A Philosophy of Walking (9 page)

And while pursuing this rather improbable research, which required long days of trudging through forests rather than through books, Rousseau's relentless self-examination did result in the internal appearance of a frail, wavering image of primitive, wild, innocent man. And as that ghostly image gradually took shape – he imagined it as a furtive shadow slipping behind the oaks – he perceived it not as fierce or brutish, ruled by disordered impulses and violent instincts, but rather as timid, absolutely adjusted to a motherly, enveloping Nature, and essentially solitary and happy. For the fullness, the simple well-being experienced there by Rousseau, purged of the exhausting artificial passions that rule the social world, when walking alone, must also be the feeling experienced by the first man in the timeless flow of ‘peaceful and innocent days'. And how much more intense that well-being was than the phoney excitements, the idiot satisfactions and vain joys of the world!

Thus the walker came to see the whole of human history, with its changes and struggles, in the form of a steady, vertiginous decline. And to see civilized man with his civility and hypocrisy, filled with malice and envy, as the real brute beast. To see the social world with its injustice and violence, its inequalities and miseries, and the states with their armies and police forces, as the real jungles. To see social man as filled with rancour, hatred, jealousy and resentment.

And when the solitary walker tried to unearth from under layers of culture the inborn truth of human passions, he only discovered a naïve and unassuming self-love (very remote from egotism or touchy self-esteem, which are ways of favouring oneself; but favour is always the opposite of love), in other words an instinctive inclination to take an interest in himself, to preserve himself and pay attention to his well-being. So the natural man instinctively
loves himself
, but never favours himself. Only in society do you learn to do that. And you have to walk a long way to relearn self-love.

Alone at last, having purged his heart of all stupid passions and dropped his masks along meandering footpaths, Rousseau also started to feel a pure, transparent, limitless compassion growing within him. Those long hours of walking drained away envies and grudges, in a similar way to bereavement or immense misfortune: the old hatreds
suddenly appeared vain, petty, futile. Which does not mean you are suddenly ready to love your former enemies and embrace them. Such loving reconciliations are of the same stuff, painted on the same canvas, as stubborn hatreds. But when you walk, it's different: you no longer feel anything for the other, neither bitter aggression nor gushing fraternity. Merely a neutral availability, taking on colour when another is found in tears. Then through natural compassion the heart opens, dilates spontaneously before the apparent pain, like petals opening to light. And you go to their aid, you long to help with all your heart.

Spite, suspicion and hatred aren't, therefore, rooted in primary savagery: they were grafted onto us, locked as we are in the world's artificial garden, and have never stopped burgeoning and developing to stifle our naturally compassionate heart.

That was the discovery of those open-ended walks through the undergrowth, following wandering paths; losing yourself the better to hear your heart, to feel the first man palpitating within you. You come out of that better adjusted to yourself: you no longer worship yourself, you simply love yourself. You come out of it better adjusted to
others: you no longer detest them, you sincerely pity them. In the end, from those paths bathed in the tranquillity of a tired sun, the gentleness of dead leaves circling to the ground, the deep slow natural breathing, from there the civilized world, society with its fears, its tinpot grandiloquence, its electric thrills, its furies: all that, seen from down there, from behind the sweet barrier of trees, seems nothing more than one long-drawn-out disaster.

Nightfall. Rousseau was now nearly sixty years old. He had become an outcast, rejected by all, proscribed everywhere, in republican Geneva as well as monarchist France. He made a pathetic attempt to become an exile in England, but created far too many enemies there. For a long time he wandered here and there, half in hiding, and several times considered having himself jailed to sample peaceful prison walls. And then came the long, slow moment when he
gave way
.

He gave it all up. Those were his last walks: he returned to Paris, drained of courage, unwilling to fight on. And there he was forgotten, little by little, as society's focus moved on to other things, other hatreds. And that was that.

I am referring to the last walks, the ones that punctuate the book
Reveries
, or rather the ones that can be discerned in it, far beyond books. I am talking about those undefined walks, not undertaken to
prepare
for anything, not seen as an opportunity to
find
new words (new defences, new identities, new ideas). The walks one imagines at Ermenonville,
the last ones in May and June 1778. There is no longer even the act of walking as a method, a heuristic and a projection. Walking is no longer undertaken to fuel invention, but exactly for
nothing
: just to connect with the movement of the sinking sun, to echo with slow tread the cadence of the minutes, hours and days. To walk like that is to punctuate the day a little, without really thinking about it, as one's fingers unconsciously tap out the beat of a tune on a table-top. Essentially a matter of no longer expecting anything, letting time come, surrendering to the floodtide of days and the exhaustion of nights. Well-being in that context requires a uniform and moderate movement, without either shocks or pauses. Walking thus means accompanying time, matching its pace as one does with a child.

