'So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own.' Thus begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
Reveries of a Solitary Walker and for pages we
walk with him
-- so close that we could be inside his head as he rambles along the unimaginable country lanes stretching then out of Paris and looks out at the child who has been convinced not to come near him any more, or the elderly veterans whose natural affability has been poisoned, as he claims, by evil reports which he is powerless to prevent
-- and so it comes as a huge surprise when, as he describes in the Second Walk, after being knocked unconscious by a runaway dog, which sets him falling down a slope and injuring his jaw and the left side of his body:
My wife's cries when she saw me made me realise I was in a worse state than I had thought. (p. 40)
The mention of this wife, or woman, was enough to change my reading of the rest of the book: how to read about solitude and the agonies and comforts of such solitude, when all along there has been a woman intimate to him whose company is so assumed, so invisible, that it rates almost as nothing at all? Much as I loved the rhythm of the writing and the elongated meditations, even rants (
rêverie), it was also spoilt by an imagined Pythonesque version of the book that begins:
'So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own.'
'No you're not.'
'Shut up.'
