalia.

In Eigeldinger’s (2010) critical edition are reproduced photos of the notes that Rousseau wrote on the backs of playing cards around the time of his writing of The Reveries (Neuchâtel library, 7872 bis).

Introduction

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s last work, written from autumn 1776 to April 1778 and first published in 1782, is deeply enigmatic regarding both its subject matter and its (labyrinthian) form.¹ And unlike his penultimate major work—Rousseau Judge of/Judges Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, written 1772–75—this swan song begins with no helpful preface titled On the Subject and on the Form of This Writing.

The first paragraph does afford a glimpse of authorial purpose: "But me [moi], detached from them and from everything, what am I myself [moi-même]? There, that is what remains for me to seek. Readers of Rousseau’s previous works may well be reminded of the famous imperative inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi: Know thyself!" (gnōthi sauton!). Rousseau made this inscription the launching pad for his Second Discourse (OC 3:122). Here in The Reveries, we soon (4:1)² hear Rousseau declare that he has become well confirmed in the opinion that the "knowest-thou thy-self [connois-toi toi-même] of the Temple of Delphi was not a maxim as easy to follow as I had believed it in my Confessions."³

But comparing the evocation of the Delphic command in the opening of the Second Discourse with that in The Reveries brings home the fact that at the end of his life, Rousseau’s response to the ancient Greek injunction has undergone a momentous change.

For when he invoked the Delphic precept at the start of the preface to his Second Discourse, he did so as part of his call on philosophy to bring to light the human soul, and human existence, as Nature formed it, in its original constitution (OC 3:122). He proceeded to a recovery of the original state(s) of nature, in an analysis that paid no attention to any divergent uniqueness(es) of natural human individuals. Since his subject interested mankind in general, he supposed himself in the Lyceum of Athens, with Platos and Xenocrateses for judges: Oh Human, of whatever country thou art, whatever may be thy opinions, listen; here is thy history such as I have believed it to read! (OC 3:133). Rousseau’s project in the Second Discourse was the presentation of a wholly new version of the perennial philosophical project: understanding and teaching the original, and still universally underlying, nature of mankind as a species.

Starting in The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, however, he has become preoccupied with a quest for, and a presentation of, deeply personal self-knowledge—of me, of me alone—an enterprise which has had no example and whose execution will have no imitator whatsoever. Thereby, and only thereby, Rousseau declares, will he reveal a human in all the truth of nature—despite or because of the fact that nature broke the mold in which she cast me. His Confessions is the only portrait of a human painted exactly after nature, and in all its truth, which exists, or which probably will ever exist. As such, it can serve as the premier piece of comparison for the study of humans, which certainly is still to begin. Imploring the innumerable crowd of his fellow humans, Rousseau asks that after they have heard his confessions, each of them uncover, in his turn, his heart, with the same sincerity (OC 1:3–5; cf. Friedlander 2004, 20–22).

The Reveries may be understood to take a step still further in the same direction, if we spotlight the fact that here the question is not Who am I myself? but What am I myself? (Manent 2019, 220–21). Rousseau has come to focus on the following proposition: that what has become, over time or history (including prehistory), fully natural for humans is the realizing of the perfectibility that contains the potentiality for radically divergent individualizations of the primordially universal sameness of human nature.

The Reveries thus completes Rousseau’s profoundly un-Socratic, because radically solitary, and often intensely anguished, quest for knowledge of his own-most, individual, unique me—a quest completed by way of a primary focus on reveries.⁴ Socrates, in contrast, interpreted the Delphic injunction to mean above all a thorough, dialogical-refutational analysis and purification of one’s own, along with others’, treasured opinions about (universal) justice and nobility.⁵ The Socratic quest for self-knowledge sought not so much an understanding of Socrates’s unique, own-most subjectivity (his me alone) but rather an understanding that confirmed the philosopher’s sharable self-consciousness as a morally opining member of the human species (eidos), viewed in relation to other crucial species or kinds (eidē) in the accessible universe. Plato’s⁶ Phaedo depicts Socrates continuing even on the very last day of his life an unusually humane version of this dialogical and didactic activity, together with friends;⁷ and Plato portrays Socrates’s days and weeks immediately prior to his death as times of intense, if often comically playful, dialectical engagement (see Plato’s Theaetetus, Cratylus, Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, and Crito, and also the implicit, deeply thought-provoking critique of the peculiarly Socratic dialectics delivered by the Eleatic Stranger, in the presence of Socrates, in Plato’s Sophist).