Then, during those long crepuscular walks, forgotten memories, welcome as old friends, rise to the surface of the conscious mind. Memories for which one at last feels indulgence. They no longer wound by reawakening painful episodes, or fatigue the soul with yearning for a lost happiness. They come floating up like aquatic flowers, differing only in their shifting colours and shapes. Indifferent, smiling, meaningful only in the vague, amusing, detached certainty of having once experienced them … Was that really me, that dreamy child, that young man intoxicated by worldliness?

Rousseau had once been able to say that while walking he was master of his imaginings, having to come to terms only with his visions, absolutely certain of his dreams. The last walks by contrast have the immense gentleness
of detachment, a letting go, with nothing left to hope for or expect. Just life, allowing yourself to exist. Because there's no need to be anyone, you can just succumb to the passage of a current, or rather to that persistent rivulet of existence.

That gives the returning memories a fraternal aspect, like timeworn, familiar old brothers. And for our own good we become that old brother, the one we love for the sole reason that he has
been through the mill
. In this way, in these walks, you conceive an affection for yourself. You forgive yourself, instead of making excuses. Nothing left to lose, just keep walking. And everything, all around, takes on this new face: indulgence for the fearful, hiding bird, for the fragile, wilting flower, indulgence for the thick foliage. For, once you no longer expect anything from the world on these aimless and peaceful walks, that is when the world delivers itself to you, gives itself, yields itself up. When you no longer expect anything. All is then bestowed as a supplement, a gratuitous favour of presence, of being there. You are already dead to the world of struggles, triumphs, projects, hopes. But this sun, these colours, that scroll of blue smoke gently rising down there, these crackling branches: everything is given and more. It's a gift. Identities, histories, written accounts, consumed, avenged, repeated, all that is behind you. All over. But everything is given as well: the spring sunshine of 1778, the glitter on the Valois lakes, the velvety Ermenonville green.

The
Reveries
enable us to imagine the last walks in June, in a state of marvellous contentment: walking long after what
had been achieved, as a relaxation of Being. Destinies had been completed, closed, wrapped up. The books had shut. He didn't have to be Rousseau any more, or Jean-Jacques, or for or against anything or anyone. But just a vibration among the trees and stones, on the paths. Walking to breathe in the landscape. Every step an inspiration born to die immediately, well beyond the oeuvre.

Eternities
 

W
e must really manage one day to do without ‘news'. Reading the newspapers in fact only tells us what we didn't yet know. And that is exactly what we are looking for: something new. But what we didn't yet know is exactly what we forget immediately. Because as soon as we know it, we have to leave room for what we don't yet know, which will come tomorrow. Newspapers have no memory: one piece of news drives out another, each event displaces another which sinks without a trace. Rumours bulge up, then suddenly subside. One juicy ‘I have it on the best authority' succeeds another in a shapeless, perpetual cascade.

When you walk, news becomes unimportant. Soon you
have lost all knowledge of the world and its gymnastics, the most recent own goal, the latest scandal. You no longer await the surprise development, or want to hear how it really all began, or what happened in the end. Heard the latest? When you are walking, all that ceases to matter. Being in the presence of what absolutely endures detaches us from that ephemeral news for which we are usually agog. After walking far and long, you can even come to wonder in surprise how you could ever have been interested in it. The slow respiration of things makes everyday huffing and puffing appear vain, unhealthy agitation.

The first eternity we encounter is that of rocks, of the swooping contour of the plains, of the skylines: all that is
resistant
, unchanging. And being confronted with that overhanging solidity reduces trivial facts, the pathetic news, to the significance of dust blowing in the wind. A motionless eternity vibrating where it stands. Walking is to experience these quietly and humbly insistent realities – the tree growing between rocks, the watchful bird, the streamlet finding its course – without expecting anything. Walking makes the rumours and complaints fall suddenly silent, stops the ceaseless interior chatter through which we comment on others, evaluate ourselves, recompose, interpret. Walking shuts down the sporadic soliloquy to whose surface sour rancours, imbecile satisfactions and easy imaginary vengeances rise sluggishly in turn. You are facing a mountain, walking among great trees, and you think: they are just there. They are there, they didn't expect me, they were always there. They were
there long before me and they will still be there long after me.