The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1782
An eighteenth-century philosopher tells on himself: vanity, tenderness, shame and long walks, written to be judged. It reads like the first modern memoir, and it is often funny.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712–1778
Rousseau wrote an opera, Le devin du village (1752), that so delighted Louis XV the king offered him a pension. Rousseau declined it.
Feels like nostalgia, memory and identity.
When hope runs out, memory can become the better place to live.
Nothing that passed during that charming epocha, nothing that I did, said, or thought, has escaped my memory. The time that preceded or followed it, I only recollect by intervals, unequally and confused; but here I remember all as distinctly as if it existed at this moment. Imagination, which in my youth was perpetually anticipating the future, but now takes a retrograde course, makes some amends by these charming recollections for the deprivation of hope, which I have lost forever. I no longer see anything in the future that can tempt my wishes, it is a recollection of the past alone that can flatter me, and the remembrance of the period I am now describing is so true and lively, that it sometimes makes me happy, even in spite of my misfortunes. Books by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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