Show notes
The Confessions is an auto-biography by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, covering the first fifty-three years of his life, up to 1765.
“Thus I have acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.”
Rousseau’s lengthy and sometimes anguished dossier on the Self is one of the most remarkable and courageous works of introspection ever undertaken. Some readers may be repelled by his tendency to revel in embarrassing accounts of humiliation and fiasco, as if he were striving too hard to achieve an ultimate nakedness, a nakedness of the soul perhaps. Others may recall the compulsive self-searching of the narrator of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, who also rather dwelt on the co-existence in the individual of the vile and the virtuous.
The two opening volumes of the Confessions, presented in this inevitably censored edition of 1903, deal with the author’s childhood and callow adolescence.
In volume 3 and 4 is again the youthful, hero-worshiping Jean-Jacques – displaying an emotional immaturity that leads him into picaresque escapades in the company of transients and misfits, always ending in reunion with mother-surrogate Madame de Warens.
“The smallest, the most trifling pleasure that is conveniently within my reach, tempts me more than all the joys of paradise.”
In a literally unprecedented gesture of self-revelation, Rousseau opens Volume 3 exposing himself indecently in dark alleyways. This 1903 edition fails to appreciate the humorous strangeness of the passage and removes it to protect the reader.
From the last two volumes:
"She was more to me than a sister, a mother, a friend, or even than a mistress, and for this very reason she was not a mistress; in a word, I loved her too much to desire her..."
More of the amours of the twentysomething Jean-Jacques: here initiated into a strangely compromised manhood by his "maman" and perennial comforter -
"Was I happy? No: I felt I know-not-what invincible sadness which empoisoned my happiness, it seemed that I had committed an incest, and two or three times, pressing her eagerly in my arms, I deluged her bosom with my tears. On her part, as she had never sought pleasure, she had not the stings of remorse..."
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