A Philosophy of Walking (8 page)

R
ousseau claimed to be incapable of thinking properly, of composing, creating or finding inspiration except
when walking
. The mere sight of a desk and chair was enough to make him feel sick and drain him of all courage. It was during long walks that the ideas would come, on the road that sentences would spring to his lips, as a light punctuation of the movement; it was paths that stimulated his imagination.

In his writing we find three set-piece experiences of walking: dawn, midday and dusk.

He walked from sixteen to nineteen years old. Those were the long journeys of his youth, filled with exaltation and fervour. Later he was a ‘Monsieur', as he put it – a man about town who went everywhere in a barouche, feverishly seeking fame and recognition.

After years of masked play-acting, tiresome scheming and dodging, came the first break. He started again to take long meditative walks along forest roads or lakeside paths. He became bearish, unsociable.

Later still he became a sort of outlaw, driven out wherever he went, a leading undesirable, condemned in Paris, in Geneva. His books were publicly burned and he was threatened with jail. People threw stones at him in Moutier. He retreated from one place to another, wandered this way and that, became suspicious of his protectors. And when all the hatreds had subsided and the issues faded with time and lassitude, there would be the last walks, the crepuscular
reveries
. Although he had become an old man, he liked nothing so much as going for long walks, to kill the days. When there is really nothing left to do or believe, except to
remember, walking helps retrieve the absolute simplicity of presence, beyond all hope, before any expectation.

As described in the
Confessions
, the earliest walks were long, happy, sunsoaked trips, and of fundamental significance. Due to both poverty and inclination, they involved covering immense distances on foot: from Annecy to Turin, from Soleure to Paris, then from Paris to Lyon, from Lyon finally to Chambéry.

Rousseau was just sixteen when, one March evening in 1728, he found the gates of Geneva closed on returning from a youthful escapade. He then decided not to turn up for work in the engraver's workshop the next day, for fear of the clouts he would get. As one must eat, he left to seek refuge with a Catholic curé not far away, in Savoie. After feeding him, and scolding him roundly for having been born a Calvinist, the priest sent him on to Annecy to see a pious woman who would teach him the true religious way and give him protection and comfort. The young man prepared himself on the way to humour an elderly duenna.

He saw her. She was twenty-eight (gentle gaze, angelic mouth, and the loveliest of arms): Madame de Warens. The vision transfixed him with love and desire. He had just run into love: an angel of generosity and sweetness, helpful, desirable. Alas, having just met her, he had to leave her immediately to please her: she hustled him off to Turin to convert, to renounce in Italy his Protestant faith. He
promised and set off on foot, in the company of Monsieur and Madame Sabran, at a slow pace. It was going to take twenty days, given that the mountains were still covered in snow. But eventually they got across the Alps via the Mont-Cenis, feeling like Hannibal … to the young, all is granted. ‘I felt that I need not trouble further about myself; others had undertaken the charge. So I went on my way with light step, freed from this burden; youthful desires, enchanting hopes, brilliant plans filled my soul.'

Barely a year later Rousseau, having become a Catholic in Turin in the course of an eventful week, and tried his hand at the profession of flunkey, returned to his protectress. The journey was again made on foot, with a random companion (Bâcle) and in a joyously insouciant spirit. The third journey took place in 1731, after a thousand vicissitudes and some whimsical adventures. Rousseau was in Solothurn, in Switzerland; well-meaning souls there sent him to Paris, to meet a retired colonel seeking a nephew to raise in the profession of arms. The walk took a good two weeks, Rousseau fantasizing along the way of rapidly becoming a general, leading magnificent armies to glory. But the old officer was a skinflint, a miser who exploited him. Rousseau ran away, and again walked all the way to Lyon, and then to Chambéry, to find ‘Maman' again. That was his last long pedestrian journey.

From the moment he had left Mme de Warens – her eyes of purest blue, delicate neck and bosom, milk-white arms – he had dreamed of her all the way, and imagined himself finding her ghosts and doubles in every wayside
inn. During long, easy walks, on well-traced routes, when all you have to do is follow an interminable set of hairpins, you hatch a thousand plans, invent a thousand tales. The body slowly advances, with measured steps, and that same tranquillity gives the mind a day off. Relieved of duty by the automatic functioning of the body, it follows up its fantasies and projects itself into a labyrinth of stories. While the gentle shock-free rolling of happy legs drives the evolving narrative forward: challenges arise, their solutions are found, fresh ambushes appear. As you follow the wide, single, clearly marked route, a thousand bifurcations swarm in your mind. The heart takes one and renounces another, then chooses a third. It wanders away, comes back.

