I was surprised to learn recently that long walks—the kind of walks that Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner refer to as “epic” or “heroic”—are completely out of fashion among (some?) walking artists. Actually, “out of fashion” is the wrong term. According to Heddon and Turner,
the reiteration of a particular genealogy—or fraternity—which includes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau, André Breton and Guy Debord generates an orthodoxy of walking, tending towards an implicitly masculinist ideology. This frequently frames and valorizes walking as individualist, heroic, epic and transgressive. Such qualities are not exclusive to men of course; however, as we go on to suggest, a lack of attention to gender serves to fix the terms of debate, so that qualities such as “heroism” and “transgression” are understood predominantly in relation to a historically masculinist set of norms. (224)
I’ve written about Heddon’s and Turner’s work here before, and I want to reiterate that their discussion of other kinds of walking opens up space for, as they write, “other types of walking practices and the insights they might prompt” (224), which is absolutely important. And yet, to abandon long walks as masculinist and to use apparently mocking terms like “heroic” and “epic” goes beyond opening up space for other kinds of walking; it narrows the range of walking practices that are considered acceptable. It’s important to construct, as they do, an alternate genealogy of women’s walking practices, and it’s important that such a genealogy include practices influenced by or derived from social or relational aesthetics, such as the work of London-based walkwalkwalk (Heddon and Turner 233) or Emma Bush’s Village Walk (Heddon and Turner 233-34) or Misha Myers’s Way from Home (Heddon and Turner 234), and that it include walking practices in domestic spaces and activities as well, such as Cathy Turner’s portion of Wrights & Sites’s performance Simultaneous Drift: 4 walks, 4 routes, 4 screens (Heddon and Turner 232-33). But it’s another thing entirely to mandate that walking practices that are not influenced by relational or social aesthetics, or that are not domestic, are therefore without value. True, Heddon and Turner refer to women who walk long distances—Linda Cracknell, Elspeth Owen, and the duo of Simone Kenyon and Tamara Ashley—but they also argue that those walking practices are significantly different from the “masculinist” ones they critique. If you’re a man, and you walk long distances, particularly if you walk by yourself, there’s something wrong with what you’re doing: that’s the implication.
Sometime, I’d like to write an essay entitled “In Defence of ‘Epic’ Walking,” but first I want to think a little bit about the canon of walking that Heddon and Turner describe (or deride) as “masculinist.” For that reason, I decided to read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s short (and unfinished) book Reveries of the Solitary Walker. For Heddon and Turner, “Rousseau’s late-eighteenth-century assertion that he could only meditate when walking is much cited as a founding moment in the history of walking understood as a cultural act, as a means in itself,” one that has become canonized in recent accounts of walking written by Rebecca Solnit and Joseph Amato (226). “It is not walking, per se, that enables Rousseau’s deep contemplation but the sense of freedom engendered by walking alone,” Heddon and Turner continue, quoting a passage from Rousseau’s Confessions that is echoed in Reveries of the Solitary Walker: “Walking serves to erase ‘everything that makes me feel my dependence, [. . .] everything that recalls me to my situation’” (qtd. Heddon and Turner 226). “The specificity of the body that is able to walk alone in the eighteenth century is worth remarking,” they conclude, suggesting that only a masculine body that would be able to walk alone and, perhaps by extension, a masculine mind that would be interested in solitary contemplation.
It might be unfortunate that Rousseau’s form of walking has become canonized, that it has come to be seen as one of the only possible forms of walking available to people. Actually, it is unfortunate, because there are other kinds of walking that have value, as Heddon and Turner point out. However, that doesn’t mean that solitary walking, or solitary walking as an aid to meditation, is necessarily a bad thing, does it? And, if we look at Rousseau’s life, we can see that there are obvious reasons the French writer preferred to walk by himself. As the translator of the Oxford edition of Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Russell Goulbourne, points out, the publication of Rousseau’s The Social Contract in 1762 “brought him not only the celebrity he loathed but also the infamy that saw him, in his terms, driven into exile, unfairly rejected by his fellow men” (xi). “In response to the events of 1762 and their traumatic repercussions,” Goulbourne continues, “Rousseau’s gaze turned inward and he wrote . . . a kind of triptych of autobiographical works”: his Confessions, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, and the Reveries, which was “his last attempt to achieve some kind of mental and spiritual balance in his life” (xi-xii). The Reveries was left unfinished when Rousseau died in 1778 and published posthumously, like the Confessions (xii). Goulbourne argues that the Reveries are a kind of continuation of the Confessions, but that they are also “different in character and scope,” because rather than explaining himself to others, in the Reveries he is addressing only himself, in an attempt at understanding himself (xiii). “His narrative is resolutely non-linear and profoundly introspective and personal,” since he no longer wishes to be understood by others, Goulbourne writes (xiii). Indeed, the Reveries show Rousseau “apparently accepting himself and endeavouring to give himself the space in which to express himself and feel as never before what it means to exist”; the book is intended “as a poignant response to, and an extended rebellion against, those who have tried to control him” (xiii). In the Reveries, Rousseau claims that “he finds strength in indifference towards his enemies and persecutors, and happiness in solitude amidst nature” (xiii). From the outset, he argues “that he must accept his fate” and “stop fighting against it,” and that acceptance becomes
an apparent triumph over those who seek to control him: his introspection leads him to seek out and find a remedy for his sufferings in those sufferings themselves. In other words, he turns isolation and solitude to his own advantage. He revels in the fact that, in spite of themselves, his enemies have given him an opportunity he gladly embraces: the opportunity to be alone. (xiv)
But, Goulbourne asks, is Rousseau as happy as he claims? The text, he writes,
gives voice to contradictions and obsessions which give us a very sharp sense of a Rousseau still working through the problems he claims to have overcome. Most obviously, this is a text shot through with such a vivid sense of there being widespread hostility towards Rousseau that it is difficult to accept that he is merely indifferent to misfortune and persecution. In addition, thoroughgoing self-analysis does not prevent Rousseau from engaging in more or less subtle self-defence, even self-exoneration. (xiv)
“It follows, then, that this is no straightforward text about a man fleeing society and finding happiness in total seclusion,” Goulbourne argues (xv).
