‘A long dispute means that both parties are wrong.’ –Voltaire
Rousseau at fifty-three — afflicted by illness, temperamental and alone, an anguished, paranoiac conscience — sitting up at his desk in Wootton, in the 1760s: “Nothing about me must remain hidden or obscure. I must remain incessantly beneath the reader’s gaze, so that he may follow me in all the extravagances of my heart and into every last corner of my life.”
The Confessions are Rousseau’s response, in the form of a remedy, to the pain and contradictions of a human heart filled with content that can no longer be transmitted vertically, toward the heavens. The task of the accused to supply proof of innocence, to authenticate the rightness of his conduct, requires a new, lateral kind of divination. A community of readers, not saints, is what counts.
photo { Brittany Markert }