The title chosen by Rousseau, Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire,⁸ when considered along with the titles he chose for the first seven chapters, each of which is titled a sequentially numbered Walk (Promenade), seems to announce a collection and/or a discussion of the pensive musings that the author has experienced on long walks that he has taken by himself.⁹ These solitary walks have apparently become so defining of him that Rousseau now designates himself no longer—as he did on previous title pages—a citizen of Geneva or J. J. Rousseau—or even Jean-Jacques but, for the first and only time, the Solitary Walker.¹⁰ The word for walker—promeneur—is Rousseau’s neologism (Mercier 1801, s.v.; cf. Spink 1948, 235). No previous thinker or writer felt a need for such a word. When Plato gives his striking and famous depictions of Socrates engaged in deep private thinking, Socrates is said to do so habitually while standing stock still, for lengths of time that seem nigh superhuman (Symposium 175a–c and 220c–d). On the one occasion when Plato presents Socrates on a long walk, he is conversing with a young friend, and both agree that such a walk is highly uncharacteristic of the life of the philosopher (Phaedrus 227–30). Xenophon presents Socrates telling of his habit of dancing alone indoors (Symposium 2:17–19): Xenophon’s Socrates is a solitary indoor dancer rather than a solitary walker. A kind of walking was so characteristic of Aristotle that his school takes its name—Peripatetic—from those walks; but they were circular strolls, in a stoa, with Aristotle discoursing to and with his students. Rousseau is the first solitary walker.

Yet, we soon start to realize that the initial impression that Rousseau has created—that we will find his work’s chapters to comprise subsequently written recollections of musings of his that took place on a number of successive solitary walks—is deceptive.¹¹

The First Walk begins our disabusal. Rather than a recollection of musings that took place during a walk, what we are given is a seemingly spontaneous outpouring of an anguished self-expression that segues into a stream of sinuous and cascading reasonings, all dealing with the Solitary Walker’s idiosyncratic present, past, and (prospected) future life. In this way, he presents the autobiographical justification for, and the explanatory introduction to, this extremely (outrageously?) self-centered writing.

Now, but if, or since, the title of this first chapter—First Walk—suggests that it somehow counts as a walk even though no walking is ever evidenced, does the chapter’s content also somehow count as reverie, or at least as recollection of reverie (Martin 2008, 245)? An affirmative answer seems implied when Rousseau says near the end of this First Walk, I am writing my reveries (para. 14); and at the start of the Seventh Walk, he seems to refer to the entire first seven chapters as the collection of my long dreams (rêves); moreover, at the end of the eighth chapter, he apparently refers back to the fifth chapter as one of my reveries.

We are obviously provoked to wonder, what exactly does Rousseau mean by, and include in, the category of dream or reverie? (For the usage of the French term prior to Rousseau, see the appendix.)

Rousseau’s Entire Life as a Long Reverie?

There is evidence that when he started writing The Reveries, Rousseau was at least strongly tempted to convey the impression that he conceived his entire life’s thinking, or consciousness, as being chiefly if not entirely reverie. After his death, there were found among his possessions twenty-seven playing cards on the plain backs of which (cards so constructed were common at the time) Rousseau had written notes, all of which have a relation to the autobiographical works, and of which only the first eight have been numbered by Rousseau, the others having been by Th. Dufour (Eigeldinger 2010, 171). The playing card numbered 1 has as its first sentence, "In order to fulfill well the title of this collection I would have had to begin more than [sic] sixty years ago: for my entire life has scarcely been anything except a long reverie divided into chapters by my walks of each day."

How seriously ought we to take this extraordinary jotting? Are we to include in the category reverie Rousseau’s intense, sustained, and rigorous philosophical reasonings and studies—his intellect’s building of his sad and grand system,¹² the achievement that, in the eyes of Kant,¹³ is the equivalent, as regards the understanding of humanity, of what Newton achieved as regards the understanding of subhuman nature? But would this not be stretching the category reverie to a point where it begins to lose any distinctive meaning?¹⁴ So, then, is Rousseau now eclipsing his genuinely philosophical thinking? Or, still again, is he shoehorning his past philosophical achievements into the category reverie in order to obscure the hard, rigorous reasoning that was at the core of his being as a philosopher? Or is he indicating that he has found rigorous philosophizing to be ultimately valuable as something like a ladder for ascending or descending to a trans—or subphilosophical, spontaneously rambling musing and sometimes enraptured consciousness? Or all of the above?

Reverie in The Confessions

We are soon informed that The Reveries is the sequel or even an appendix to my confessions.¹⁵ If we look then to Rousseau’s book The Confessions for help in trying to understand what Rousseau means by reverie, what do we find?

