The Nexus Archive
Republican Social Contract · Memoir
The Reveries of a Solitary
by Rousseau · The Champion of Natural Man · Enlightenment, 1712-1778
Rousseau's ten walks explore solitude, memory, nature, persecution, happiness, and the remaining freedom of attention.
- Advanced
- ~3 hr 15 min read
- 2 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the Third Promenade guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
The Last Walks
Rousseau believes society has shut him out. Yet he still wants affection, and the judgments of other people keep returning to his thoughts. Solitude offers relief from these encounters. It also leaves him alone with the need to explain his life to himself.
These ten meditations follow the movement of an aging mind. A walk among plants can open into a memory, an argument about truth, or a question about duty. Rousseau tests his own motives as he defends his character. His confidence in his good intentions sits beside admissions of weakness, fear and error.
Writing offers a kind of company. He hopes to meet his earlier self again when he rereads these pages, just as a pressed plant can recall a place and its pleasures. The solitary voice wants release from other people’s judgment but repeatedly returns to the scene of being judged. The peace he finds is precious because it can be disturbed.
The opening pages
First Promenade
HERE am I, then, alone upon the earth, having no brother, or neighbour, or friend, or society but myself. The most sociable and loving of human beings has been proscribed by unanimous agreement. They have sought in the refinements of their hatred whatever torment could be most cruel to my sensitive soul, and they have violently broken all the links which attached me to them. I would fain have loved men in despite of themselves; they have not been able to conceal themselves from my affection, except by ceasing to be men. They are, then, strangers, unknown, nothing finally for me, because they have wished it. But I, detached from them and from all, what am I in myself? That is what remains to be discovered. Unhappily this search must be preceded by a backward glance over my position; that is a mental stage through which I must necessarily pass in order to arrive at myself.
For fifteen years and more I have been in this strange position, and it still appears to me a dream. I always imagine to myself that an indigestion is tormenting me, that I am sleeping badly, and that I am about to awake, eased of my troubles, and to find myself again with my friends. Yes, without doubt, it must be that, without perceiving it, I have made a leap from waking to sleep, or from life to death. Drawn, I know not how, from the order of things, I have seen myself precipitated into an incomprehensible chaos, in which I perceive nothing at all; and the more I think of my present state, the less I can understand where I am.
But how could I have foreseen the destiny that awaited me? How can I understand it even to-day when I still suffer from it? Could I, in my good sense, suppose that, one day, I, the same man that I have always been, the same man that I am still, should appear, should be held, as a monster, a poisoner, an assassin; that I should become the horror of the human race, the plaything of the mob; that all the salutation which I should receive from passers-by would be for them to spit in my face; that an entire generation should amuse themselves with burying me alive? When this strange revolution occurred, I was taken by surprise and utterly dumbfounded. My agitation, my indignation, plunged me into a delirium which has taken fully ten years to calm down; and, in that interval, fallen from error to error, from fault to fault, from stupidity to stupidity, I have furnished, by my own imprudences, as many means to the controllers of my destiny, which they have skilfully made use of to render it inalterable.
Chapter guides · 2
Third Promenade
A refuge that needs renewing
Rousseau seeks peace by relinquishing public vindication, but memory and suspicion repeatedly disturb the solitude he claims for himself.
Company with an earlier self
Writing for himself promises a pleasure that hostile readers cannot take away: rereading can restore a former state of feeling, like meeting a younger friend. Yet the declaration of solitude remains full of the people from whom he feels excluded. Retreat does not eliminate relation; it reveals how deeply other people remain inside the solitary self.
Peace interrupted
After the collision with a dog, Rousseau describes an instant of consciousness without memory of his name or misfortune. Sky, stars and grass suffice for delight. As ordinary awareness returns, reports about the accident and offers of help become occasions for conjecture. He acknowledges that fever disturbed his judgment. His eventual belief that suffering belongs to a divine order consoles him; it does not independently confirm the universal plot he perceives.
What old age can still acquire
The third walk asks what knowledge is useful when little life remains in which to use it. Rousseau defends the beliefs he examined in the strength of adulthood, while admitting that some objections remain unanswered and that hope may have inclined his judgment. Reopening those questions in distress seems less trustworthy to him than holding to his earlier deliberation. What remains to cultivate is patience, gentleness, integrity and justice: qualities he believes the soul can carry beyond death.
Sixth Promenade
The limits of willing goodness
Truthfulness and benevolence prove harder than an innocent intention: each can demand resistance to the feelings Rousseau prefers to trust.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read The Reveries of a Solitary?
- About 3 hr 15 min in total.
- How difficult is The Reveries of a Solitary?
- Advanced. A mid-length memoir; about 3 hours of reading.
- Which translation is this?
- The John Gould Fletcher translation from the French, first published in 1782. The text follows The Reveries of a Solitary, Broadway Library of Eighteenth-Century French Literature, Routledge/Brentano 1927 issues.
- Can I read The Reveries of a Solitary for free?
- The Reveries of a Solitary is part of Nexus Premium, so reading it needs an account and a Premium subscription. The opening above and one chapter guide on this page are free to read.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 2 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. One opens in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher whose writings on inequality, education, and political legitimacy shaped democratic and revolutionary thought. The Social Contract asks how authority can be legitimate if human beings are born free.
“Can society make people free instead of merely obedient?”
Rousseau becomes a major hinge between liberty, revolution, democracy, and the dangers of collective political will.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. The Reveries of a Solitary is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.