According to Goulbourne, “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. . . . 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. (xv-xvi)
Contemporary readers might disagree with Rousseau’s reaction to the styles and norms of behaviour and communication in eighteenth-century France, but that reaction—particularly in the context of the persecution he experienced—needs to be understood as the source of his desire for solitude and his preference for walking alone. Goulbourne writes,
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. . . . His happiness comes in part form 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. (xvi)
“The diversity of nature keeps Rousseau busy and helps him not to think unpleasant, unwanted thoughts,” Goulbourne continues, and Rousseau “delves into this diversity through his interest in botany”; although he characterizes botany as an easy pastime, he was in reality serious and systematic about it (xvi). The solitary walks are often an excuse for botanizing—for identifying plants and collecting specimens—which becomes a way Rousseau relates to the natural world. (I sympathize with this, because I have often gone for walks on native grassland with a field guide in my pocket and a few bags for gathering ripe seeds to plant at home. And in my experience, that activity has been a solitary one, because nobody I know is interested in walks that include frequent stops to figure out what a particular plant is called or in collecting seeds.)
Rousseau’s self-analysis in the book “is structured around a series of ten walks,” which “allow his mind to wander” as his feet do, and give him an opportunity “to meditate and to muse” (xvii). For Rousseau, Goulbourne writes, such musings or reveries become
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. (xviii)
Walking inspires thought, for Rousseau, and in representing those thoughts, the Reveries “attempt to portray the twists and turns” of Rousseau’s mind (xxi). In other words, Goulbourne writes,
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. (xxii)
“The structure of the text is determined by the chance association of ideas as Rousseau’s mind wanders in tandem with his feet,” Goulbourne notes (xxii). But, he continues, “what is radically new about the Reveries: the text is intended as a means of expression of his own self for his own self” (xxiii).
The Reveries was an influence on other walking writers, including William Hazlitt and Henry David Thoreau (xxiv), and Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth (xxv). Goulbourne also suggests that there is a connection between Rousseau with W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn,” which he describes as “a meditative work blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction” (xxvii). Goulbourne concludes:
The work of a great prose stylist and a controversial philosopher, the Reveries still appeal to modern readers because they are the enduring testimony of an alienated person who wants to know himself, rebel against the forces that constrain him, and live as an autonomous individual. They are the work of a person who is not afraid to lay bare his psychological frailty and human vulnerability. They give a window onto the soul of someone who is different, who does not fit in, an eccentric/ex-centric that cannot—or does not want to—find a place in conventional, supposedly civilized society. Rousseau is thus at once exceptional . . . and exemplary. (xxviii)
When I read those words, I wondered if there’s a place in contemporary walking aesthetics for people who don’t fit in, who aren’t extroverted or socially motivated, who are eccentric and solitary. I would hope that there is. After all, walking art is, from the perspective of the mainstream, an unusual activity. But the demand that all walking practices be defined by social or relational aesthetics suggests that there is no space in aesthetic walking for eccentric introverts or people who, like Rousseau, have been abused by others and therefore seek an escape from the potential for more abuse. That’s the root of my discomfort with Heddon’s and Turner’s essay: making space for other forms of practice is salutary, but dismissing all practices that do not conform to one’s preferred forms risks repeating the forms of exclusion that one is critiquing.
At the beginning of the “First Walk,” Rousseau emphasizes his isolation, but argues that his solitary situation is not his fault. It is, rather, the result of his banishment by society:
So here I am, all alone on this earth, with no brother, neighbour, or friend, and no company but my own. The most sociable and loving of human beings has by common consent been banished by the rest of society. In the refinement of their hatred they have continued to seek out the cruellest forms of torture for my sensitive soul, and they have brutally severed all ties which bound me to them. I would have loved my fellow men in spite of themselves. Only by ceasing to be men have they succeeded in losing my affection for them. So now they are strangers, persons unknown who mean nothing to me since that is what they wanted. But what about me, cut off from them and from everything else, what am I? This is what remains for me to find out now. (3)
Rousseau ignores his wife here, which isn’t surprising; an editor’s note points out that Rousseau thought little of women writers (111), and perhaps that disdain included women who didn’t write as well. I don’t know enough about Rousseau’s life to understand their relationship. He does mention his wife a few times in the Reveries, but for the most part she is taken for granted. Perhaps that wasn’t unusual in the eighteenth century, although it certainly stands out as a problem now.