Rousseau certainly does not refer to The Confessions as consisting of reveries. By far, most of the references to reverie occur in the first part of the work—books 1–6, finished in late 1767 and dealing with his life until 1743, or age thirty-one. There, Rousseau applies the word rêverie, and the allied words rêve (dream), rêveur (dreamer), and rêver (the verb to dream), to a thinking or consciousness engaged in sometimes gay, sometimes melancholy daydreaming or light rumination or fantasizing (not least, erotic).¹⁶ One receives the distinct impression that in writing the first part of his Confessions, Rousseau did not yet assign to the term reverie anything like its later great importance (Tripet 1979, 28), which begins to emerge only in some of the rare usages of the term in the second part of The Confessions (bks. 7–12, which Rousseau started writing in late 1769).

Meditative Walks

In the second part of The Confessions, we hear of solitary walks on which Rousseau engaged in sustained and deep intellectual activity that he designates not reveries but the work (travail) of philosophical and poetic writing. Describing his stay in Geneva in 1754 soon after completing the dedication to the Second Discourse, Rousseau reports (OC 1:394), "I did not lose either the taste for, or the habit of, my solitary walks [mes promenades solitaires], and I often made rather long ones during which my head, accustomed to work, did not remain idle." On those walks, he says, he formed the plan of the work that resulted in Of the Social Contract; he planned a history of Valaise, he planned his (never finished) prose tragedy Lucretia, and he pondered a translation of Tacitus (later started and broken off after the first book). A year earlier (OC 1:388), he thought out the thesis of the Second Discourse by spending seven or eight days at St. Germain where, without a care in the world, he came in at mealtimes, while all the rest of the day, immersed in the forest, I sought there, I found there, the image of the first times whose history I proudly traced; I made a clean sweep of the petty falsehoods of men, I dared to strip naked their nature, and comparing the human [made by] human with the natural human, to show them in the former’s pretended perfection the genuine source of his miseries. Rousseau says his soul was exalted by these sublime contemplations to the point where it raised itself to the divinity. But he does not characterize these "meditations from which resulted the Discourse on Inequality" as reveries.

In an instructive passage describing the momentous start (April 9, 1756) of his residence outside Paris at the Hermitage,¹⁷ Rousseau draws a sharp distinction between (a) the countryside delirium (délire champêtre) of his first few days’ walks, which transported me in idea to the end of the world (these sound like reveries, though Rousseau does not use that term); and (b) subsequent walks, when, provided with my little white notebook and with my pencil, he made the forest of Montmorency henceforth my office for working (n.b., not for dreaming or reverie)—having been never able to write and to think at my ease except outdoors. He adds with some manifest pride, If one counts and measures the writings that I have executed in the six years that I passed there, one will find, I assure myself, that if I lost my time during that interval, this was not at least on account of laziness (OC 1:403–4).

There is only a single passage, unique in the entire Confessions, in which Rousseau explicitly associates dreaming (rêver) with serious philosophical thought.¹⁸ He reports that not long after the publication of his first philosophical work, the First Discourse (1751), and prior to the writing of the Second Discourse (begun 1753), whenever possible "I went walking alone by myself [j’allois me promener seul], I dreamed [rêvois] about my great system, I threw some of it onto paper with the aid of a blank booklet and a pencil which I always had in my pocket" (OC 1:368). Here, dreaming would seem to have been profoundly philosophical and in some sense systematic.

But this dreaming about the great system required the very extensive and intensive supplement, once Rousseau returned home, of sustained, hard, rigorous, self-critical reasoning—a mental discipline that would seem to be at the opposite pole from any dreaming or reverie. We are afforded by The Confessions (OC 1:352) a vivid glimpse of Rousseau’s typical manner of engaging in philosophical writing, starting with his First Discourse: I worked on this discourse in a very singular manner, but one which I have almost always followed in my other works. I dedicated the insomnia of my nights to it. I meditated in my bed with my eyes closed and shaped and reshaped my passages in my head with unbelievable pains; then, when I had succeeded in being satisfied with them, I deposited them in my memory. Upon his secretary’s assigned arrival each morning, I dictated from my bed [not walking or pacing, n.b.] my work of the night, and this practice, which I followed for a long time, has saved me from forgetting many things.

There is here no hint of reverie or dreaming or promenade. It appears that Rousseau did much of his most important thinking not in rambling musings on daytime walks but, on the contrary, prone, immobile, in bed at night, excogitating, designing, and redesigning.

And as Christopher Kelly (1987, 157) has pointed out, Rousseau never characterizes as times of reveries the several years that he reports having spent studying the works of Locke, Malebranche, Leibniz, Descartes, and so on, following the law that he gave himself to adopt and to follow each author’s ideas without mixing in my own or those of anyone else, and without ever disputing with him, thereby acquiring the needed apprentice’s foundation for thinking without anyone else’s help and eventually, sometimes judging my masters (Confessions OC 1:237).

