In a change of pace from my normal subjects, I wanted to write a short recommendation for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker. I read this within the last year and had come across it by accident. Not intending to read it through, I found it forgotten about on one of my shelves and decided to take a look and see what it was about. I soon realized a few minutes into reading that I was quickly being pulled in. Not a book many I know have heard of, it is a short work that explores a man at the end of his life grappling with the “why” of how things turned out for him. In this account of his own life, Rousseau fills the pages with emotion and reflection, attempting to work through a life that had not left him happy in old age. Rousseau does however express his belief that his path through life will be vindicated by posterity and that all things work themselves out in the end; even if that means after our own lives are over. He says in one chapter “Let men and fate do their worst, we must learn to suffer in silence, everything will find its proper place in the end and sooner or later my turn will come.” Though in our time suffering in silence is frowned upon (and not recommended), Rousseau’s advice that the world around us is imperfect and we can only do our best given the circumstances is deeply sound advice and this book is filled with countless other valuable reflections on life.
This recommendation does come with the warning that it is an overall gloomy book considering the circumstances of the author. Reading through Rousseau’s experiences and takeaways at times can feel discouraging for our own lives considering the high regard in which many hold the legendary philosopher. It isn’t a common thing to be exposed to the deep emotional feelings of the most influential characters in our relatively recent history, and seems to suggest that if someone as brilliant and successful as Rousseau is unhappy in their dying days, how can we expect to fare any better? This though, I believe, would be the wrong conclusion to take away from the work and I believe the introspections found in this account can have real positive impacts on our own lives. The entire book is a twisting narrative filled with melancholy reveries contradicted with rather firm faith that in all he did, he did with pure intentions and innocence. This is a wonderful opportunity to have exposure to life’s deepest questions on how we ought to live and the unfairness of life with the experience and answers to those questions by one of the brightest minds of the Enlightenment, all for our own use. I’ll leave my recommendation with one final quote from Rousseau and hope you will find it as useful as I have: “Experience is always instructive, I admit, but it is only useful in the time we have left to live. When death is already at the door, is it worth learning how we should have lived?”
