The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), 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. A slow, candid voice moves between warm memory and uneasy self-scrutiny, with flashes of humor and long reflective walks.
Feels like nostalgia, tenderness and longing. About memory, identity and solitude.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy candid memoir, philosophical reflection, and a narrator who turns his own vanities and tender memories over in public. The eighteenth-century prose and unhurried, digressive stretches can ask for patience.
Why read it
It offers an intimate view of how a mind makes a self out of memory, shame, and desire, and it shows memoir being invented on the page.
Pages from the book
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. Why the shortest romances can hold more than the ones that go further.
Those who read this will not fail to laugh at my gallantries, and remark, that after very promising preliminaries, my most forward adventures concluded by a kiss of the hand: yet be not mistaken, reader, in your estimate of my enjoyments; I have, perhaps, tasted more real pleasure in my amours, which concluded by a kiss of the hand, than you will ever have in yours, which, at least, begin there. The strange grief of getting the life you imagined, only briefly.
I never recollect to have enjoyed the future with such force of illusions as at that time; and what has particularly struck me in the recollection of this reverie, is that when realized, I found my situation exactly as I had imagined it. If ever waking dream had an appearance of a prophetic vision, it was assuredly this; I was only deceived in its imaginary duration, for days, years, and life itself, passed ideally in perfect tranquility, while the reality lasted but a moment. Alas! my most durable happiness was but as a dream, which I had no sooner had a glimpse of, than I instantly awoke. Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Rousseau wrote an opera, Le devin du village (1752), that so delighted Louis XV the king offered him a pension. Rousseau declined it.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy candid memoir, philosophical reflection, and a narrator who turns his own vanities and tender memories over in public. The eighteenth-century prose and unhurried, digressive stretches can ask for patience.
- What is The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau like?
- A slow, candid voice moves between warm memory and uneasy self-scrutiny, with flashes of humor and long reflective walks. Feels like nostalgia, tenderness and longing. About memory, identity and solitude.
- What should I read after The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau?
- If you liked The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, try My Reminiscences (Rabindranath Tagore), David Copperfield (Charles Dickens) and The Professor’s House (Willa Cather).
A taste of the feed
Grief keeps returning you to the same place, to look for what isn't there.
The terrible darkness which was disclosed to me through this rent, continued to attract me night and day as time went on. I would ever and anon return to take my stand there and gaze upon it, wondering what there was left in place of what had gone. Emptiness is a thing man cannot bring himself to believe in; that which is not, is untrue; that which is untrue, is not. So our efforts to find something, where we see nothing, are unceasing.
My Reminiscences · Rabindranath Tagore
The eerie certainty that you have lived this exact moment before.
We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time—of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances—of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it! I never had this mysterious impression more strongly in my life, than before he uttered those words.
David Copperfield · Charles Dickens
Science can explain sin, but it cannot make it thrilling.
But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins—not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin.
The Professor’s House · Willa Cather
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