Since 1762, Rousseau suggests, he has been thought of “as a monster, a poisoner, and a murderer” and that he has become “an abomination to the human race and the plaything of the rabble,” that “the only greeting that passers-by would offer would be to spit on me,” and that “a whole generation would by common consent delight in burying me alive” (3-4). That rejection, he writes, “plunged me into a frenzy which has taken no less than ten years to subside, during which time, as I reeled from one error to another, from one mistake to another and from one foolish act to another, my reckless behaviour gave those who were responsible for my fate all the ammunition that they have so skilfully used to determine it once and for all” (4). His battles against his antagonists—“fighting without cunning, without skill, without deceit, without caution, frankly, openly, impatiently, and angrily”—simply made things worse and gave his critics “new holds over me which they were careful to exploit” (4). Acceptance, or resignation, was the only way out of his quandry:
Finally realizing that all my efforts were useless and that I was tormenting myself to no avail whatsoever, I took the only remaining course of action left open to me, which was to accept my fate and stop struggling against the inevitable. I have found in this resignation the cure for all my ills through the peace of mind that it gives me and which was incompatible with continually pursuing a struggle that was as agonizing as it was ineffectual. (4)
According to Rousseau, his antagonists also left him without hope, which made such resignation easier (4-5). As a result, he continues,
Everything outside of me is from this day on foreign to me. I no longer have any neighbours, fellow men or brothers in this world. Being on this earth is like being on another planet onto which I have fallen from the one on which I used to live. If I recognize anything at all around me, it is only objects which distress and rend my heart, and I cannot even look at what touches me and what surrounds me without forever seeing something contemptible which angers me or something painful which wounds me. (7)
It’s worth pointing out the gendered language he uses here: he uses masculine nouns to stand in for men and women. That was probably commonplace in the eighteenth century; it was commonplace only a few decades ago.
According to Rousseau, this book is a way of “preparing the account of myself which I shall soon have to render” (7). But it is also an exercise in the only pleasure other people cannot take away from him:
Let me give myself over entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my soul, for this is the only pleasure that my fellow men cannot take away from me. If by dint of reflecting on my inner feelings I am able to order them better and put right the wrongs that may remain, my meditations will not be entirely in vain, and while I am good for nothing on this earth, I shall not have entirely wasted my days. 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. I shall forget my misfortunes, my persecutors, and my shame by thinking of the honour my heart had deserved. (7-8)
“These pages will in fact be merely a shapeless account of my reveries,” he continues. “They will often be about me, because a reflective solitary man necessarily thinks about himself a lot. What is more, all the strange ideas which come to me as I walk will also find their place here.” (8) In its shapelessness and strangeness, it seems clear that Rousseau’s account is not intended for an audience; the Reveries was a private text, and as readers we become privy to Rousseau’s thinking—including his self-justications and defensive arguments—as if we were reading a diary or a journal.
The “First Walk” in the text is introductory—I doubt that any walking was involved. In the “Second Walk,” Rousseau claims that the book he is writing will be “a faithful record of my solitary walks and the reveries that fill them when I let my mind wander quite freely and my ideas follow their own course unhindered and untroubled” (11). He explains why solitude and meditation are important to him: “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” (11). He is old, though, and his imagination less vigorous than it used to be, and so “now there is more recollection than creation in what my imagination produces, an apathetic listlessness saps all my faculties, and the spirit of life is gradually dying within me”; therefore, he decides to remember an earlier time when, “losing all hope here on earth and finding no more sustenance left on earth for my heart, I gradually became used to feeding it with its own substance and seeking out its nourishment within me” (11). That practice, he continues,
proved so fruitful that it was soon enough to compensate me for everything. The habit of turning in on myself eventually made me insensible to my suffering, and almost made me forget it altogether, and so I learnt through my own experience that the source of true happiness is within us and that it is not within men’s ability to make anyone truly wretched who is determined to be happy. (11)
There is a sense here that, given his experiences, solitary and meditative walking is essential to Rousseau’s happiness, and that without them he would be miserable.
