April 23, 2002 & at a bit of a looose end, so I picked this little book up & flicked through its pages {I purchased it months ago but never really bothered ... as is often my habit ... } ...

Page 6 -

     Everything external is henceforth foreign to me. I no longer have any neighbours, fellow-men or brothers in this world. I live here as in some strange planet onto which I have fallen from the one I knew. All around me I can recognise nothing but objects which afflict and wound my heart, and i cannot look at anything that is close to me or round about me without discovering some subject for indignant scorn or painful emotion. Let me therefore detach my mind from these afflicting sights; they would only cause me pain, and to no end. Alone for the rest of my life, since it is only in myself that I find consolation, hope, and peace of mind, my only remining duty is towards myself and this is all I desire. This is my state of mind as I return to the rigorous and sincere self-examination that I formerly called my Confessions. I am devoting my last days to studying myself and preparing the account which I shall shortly have to render. Let me give myself over entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my soul, since this is the only pleasure that men cannot take away from me. If by meditating on my inner life I am able to order it better and remedy the faults that may remain there, my meditations will not be entirely in vain, and although I am now good for nothing on this earth, I shall not have totally wasted my days. The free hours of my daily walks have often been filled with delightful contemplations which I am sorry to have forgotten. Such reflections as I have in future I shall preserve in writing; every time I read them I shall recall my original pleasure. I shall forget my misfortunes, my persecutors and my disgrace.

     These pages will be no more than a formless record of my reveries. I myself will figure largely in them, because a solitary person inevitably thinks a lot about himself. But all the other thoughts which pass through my mind will also have their place here. I shall say what I have thought just as it came to me, with as little connection as the thoughts of this morning have with those of last night. But on the other hand I shall gain new knowledge of my nature and disposition from knowing what feelings and thoughts nourish my mind in this strange state. These pages may therefore be regarded as an appendix to my Confessions, but I do not give them this title, for I no longer feel that I have anything to say that could justify it. My heart has been purified in the crucible of adversity and the most careful self-examination can hardly find any remaining traces of reprehensible inclinations. What could I still have to confess when all earthly affections have been uprooted? I have no more reason now to praise than to condemn myself: henceforward I am of no importance among men, and this is unavoidable since i no longer have any real relationship or true companionship with them. No longer able to do good that does not turn to evil, no longer able to act without harming others or myself, my only duty now is to abstain, and I do this with all my heart. But though my body is idle, my mind remains active and continues to produce feelings and thoughts, indeed its inner moral life seems to have grown more intense with the loss of all earthly or temporal interests. My body is now no more than an obstacle and a hindrance to me, and I do all I can to sever my ties with it in advance.

     Such an exceptional situation is certainly worth examining and describing, and it is to this task that I am devoting my last days of leisure. To accomplish it successfully I ought to proceed with order and method, but such an undertaking is beyond me, and indeed it would divert me from my true aim, which is to give an account of the successive variations of my soul. I shall perform upon myself the sort of operation that physicists conduct upon the air in order to discover its daily fluctuations. I shall take the barometer readings of my soul, and by doing this accurately and repeatedly I could perhaps obtain results as reliable as theirs. However, my aim is not so ambitious. I shall content myself with keeping a record of my readings without trying to reduce them to a system. My enterprise is like Montaigne's, but my motive is entirely different, for he wrote his essays only for others to read, whereas I am writing down my reveries for myself alone. If, as I hope, I retain the same disposition of mind in my extreme old age, when the time of my departure draws near, I shall recall in reading the pleasure I have in writing them and by thus reviving times past I shall as it were double the space of my existence. In spite of men I shall still enjoy the charms of company, and in my decrepitude I shall live with my earlier self as i might with a younger friend.

     I wrote my first Confessions and my Dialogues in a continual anxiety about ways of keeping them out of the grasping hands of my persecutors and transmitting them if possible to future generations. The same anxiety no longer torments me as I write this, I know it would be useless, and the desire to be better known to men has died in my heart, leaving me profoundly indifferent to the fate both of my true writings and the proofs of my innocence, all of which have perhaps already been destroyed forever. Let men spy on my actions, let them be alarmed at these papers, seize them, suppress them, falsify them, from now on it is all the same to me. I neither hide them nor display them. If they are taken from me during my lifetime, I shall not lose the pleasure of having written them, nor the memory of what they contain, nor the solitary meditations which inspired them

May tap out a couple more excerpts at some stage ... :)

Some Links:

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

One search ...

Here's another - I aint had the opportunity to sift through the results but you're big enough to do that surely ...