When you are that age, when you can't say that you have loved, because love is still a future flowering that you yearn for with your entire being, there is lightness in your step, eagerness for the great love at the end of the road. Then Rousseau crossed the Alps. The prospects that opened over hillcrests, the sublime views of the peaks, seemed to
endorse the maddest ambitions. What would he find at the next lodging? Who would be dining there? Everything could, everything
should
offer the opportunity for extraordinary encounters: stout-hearted companions, mysterious women, louche characters, formidable schemers. Every time you approach a hamlet, a farm, a great house, anything could happen. And when evening comes, and it's time to eat, even if the hostess is less beautiful than you might have hoped, and the innkeeper less forthcoming, you hardly notice: the body is content to fill those immense hollows gouged in the belly by the wind. Afterwards, you fall asleep in seconds to visit other dreams. That first walk is infinitely sweet … at sixteen or even twenty you carry no burden but your cheerful hopes. No memories weigh down your shoulders. All is still possible, all is yet to be experienced. Desires are forming within you, delighted with all possibilities. It is the walk of happy daybreaks, the resplendent mornings of life.

Rousseau was now past forty. He had already done a lot: embassy secretary in Venice, music teacher, encyclopaedist … He had made friends, enemies, a reputation; his name was often mentioned. He had schemed, written, invented,
sought glory and recognition. Now he suddenly decided to stop frequenting society, to give up haunting learned and distinguished circles, to cease pursuing a success that he found slow in coming, and in whose very prospect he was already losing interest. He abandoned wigs and fine clothes, deserted the salons, resigned from all high-profile posts. Soon he was dressed like a poor man, and copying music sheets for a living. Because he wanted (as he kept saying) to rely only on himself. He was spoken of as a new Diogenes: Rousseau was the ‘doggish man' of the Enlightenment.

But the break wasn't a clean or abrupt one. At the same time the king discovered his music, took a fancy to it, and made the fact known. Also at the same moment, his
Discours sur les arts
was being read and talked about everywhere. And he was still intending to defend his views on French music.

Increasingly, nevertheless, he longed for one thing above all: to remain alone for a long time, to leave Paris, bury himself in the woods. He had already written that culture, letters and learning had helped make humanity decadent, rather than completing it. With the thinkers of the time, all around him, chorusing the songs of liberation through reason, perfectibility through education and progress through science, he aspired to show that society corrupts mankind. But when he wrote that in his first
Discours
, it was from a desire for glory; and his whole life reveals a single-minded wish to be known, recognized, loved and applauded.

Past forty, it's time to draw a line under social quests, celebrity friendships, whirling fashions and incessant
tittle-tattle. Rousseau no longer wanted anything but forest paths. To be alone, far from the hubbub. No longer to have to check his social share price daily, calculate his friends, ration his enemies, flatter his protectors, ceaselessly measure his importance in the eyes of fops and imbeciles, return looks in kind, avenge words with words. He wanted to be elsewhere, far away: buried in the woods, where there would be deep silent nights, transparent mornings. To achieve that, he needed to make himself detestable to many. But he knew how to set about it: he would arrange his life so that he no longer had to run or crawl, but could walk.

This was also the time when he was writing a second
Discourse
:
On the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men
. He would go out in the morning and plunge into the forests of Saint-Germain or the Bois de Boulogne. The November of 1753 was exceptionally fine and mild, deep soft autumnal blue skies, the rustle of fallen leaves, golden and russet colours. To do what exactly? Walk, work, discover. Immense solitary walks, regular, daily. Trampling the earth with his heavy shoes, disappearing into the brush, wandering among ancient trees.

Alone, and surrounded – or rather filled – with the quiet murmur of animals and trees, the sigh of wind through the leaves, the rattle and creak of branches. Alone, and fulfilled. Because now he could breathe, breathe and surrender to a well-being slow as a forest path, without any thrill of pleasure but absolutely peaceful. A lukewarm happiness, persistent as a monotonous day: happiness just to be there, to feel the rays of a winter sun on his face and hear
the muffled creaking of the forest. Walking there, Rousseau listened: to the leaping of his heart, no longer assailed by worldly emotions, a heart no longer affected by society's desires, but surrendered at last to its primary, natural beat.

And there, walking all day long, Rousseau conceived the insane plan to identify – in himself,
homo viator
, walking man – the natural man, one not disfigured by culture, education, art: man as he would have been before books or salons, before society or paid labour.

He wasn't walking to find his own identity, or to rediscover a disguised singularity, or to get a rest from shuffling masks; but walking long distances to find in himself the man from another age, the first man. Walking, but not as one might go to the desert to escape the world and its horrors, purified by solitude, prepared for one's celestial destiny. But walking to find in himself the man fresh from the hands of Nature, the absolute primitive. So he walked at great length, going far, into the real wilds, endlessly turning over the question: what is it that
resists
in me, what in me is the exact contemporary of the gravity of the trees, the uneasy brother of these beasts whose rustlings I perceive? What can I find in myself that is
natural
, what can I discover that isn't in books but that I can only find by walking in solitude?

Find the contours of the first man, the absolute savage; scrape off, with the slow wear of these forest walks, the social man's varnish, revealing the portrait which isn't in books because they are only about recent man, civilized, denatured, swollen with social passions: draw that first man.
And thus discover, through endless solitary walks, desolate, far from the world, in the sole company of trees and beasts, rediscover in oneself the first man.