Rousseau writes about an afternoon walk into the country, during which he looked at and catalogued plants and thought about the approaching winter:
I recalled with fondness all my heart’s affections, its attachments which had been so tender and yet so blind, and the ideas—more comforting than they were sad—which had nourished my mind for a number of years, and I prepared myself to remember them clearly enough to be able to describe them with a pleasure that was almost equal to the pleasure of experiencing them in the first place. (13)
As he was walking home, however, he was knocked down by a Great Dane that was running ahead of a carriage: “It was almost night when I regained consciousness. I found myself in the arms of three or four young men who told me what had just happened”: the coachman stopped the carriage, otherwise Rousseau would have been run over (13-14). Despite his injuries, the moments when he was coming back to himself were delightful, partly because he was removed from himself:
Night was falling. I saw the sky, a few stars, and a little greenery. This first sensation was a moment of delight. It alone gave me some feeling of myself. In that instant I was born into life, and it seemed to me as if I was filling all the things I saw with my frail existence. Entirely taken up by that moment, I could not remember anything else; I had no clear sense of myself as an individual, nor the slightest idea of what had just happened to me; I did not know who I was nor where I was; I felt neither pain nor fear nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as if I were watching a stream, without even thinking that this blood was in any way part of me. Throughout my whole being I felt a wonderful calm with which, whenever I think of it, I can find nothing to compare in the whole realm of known pleasures. (14)
When he finally arrived home, his wife cried over his appearance; his top lip was split open, and his face swollen and bruised; his left thumb was injured, his left arm sprained, and his left knee swollen and stiff; but he had not lost any teeth (15). As a sign of the ongoing persecution he experienced, rumours immediately spread across Paris that he had been disfigured and was now unrecognizable (16). Rumours of his death are printed in a newspaper (18). For Rousseau, the success of the plots against him seemed to be “one of Heaven’s secrets, impenetrable to human reason,” and this idea consoled and calmed him, and helped him to a feeling of resignation (19).
In Rousseau’s “Third Walk,” he notes that he grew up in “rural solitude”: “Lonely meditation, the study of nature, and the contemplation of the universe necessarily make a solitary person strive continually for the author of all things and seek with a sweet anxiety the purpose of everything he sees and the cause of everything he feels” (22). However, he continues, “[w]hen my destiny threw me back into the torrent of the world, I could not find anything there that pleased my heart even for a moment. Wherever I went I missed my sweet freedom and I felt indifference and disgust for anything that came my way that could have led to fortune and fame. (22-23). At the age of 40, then, he renounced his efforts to succeed socially (23), and began copying music by the page (24). “A great change that had recently taken place in me,” he writes:
a different moral world that was opening up before me, the irrational judgements of men, whose absurdity I was beginning to feel, though without yet realizing just how much I would fall victim to them, the ever-growing need for something other than literary notoriety, barely a whiff of which had reached me before I was already sickened by it, and finally the desire to follow a less certain road for the rest of my career than that on which I had just spent the better half of it: all this forced me to undertake this great examination which I had felt I needed for a long time. So I undertook it, and I neglected nothing in my power in order to carry it out successfully. (24)
His “complete renunciation of the world,” he writes, gave him “that great fondness for solitude that has never left me since”:
The work that I was undertaking cold only be accomplished in absolute isolation; it called for the kind of long and undisturbed meditations that the tumult of society does not allow. That forced me for a time to adopt a different way of life, which I was subsequently so glad to have done that, having since then interrupted it only against my will and for short periods of time, I returned to it most readily and limited myself to it quiet easily as soon as I could, and when men later reduced me to living alone, I found that by isolating me in order to make me miserable, they had done more for my happiness than I had been able to do myself. (24)
He decides that “this life was merely a series of trials,” and that they would lead to “recompense” later on (29); he finds contentment and consolation in acceptance of his situation (30-32), and in the study of virtues such as “patience, kindness, resignation, integrity, and impartial justice” (32).
In the “Fourth Walk,” Rousseau decides to contemplate why people tell lies. He remembers “an awful lie I had told when I was very young,” a lie about a stolen ribbon which cost a servant her position (33-34). That lie “and the unceasing remorse that it left me inspired in me a horror of lying that should have protected my heart from this vice for the rest of my life,” although he then recalls many lies he told afterwards without remorse (34). He wonders if there are times “when one can deceive people innocently” (35); in other words, whether one must always tell the truth (35-37). “To lie for one’s own advantage is imposture, to lie for the advantage of others is fraud, and to lie in order to do harm is calumny; this is the worst kind of lie,” he writes. “To lie without benefit or harm to oneself or to others is not to lie: it is not a lie, but a fiction” (38). That distinction—between falsehood and fiction—structures the remainder of his musings. Rousseau realizes that he often has “recourse to fiction in order to have something to say” in social situations, in order to be able to engage in small talk:
Conversation, flowing faster than my ideas and forcing me almost always to speak before thinking, has often led me to make stupid and inept remarks which my reason disapproved of and which my heart disowned even before they had passed my lips, but which, spoken before I could apply my judgement, were no longer susceptible to being corrected by its censure. (42)
Rousseau concludes,
my professed truthfulness is based more on feelings of justice and rectitude than on the reality of things, and that I have followed in practice more the moral dictates of my conscience than abstract notions of truth and falsehood. I have often told lots of stories, but I have very rarely lied. By following these principles I have made myself very vulnerable to criticism from others, but I have done nobody any wrong, and I have not laid claim to more advantage than was owing to me. Only in this way, it seems to me, can truth be a virtue. In all other respects it is for us no more than a metaphysical thing which leads to neither good nor evil. (47)
However, that conclusion is not sufficient. In his writing, when he “embellished real things with made-up ornaments,” he argues that he was wrong; he should have committed himself “absolutely to truth,” and sacrificing the truth to his “interests and desires” was not enough:
I should also have sacrificed it to my weakness and timid nature. I should have had the courage and the strength always to be truthful, on all occasions, and never to allow fictions or fables to pass my lips or come from my pen which was specifically dedicated to truth. . . . My lies were never dictated to me by falsehood; they all came through weakness, though that is a very poor excuse. With a weak soul one may at the very most be able to shun virtue, but it is arrogant and reckless to dare to profess great virtues. (48)
So the distinction between lies and stories ends up being abandoned, and the need to be honest at all times, which he earlier questioned, becomes his rule—even though he is probably too weak to follow it.
