“The idleness I like is not that of the lounger, who sits there, arms crossed, wholly inert, and who no more thinks than he acts. It is at once that of a child, who is always in motion and always dong nothing, and that of a driveller, who rambles on endlessly while never stirring from his seat. (…) Wandering carelessly through the woods and the fields, gathering mechanically, here and there, now a flower, now a branch; browsing almost at random in my hayfield, noting again and again a thousand times the same things, and always with the same interest, because I had always forgotten them, these things were enough to last me an eternity without my being bored for a moment. (…) I was, and because of my lack of memory was always to remain, at that happy stage of knowing little enough for everything to be new to me, but enough for everything to be intelligible.”
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Oxford World Classics, translated by Angela Scholar)
This year France is celebrating the tricentennial of one of its favourite Enlightenment Darlings, the philosopher- essayist-novelist-composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I’ve been rereading his Confessions. One cannot boast of a bad memory but as J.J. points out in the passage above, there are certain advantages to having a loose mnemonic grip. My second reading has been every bit a delightful as the first of which only bits had remained with me, the rather naughty ones, I’m afraid. I recalled his erotic pleasure in being spanked and his “exposure” at the well where he revealed not the “obscene thing” but the “absurd one” to a flock of maidens. I passed over these professions of shame, daring for his age, quaint for our own, and marveled in the picaresque adventures of this roving, autodidact from Geneva who unwittingly gets himself converted to Catholicism and nearly raped by a Moor in the process, who teaches himself music, botany, science, literature, mathematics, who sleeps with the woman he calls Maman, who pretends to be a composer and then actually becomes one, writing operas performed at Paris’ prestigious opera house, and who, with no pretention of being a writer, ends up the author of a best-selling novel and numerous philosophical works…
It is an extraordinary life he recounts in which his so-called faulty memory serves him well; we are treated to a lively portrait of eighteenth century European society as Rousseau opens his heart, cinches his reasoning, measures his motives, flexes his narrative muscles. Today’s writers of memoir and “autofiction” are clearly indebted to his enterprise, which in its ambition to tell the whole truth about the man and not to shirk from shame (on the contrary, it seems to me Rousseau takes a masochistic pleasure in tattling on himself) produced a highly modern work that considerably extended the boundaries of autobiography.
If you have not read Rousseau, this is the year to do so because, in France at least, you’ll have plenty of people to accompany you. It’ll be like bookclub only with very smart folks leading the discussion on France Culture. Why look!
Special K has a word or two to say about J.J. too. A one hundred and twenty-four-page supplement in Le Monde for only seven euros and ninety centimes! I’m getting myself a copy tomorrow.
You may or may not recognize yourself in the passage from Confessions I’ve quoted above; I know I certainly do. I share Rousseau’s love of nature; nothing pleases me more than long hikes through the forest and countryside and, like him, my passion for plants, flowers in particular, make these traipses all the more pleasing. The good thing about forgetting as I’ve already mentioned is that you can relive your pleasures over and over. Right now we are in the Ariège, near the Pyrenees, thanks to my friend, poet Olivia McCannon, who when I told her we needed a place to stay for five weeks, having rented out our flat in Paris, came up with a scheme so enticing we could only happily agree to it. She put us in contact with her uncle and aunt who have just finished constructing a gîte in the mountains of the Ariège. Pete, her uncle, is an architect and the gîte he designed and had constructed from what was formerly a barn is simply glorious with beautiful wooden floors, high ceilings and, generous windows in every room that look out onto the forested mountains. Never have we stayed at a nicer gîte or been received by lovelier hosts than Pete and Jackie who have guided us to some of the region’s most charming spots. Our days are spent hiking mostly, but we also made a pilgrimage to the spa at Aix les Thermes, have visited several Cathar castles, and gone swimming in nearby lakes. I’ll be writing about it more in upcoming posts. As we have no Internet connection here, I do all my web business at a campground by the lake at Puyvert, the closest village to this mountain hideaway, and an hour’s walk away. I have no idea if Rousseau ever passed through this region but if he did, I don’t think he would have forgotten it.