Review: The Confessions

The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Among the reasons I have enjoyed reading Rousseau's obsessively detailed, confessional autobiography is that I recognize in him a fellow book lover. Consider this quote from ""JJ": "I have lost or dismembered numbers of books through the habit of carrying them about with me everywhere, in the pigeon-house, in the garden, in the orchard, and in the vineyard. While occupied with something else, I put my book down at the foot of a tree or on a hedge ; I always forgot to take it up again, and, at the end of a fortnight, I frequently found it rotted away, or eaten by ants and snails. This eagerness for learning became a mania which drove me nearly stupid, so incessantly was I employed with muttering something or other to myself."

However, I cannot recongnize in myself (thankfully) thin-skinned Rousseau's small-mindedness, petulance, defeatism, and general self-defeating actions. It is somewhat amazing the the author of [b:The Social Contract|12651|The Social Contract|Jean-Jacques Rousseau|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309284382s/12651.jpg|702720] had such a bizarrely unhealthy sex life, a streak of self-abasing confessionalism, and a Tesla-like ability to confound his own financial success and security through his intellectual property.

A few things made an impact on me and will stay with me from this book:

- In Rousseau's younger years, he was one of the rootless, poor vagabonds which dotted the landscape of Europe in the early 18th Century. That lifestyle, during which Rousseau typically wrecked his own chances of betterment time and time again, of cottage industries, patronage, and latent feudalism was a fascinating part of the work which I am sure is among the earliest examples of the hyper-confessional autobiography that is not uncommon today. ([a:Lance Armstrong|1544|Lance Armstrong|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1213137491p2/1544.jpg], where's yours?)

- In one bizarre episode [a:Friedrich Melchior Von Grimm|4189980|Friedrich Melchior Von Grimm|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66-251a730d696018971ef4a443cdeaae05.jpg], Rousseau and another man of letters stop in to visit a simpleton tween sold off by her mother as a concubine. Grimm, apparently, claimed to have only lingered in the young girl's room to make the others wait and Rousseau typical sexual encounter was an episode of weeping self-loathing. He confesses the peccadillo in his mind to his wife (five children, all dropped off at the orphanage) who forgave him and then Grimm shows up to tell on Rousseau. So, what's Rousseau's take on this? Grimm is a jerk ... no commentary on the poor young girl, the motivations of her mother, or the general behavior of his colleagues. It was all par for the course in that day and age, apparently.

- I am amazed Rousseau gives so much of his supposed enemie's correspondence, which only supports the apparent fact that Rousseau was a self-destructive, peevish whiner.



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