At the beginning of his “Fifth Walk,” Rousseau recalls an island where he lived for six weeks during his exile, on a lake in Switzerland; what seems to attract him to this place is its quietness and its well-kept domesticity:
For all its smallness, the island is so varied in soil and position that it has all kinds of places suitable for all sorts of things to be grown. It includes fields, vineyards, woodland, orchards, and rich pastures shaded by trees and lined by shrubs of all varieties, all of which are kept watered by the edges of the lake; a raised terrace, planted with two rows of trees, runs the length of the island, and in the middle of this terrace a pretty summerhouse has been built, where the inhabitants of the neighbouring shores gather for dancing on Sundays during the grape harvest. (50)
He stayed on that island as a refuge after a mob stoned his house at Môtiers (50)—that’s an essential piece of the story he is telling. He writes,
the only company I had there, apart from my companion, was the steward, his wife, and his servants, who were certainly all very good people and nothing more, but this was precisely what I needed. I consider those two months to be the happiest time in my life, so happy in fact that it would have been enough for me to have lived like that for the whole of my life, without ever feeling in my soul the desire to live in any other state. (50)
On the island, he doesn’t read or write anything; he spends time botanizing (51). He also helped out with the harvest, picking fruit, which put him into a “good mood” (52). Then, in the afternoons, he would go out on a boat alone, he writes, and “let myself float and drift slowly wherever the water took me, sometimes for several hours at a time, plunged in a thousand vague but delightful reveries, which, although they did not have any clear or constant subject, I always found a hundred times preferable to all the sweetest things I had enjoyed in what are known as the pleasures of life” (52-53). “What does one enjoy in such a situation?” he asks:
Nothing external to the self, nothing but oneself and one’s own existence: as long as this state lasts, one is self-sufficient like God. The feeling of existence stripped of all other affections is in itself a precious feeling of contentment and peace which alone would be enough to make this existence prized and cherished by anyone who could banish all the sensual and earthly impressions which constantly distract us from it and upset the joy of it in this world. (55-56)
However, not everyone can experience those feelings of contentment and peace:
It is true that such compensations cannot be felt by every soul or in every situation. The heart must be at peace and its calm untroubled by passion. The person who experiences them must be suitably disposed to them, as must all the surrounding objects. There must be neither total calm nor too much agitation, but a steady and moderate movement with neither jolts nor pauses. Without movement life is but lethargy. If the movement is irregular or too violent, it rouses us; by reminding us about the surrounding objects, it destroys the charm of the reverie, tears us out of ourselves, immediately puts us back beneath the yoke of fortune and men, and makes us aware of our misfortunes again. Absolute silence leads to sadness. It offers an image of death. So the help of a cheerful imagination is necessary and comes quite naturally to those whom Heaven has blessed with it. The movement which does not come from outside is created within us on such occasions. (56)
I think that walking is an example of the kind of movement that helps to generate the feelings of peace Rousseau describes here, although he might also be thinking of the movement of the boat he was in as well. In any case, Rousseau is able to add “charming images” to his reveries or daydreams, and those images “enliven” them, although now, “as my imagination wanes, this happens with greater difficulty and for shorter periods of time. Alas, it is when one is beginning to leave behind one’s mortal body that one is the most hindered by it!” (58).
