Another day passes. Another day – I always wondered whether you didn’t grow wise during the day as one might in a lifetime. A day as a life, and so as evening draws towards night you become wise because of the adventures of the day. And today? Broken paths, dead ends. What was I supposed to do? Bridge the gaps in the chapters of the book on Rousseau’s Confessions, on Kierkegaard’s practice of writing, the early Levinas’s criticisms of Husserl. And what happened? I wandered from home to work and back again, then through town, from shop to shop, repeating in my own way Rousseau’s wandering life.
Movement outwards to the world, desiring company, and then the retreat to write – yes, this is close to the movement of the Confessions. And I had a little vision this morning – my own version of the ‘heavenly fire’ Rousseau witnessed at Vincennes: I knew what I was to write, the path lay open before me, everything was simple, I was young. And now, older, I know I will still try to write, dreaming like Rousseau as he finishes Part Two of writing Part Three where everything will be laid bare (he wrote the Dialogues and then the Reveries …). As though it were possible to answer the question, ‘Who am I?’ which Rousseau asks himself at the outset! As though one could write, just write my way towards an answer. Rousseau’s faith: he will be able to speak, he will find his way to the truth.
Rousseau’s fear: writing will carry him away. What happens? He writes, he writes in faith but he also writes in fear. Whence the necessity to write more and more. Whence the strange outbidding in the Confessions whereby every catastrophe is greater than the last and Rousseau, again, is shipwrecked anew. It is as though he knows that to approach the true, the immediate, is to miss that truth, to pass by way of a lengthy detour. First the primal light to which Rousseau will return over and again: the natural, truth, all that thereafter becomes distorted. But then the great corruption whereby the natural is lost, when a great deviation is necessary in order to return to the primordial. And then the real catastrophe: there is no end to his wandering; he must return to himself by way of writing which is to say he is lost, he was lost straightaway, as soon as he picked up his pen …
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