As Heinrich Meier has observed, "in the philosophic writings he published during his lifetime, Rousseau had always used the term rêveries in a pejorative or ironically defensive sense" (Meier 2016, 17–18).¹⁹

In an earlier passage in the first part of The Confessions (OC 1:114), Rousseau describes more generally the slowness in thinking, joined to vivacity of feeling that he experiences when he is alone and when I work and which explains the extreme difficulty that I find in writing. His ideas, he says, typically circulate dumbly in his head, fermenting there and moving me, heating me, giving me palpitations, in the midst of which I see nothing clearly. Only after a long and confused agitation does this chaos insensibly sort itself out: slowly, each thing comes to put itself in its place, and this requires in part a process of writing and rewriting, resulting in manuscripts that are crossed out, blotted, mixed up, indecipherable. Even before writing down anything, he says, there are some of my passages that during my insomnias have been turned over and over for five or six nights in my head before they were in a state to be put on paper. Does this not apply also to the writing of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker?

Walks of Self-Expansive, Drunken Rapture

Two striking passages in the first part of The Confessions present Rousseau’s recollection of the flowering of his imaginative experiences on solitary travels by foot in his late teens (the very last of these occurred, he says, when he was nineteen [OC 1:171]).²⁰ On one especially happy trip, at the age of sixteen, my sweet chimeras kept me company, and never did the heat of my imagination give birth to more magnificent ones: for this time my ideas were martial; I was going to become a military man; my heart swelled at this noble idea. And yet, when I passed agreeable countryside, then I felt in the midst of my glory that my heart was not made for such, and soon, without knowing how, he found himself plunged back into his more usual fantasizing, about being a shepherd, and he renounced forever the works of Mars (OC 1:158; but cf. 256).

We are at first inclined not to take too seriously this recollection of teenage fantasizing on long walks; but a few pages later, Rousseau all of a sudden exclaims (OC 1:162–63), never have I thought so much, existed so much, lived so much, been me so much—if I dare speak thus—as on those travels that I made alone and on foot. Then he shifts to the present tense, to describe his walks now, in his maturity, and he judges the latter to be inferior versions of those long ago, teenage travels and fantasizings, when I buried myself at my whim in the land of chimeras. Nowadays, in contrast, his walks in the countryside have an element of escapism: they bring about a distancing from all that makes me feel my dependence, from all that reminds me of my situation.

But all at once, these escapist walks of his maturity explode in significance: they disengage my soul, give me a greater audacity of thinking, cast me somehow into the immensity of beings in order to combine them, to make a choice among them, to appropriate them to me as I please, without impediment and without fear. Going still further, he writes, "I dispose, as master [en maître], of nature, in its entirety; my heart wandering from object to object, unites, identifies with those that gratify it, surrounds itself with charming images, makes itself drunk [s’inivre] with delicious feelings."²¹ When he chooses, he sometimes amuses himself by describing the charming images, in order to fix them, and he succeeds in portraying them vividly; and that has all, it is said, been found in my works, although written in my declining years. But oh, if one had seen those of my first youth, those I made during my travels, those that I composed and that I never wrote down! Then I soared in Heaven; I felt that a new paradise awaited me. He explains that in those greater teenage ecstasies, he did not foresee his ideas; they came when it pleased them, not when it pleased me. Either they did not come at all, or else they came in crowds, they overwhelmed with their number and their force. The images themselves were experienced in a heightened consciousness, but they surged into the consciousness—to a degree that he finds has been lost in his maturity.

Reverie in Awe of Nature

The preceding chimerical and drunken but mastering experience of, and posture toward nature contrasts with the awed and pious, more self-forgetting, explicit reverie experienced by the mature Rousseau and described near the end of The Confessions (OC 1:642): I have always loved the water passionately, and its sight throws me into a delicious reverie, though often without a determined object. Recalling in particular his sojourn on the island of St. Pierre in the middle of Lake Bienne (1765), when he let his eyes sweep over the horizon of that beautiful lake, whose banks, and the mountains which bordered it, enchanted my sight, he is led to exclaim, I find nothing more worthy of homage to the divinity than that mute admiration excited by the contemplation of his works. He then reflects that "for me, it is above all when I wake up, worn down by my fits of insomnia, that a long habitude carries me to those exaltations of the heart that do not at all impose the fatigue of thinking" (my italics). In order for such exaltations of the heart to occur, however,