During his “Sixth Walk,” Rousseau thinks about the relationship between doing good things and social obligations (including obligations to do good things); he enjoys the first, and hates the second (59-60). For a long time he had a high opinion of his own virtue, but now he realizes that “there is no virtue in following one’s inclinations and, when they so lead, in offering oneself the pleasure of doing good. Rather, it consists in overcoming those inclinations when duty requires it in order to do what it tells us to do, and this is what I have been less able to do than any other man in the world” (61). Feeling obligated to do something—even a good act—destroys, however, his desire to perform such an act:
Obligation coinciding with my desire is enough to destroy that desire and change it into repugnance, even aversion, if the obligation is too strong, and that is what makes a good deed irksome for me when it is demanded of me, even if I was doing it of my own accord without anyone demanding it of me. A purely voluntary good deed is certainly something that I like to do. But when the beneficiary of it thinks it entitles him to demand more good deeds of me on pain of provoking his hatred if I refuse, and when he insists that I have to be his benefactor for evermore, just because I initially enjoyed being so, from that point on annoyance begins and pleasure subsides. What I do then, when I give in, is weakness and false shame, but good will is no longer part of it, and far from applauding myself for it, I reproach myself in my conscience for doing good unwillingly. (62)
For that reason, Rousseau sometimes avoids doing good deeds: “I have learned to foresee from afar the consequences of following my instinctive inclinations, and I have often abstained from a good deed that I wanted and was able to do for fear of the enslavement to which I would subsequently submit myself if I gave myself over to it unthinkingly” (63). Interestingly, he only began to feel this way after his misfortunes began (or so he claims): “From that point on I have lived in a new generation that looked nothing like the old one, and my own feelings for others have suffered from the changed I found in theirs” (63). “Once I was convinced that there was nothing but lies and falsehood in the affected protestations of friendship lavished upon me,” he continues, “I quickly went to the other extreme: for once we have left behind our true nature, there is nothing left to constrain us. From then on I grew sick of men, and my own will, coinciding with theirs in this respect, keeps me further removed from them than all their machinations do” (65). He suggests that he remains affected by “[t]he spectacle of injustice and wickedness,” but contends, “I have to see them and appreciate them for myself; for, given what has happened to me, I would have to be mad to adopt men’s judgements on anything or to take anything on trust from anyone” (65). “The conclusion I can draw form all these reflections,” he writes,
is that I have never really been suited to civil society, where there is nothing but irritation, obligation, and duty, and that my independent nature always made me incapable of the constraints required of anyone who wants to live with men. As long as I act freely, I am good and I do nothing but good; but as soon as I feel the yoke of necessity or men, I become rebellious, or rather, stubborn, and then I am incapable of doing good. (67-68)
One might doubt Rousseau’s conclusions here, or the argument that leads to them, but clearly he is arguing that freedom is more important to him than the pleasure he receives from doing good things for others.
In his “Seventh Walk,” Rousseau notes that, in his old age, he has returned to his interest in botany, despite having given away his guides, books, and herbarium (69). He’s not interested in plants for their potential medical benefits—in other words, his interest in botany is not instrumental—but rather he prizes plants for themselves: “In this respect I feel I am completely at odds with other men: everything to do with my needs saddens and spoils my thoughts, and I have only ever found real charm in the pleasures of the mind when I have completely lost sight of the interests of my body” (74). Rousseau emphasizes that division between his body and his soul: “No, nothing personal and nothing to do with the interests of my body can truly concern my soul. My meditations and reveries are never more delightful when I forget myself. I feel ecstasy and inexpressible rapture when I melt, so to speak, into the system of beings and identify myself with the whole of nature” (74). As with his dislike of social obligations, Rousseau suggests that he didn’t always feel that way. It was only after his persecutions began that he began to prize solitude; those attacks made him into “a solitary or, as they call it, unsociable and misanthropic, because the fiercest solitude seems to me preferable to the society of the wicked, which thrives only on treachery and hatred” (74-75). “Fleeing men, seeking solitude, no longer using my imagination, and thinking still less, yet endowed with a lively temperament that keeps me from falling into listless and melancholy apathy, I began to take an interest in everything around me, and, following a very natural instinct, I preferred the most pleasant things,” he writes (75).
However, he is not interested in minerals, which require digging and refining, nor zoology, which requires necropsies; not “everything” around him interests him. Rather, he is engaged by botany:
Brightly coloured flowers, the varied flora of the meadows, cool shade, streams, woods, and greenery, come and purify my imagination, sullied by all these hideous things. My soul, being dead to all great impulses, can no longer be touched by anything except things that appeal to the senses; sensations are all I have left, and through them alone can pain or pleasure now reach me here on earth. Attracted by the charming things that surround me, I look at them, consider them closely, compare them, and eventually learn to classify them, and all of a sudden, I am as much a botanist as anyone needs to be who wants to study nature with the sole aim of continually finding new reasons for loving it. (77)
Rousseau claims that botany “is what an idle and lazy solitary studies” (78): “There is in this idle occupation a charm which is only felt when the passions are completely calm, but which is then enough on its own to make life happy and pleasant” (78). And that apparently idle pursuit—although, as Goulbourne suggests, he is serious about it—has become a motivation for walking:
I climb up rocks and mountains, I go down deep into valleys and woods in order to escape as far as possible the memory of men and the attacks of the wicked. It seems to me that, in the shade of a forest, I am forgotten, free, and undisturbed, as if I no longer had any enemies or as if the foliage of the woods could protect me from their attacks as it distances them from my memory, and I imagine, in my foolishness, that if I do not think about them, they will not think about me. . . . The pleasure of going to some isolated spot to look for new plants gives me the added pleasure of escaping from my persecutors, and when I reach places where there is no trace of men, I breathe more freely, as if I were in a refuge where their hate can no longer pursue me. (79)
However, such isolation is difficult to achieve; he remembers finding what appeared to be an isolated spot and then discovering it was only 20 yards from a factory:
I cannot express the confused and contradictory commotion I felt in my heart on discovering this. My first instinct was a feeling of joy at finding myself among human beings again, having thought myself to be entirely alone; but this instinct, swifter than lightning, was soon followed by a more lasting feeling of distress at not being able, even in the caves of the Alps, to escape the cruel clutches of those men bent on tormenting me. (80)
His first reaction suggests that he is not a natural solitary or misanthrope, but someone whose interest in solitude was created through experience.
For Rousseau, botany has become an aid to memory:
All my botanical walks, the varied impressions made on my by the places where I have seen striking things, the ideas they have stirred in me, and the incidents that became connected to them have all left me with impressions which are renewed by the sight of the plants I collected in those very places. . . . all I have to do is open my herbarium and it quickly transports me there. The pieces of plants that I gathered there are enough to remind me of the whole magnificent spectacle. This herbarium is for me a diary of my botanical expeditions which makes me set off on them again with renewed delight and which produces the effect of an optical chamber, showing them again before my very eyes.
It is the chain of secondary ideas that attracts me to botany. It brings together and recalls to my imagination all the ideas which please it most. It constantly reminds me of the meadows, the waters, the woods, the solitude, above all the peace and the tranquillity one finds in the midst of all those things. It makes me forget the persecution of men, their hate, their scorn, their insults, and all their evil deeds with which they have repaid my tender and sincere attachment to them. It transports me to peaceful places amongst good and simple folk like those with whom I used to live. It reminds me of my youth and my innocent pleasures, it makes me enjoy them all over again, and very often it makes me happy, even in the midst of the most miserable fate ever endured by a mortal. (82)
Again, one sees the way Rousseau continues to react against the persecution he suffered, despite his claims that through acceptance and resignation he has come to terms with it.
In his “Eighth Walk,” Rousseau suggests that, during his mediations, he has realized that even during those persecutions he “enjoyed the pleasure of existence more fully”:
in all the hardships of my life I constantly felt full of tender, touching, and delightful emotions which, as they poured a healing balm over my wounded heart, seemed to turn its pain into pleasure, and the memory of which comes back to me on its own, without that of the adversities I experienced at the same time. It seems to me that I enjoyed the pleasure of existence more fully, that I really lived more fully, when my feelings, concentrated, as it were, around my heart by my destiny, were not wasted on all the things prized by men, which are of such little value in themselves and which all supposedly happy people are concerned with. (83)
In the past, he reacted strongly to the “infamy and treachery” he experienced, but now, although he is “still in it, indeed more deeply than ever before,” he has regained his “calm and peace,” and lives “happily and quietly” while laughing at “the incredible torments” his “persecutors continually inflict upon themselves” while he goes about botanizing and meditating (84-85). How has that change taken place? “I have learned to bear the yoke of necessity without complaining” (86):
I realized that the causes, instruments, and means of it all, which were unknown and inexplicable to me, should be of no significance to me whatsoever; that I should consider all the details of my destiny as the workings of simple fate in which I should presuppose no direction, intention, or moral cause; that I had to submit to it without arguing or resisting because to do that would be pointless; and that, since all that remained for me to do on earth was to consider myself a purely passive being, I should not waste on futile resistance to my destiny what strength I had left to withstand it. (87-88)
Nevertheless, he still felt some dissatisfaction, which he discovered came from his “self-love which, having become indignant with men, now rebelled against reason” (88). That’s why he had to separate himself from “the yoke of public opinion” (88). His self-love becomes love of self, a natural rather than artificial passion (88); the distinction between self-love and love of self (which apparently is clearer in French) is central to the point he is making here.
Accepting his situation, he contends,
allows me to indulge my natural insouciance almost as much as if I were living in the greatest prosperity. Apart from the brief moments when I am reminded by the things around me of my most painful anxieties, the rest of the time, following my inclinations and indulging the affections which attract me, my heart still feeds on the feelings for which it was created, and I enjoy them with imaginary beings who produce them and share them with me, as if these beings really existed. They exist for me, since I created them, and I do not worry about their betraying or abandoning me. They will last as long as my misfortunes themselves and will suffice to make me forget them.
Everything brings me back to the happy and sweet life for which I was born. I spend three quarters of my life either busy with instructive and even pleasant things, to which I am delighted to devote my mind and my senses, or with the children of my imagination, which I created according to my heart’s desires, whose feelings are nourished by contact with them, or else with myself, contented with myself and already full of the happiness I feel is owing to me. In all this, only love of myself is at work, and self-love has nothing to do with it. (90)
However, in the “sad moments I still spend among men,” “self-love always plays a role. The hatred and animosity I see in their hearts through their crude disguises fills my heart with pain, and the idea of so naively being duped compounds this pain with a very childish irritation, the product of a foolish self-love which I know full well but which I cannot control” (90). Solitude has become essential for Rousseau as a way of managing those feelings:
On the days when I see nobody, I no longer think about my destiny, I am no longer conscious of it, I no longer suffer, and I am happy and contented, with neither distraction nor obstacle in my way. But I rarely escape any physical assault, and when I am least thinking about it, a gesture, a sinister look that I catch sight of, a poisoned remark that I hear or a malicious person I meet is enough to upset me. All I can do in such circumstances is to forget as quickly as possible and run away. My heart’s distress disappears with the object that caused it, and I become calm again as soon as I am alone. (91)
His living situation makes that solitude difficult to achieve:
I live in the middle of Paris. When I leave home, I long for the countryside and solitude, but they are to be found so far away that before I can breathe easily, I come across a thousand things that oppress my heart, and half the day is spent in anguish before I have reached the refuge I was looking for. I am fortunate, though, when I am left to make my way in peace. The moment when I escape the train of the malevolent is one to be savoured, and as soon as I am under the trees and surrounded by greenery, it is as if I were in the earthly paradise, and I experience an inner pleasure as intense as if I were the happiest of mortals. (91-92)
Surprisingly, before his troubles began, Rousseau had no need for or interest in solitude or solitary walks:
I remember perfectly how, in my brief periods of prosperity, these same solitary walks which today I find so sweet I then found insipid and tedious. When I was staying with someone in the country, the need for exercise and fresh air often made me go out alone, and, escaping like a thief, I would go walking in the park or in the countryside, but, far from finding the happy calm that I enjoy there today, I carried with me the agitation of futile ideas which had occupied me in the salon; the memory of the company I had left behind followed me in my solitude; the mists of self-love and the tumult of the world soured the freshness of the groves in my eyes and troubled my secluded peace. I had fled in vain to the depths of the woods: an importunate crowd followed me everywhere and veiled the whole of nature from me. It is only once I had cut myself off from social passions and their dismal retinue that I rediscovered nature and all her charms. (92)
Clearly his interest in solitary walking is the product of his experiences.
In Rousseau’s “Ninth Walk,” he thinks about his love of children and tries to justify putting his own children into the Foundlings’ Hospital in Paris. He loves “seeing little children romping and playing together,” he writes, but “the reproach of my having put my children in the Foundlings’ Hospital has easily degenerated, with a little distortion, into that of being an unnatural father and a child-hater,” even though he made that decision with their interests in mind, because he feared that their fates “would almost inevitably be, under any other circumstances, a thousand times worse” (95-96). Perhaps he is concerned that his children would have been affected by the reaction of society to his writing. Even in the present, when people discover who he is, they turn away from him: “I must admit that I still feel pleasure in living among men as long as my face is unknown to them. But this is a pleasure which I am rarely allowed to enjoy” (104). That rejection clearly stings, despite his claims to having become resigned to it.
Rousseau’s “Tenth Walk” is unfinished. In it, he notes that when he was young and in love with Madame de Warens, he developed an interest in solitude and contemplation: “The taste for solitude and contemplation was born in my heart together with the expansive and tender feelings whose purpose is to feed it. Turmoil and noise constrain and suffocate them, calm and peace revive and intensify them. I need to retire within myself in order to love” (108).
So, what can we take from Reveries of the Solitary Walker? The inclusion of Rousseau’s form of walking within the canon of walking may have established solitary walking as a norm, and because that norm excludes other forms of walking, it is (to say the least) unfortunate. However, there’s no suggestion in the Reveries that Rousseau’s walking is long in duration or distance; he is essentially engaged in day-hikes from his home in Paris to the surrounding countryside. It’s possible that those are long walks, but from the evidence in the text it’s hard to tell how long they might be. In addition, while solitary walking may have become the default form of walking, it’s clear that solitude was important for Rousseau; he had been rejected by French society because of his writing, and vilified by people as a result, and so to be alone was safer than being with others. Solitude and contemplation became ways for Rousseau to manage his feelings about that rejection—despite his claims that he has come to accept it—and walking was an aid to his musing or contemplation or reverie. In addition, walking was the form of transportation that was best suited to his interest in collecting and identifying plants—an activity that is sometimes solitary in nature. What others made of Rousseau’s form of walking is one thing; his need for solitude and contemplative walking, however, becomes clear when one reads his Reveries. I wonder if his Confessions provides a similar explanation. There’s only one way to find out.
I think Heddon’s and Turner’s essay is important, and as I wrote in this blog earlier, that essay opened up new forms of walking for me. At the same time, the suggestion that the only valuable forms of walking are informed by social or relational aesthetics is a problem. Is there really no space for solitary walking? Is contemplation a bad thing? Isn’t it possible that some walkers are, like Rousseau, withdrawing from other people because of bad experiences that have had in the past? Like Rousseau, I don’t like the idea of being obligated to do things, including the idea of being obligated to walk with other people–unless that’s something I choose to do. Surely there is room for multiple forms of practice and multiple forms of walking.
Works Cited
Heddon, Deirdre, and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Scales and Tales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 224-36.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Translated by Russell Goulbourne, Oxford University Press, 2011.
