The conclusion I can draw from all these reflections is that I have never really been suited to civil society, where there is nothing but irritation, obligation, and duty, and that my independent nature always made me incapable of the constraints required of anyone who wants to live with men. As long as I act freely, I am good and I do nothing but good; but as soon as I feel the yoke of necessity or men, I become rebellious, or rather, stubborn, and then I am incapable of doing good.* When I have to do the opposite of what I want to do, I do not do it, whatever happens; I do not even do what I want to do, because I am weak. I abstain from acting: since my weakness is entirely in terms of action, all my strength is negative, and all my sins are sins of omission, rarely of commission.* I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants to do, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do, and this is the freedom I have always craved and often enjoyed and because of which I have most scandalized my contemporaries. For they, being active, restless, and ambitious, detesting freedom in others and wanting none of it for themselves, as long as they can sometimes do what they want to do, or rather stop other people from doing what they want to do, they go to great lengths throughout their lives to do what they are loath to do and will do absolutely anything menial in order to command. Their wrong was therefore not to cut me off as if I were a useless member of society, but to banish me as if I were harmful: for I admit that I have done very little good, but I have never had any evil intentions in my life, and I doubt if there is any man in the world who has really done less evil than I have.
SEVENTH WALK
THIS collection of my long reveries has hardly begun, and already I feel that it is coming to an end. Another pastime has taken over from it, absorbs me, and even deprives me of any time for dreaming. I abandon myself to it with an enthusiasm that smacks of the extravagant and that makes me laugh when I think about it; but I abandon myself to it nonetheless because in my current situation, I have no other rule of conduct than always to follow unhindered my natural inclinations. I can do nothing about my fate, all my inclinations are innocent, and since all the judgements of men are henceforth of no significance to me, wisdom itself dictates that in everything that remains within my grasp, I should do whatever I want, be it in public or in private, with no rule other than my own fancy and no constraint other than the little strength that I still have. So here I am with only my hay for food and my botany to occupy me. I was already old when I first gained a superficial knowledge of it in Switzerland from Doctor d’Ivernois, and during my travels I had botanized well enough to gain a decent knowledge of the plant kingdom. But once I was in my sixties and was living a sedentary life in Paris, I began to lose the strength required for lengthy botanizing, and since, moreover, I was busy enough with copying out music not to need any other activity, I had abandoned this pastime which I no longer needed; I had sold my herbarium and my books and was content with sometimes seeing again the common plants that I had found on my walks around Paris. During this time I forgot far more quickly than I had learned it almost all of what little I knew.
Suddenly, already aged sixty-five and having lost both the little memory I had and the strength I had left to run around the countryside, with no guide, no books, no garden, and no herbarium, here I am, once again obsessed with this madness, and even more ardently than I had been the first time I indulged in it; here I am, seriously engaged in the wise plan of learning off by heart the whole of Murray’s Regnum vegetabile* and acquainting myself with every known plant on earth. Unable to buy any books on botany again, I have made it my task to transcribe those lent to me, and, determined to reconstitute a richer herbarium than my first, and until I can put in it all the marine and alpine plants and the trees of the Indies, I am quite happily beginning with pimpernel, chervil, borage, and groundsel; I botanize learnedly at my birdcage, and with every new blade of grass I come across, I contentedly say to myself: ‘There’s yet another plant.’
I am not trying to justify my decision to follow this whim; I find it very reasonable, since I am persuaded that, in my current situation, indulging in the pastimes that I enjoy is a very wise thing to do, and is even a great virtue: it is a way of preventing any seed of vengeance or hatred from taking root in my heart, and, given my destiny, in order to find a liking for some pastime, I surely need my true nature to have been cleansed of all irascible passions. This is my way of taking revenge on my persecutors: I can think of no crueller way of punishing them than to be happy in spite of them.
Yes, reason without doubt allows me, even requires me, to give myself to any inclination which attracts me and which nothing prevents me from following; but it does not tell me why this inclination attracts me nor what charm I can find in a fruitless study which I pursue without learning anything useful or making any progress and which, old dotard that I am, already decrepit and unwieldy, ungifted and forgetful, takes me back to the exercises of my youth and my schoolboy lessons. Now, this is a bizarre thing that I would like to be able to explain to myself; it seems to me that, once fully explained, it could cast some new light on the self-knowledge which I have devoted my final days of leisure to acquiring.
Sometimes I have thought quite profoundly, but rarely with pleasure and almost always against my will and as if forced to do so: reverie revives and amuses me, thought tires and saddens me; thinking has always been for me a painful and unappealing occupation.* Sometimes my reveries end in meditation, but more often my meditations end in reverie, and during these wanderings, my soul roams and takes flight through the universe on the wings of the imagination in ecstasies that exceed all other pleasures.
As long as I enjoyed this in all its purity, I always found all other occupations dull. But when, having been launched into a literary career by outside forces,* I felt the tiredness caused by intellectual work and the cares created by unfavourable fame, I also felt my sweet reveries languishing and waning at the same time, and soon, being forced in spite of myself to confront my sad situation, only very rarely was I able to rediscover those dear ecstasies which for fifty years had taken the place of fortune and glory for me and which, since I spent nothing on them but time, had made me in my idleness the happiest of mortals.
I even feared in my reveries that my imagination, alarmed by my misfortunes, might finally turn its activity in their direction and that the continual awareness of my sufferings, gradually oppressing my heart, might finally overwhelm me under their weight. In these circumstances, a natural instinct of mine that makes me flee all depressing ideas silenced my imagination and, focusing my attention on the things around me, made me for the first time consider in detail the spectacle of nature, which until then I had hardly ever looked at otherwise than collectively and as a whole.
Trees, bushes, and plants are the adornment and clothing of the earth. Nothing is so sad as the sight of bare, barren countryside that holds up to view nothing but stones, mud, and sand. But brought to life by nature and wearing her wedding dress, amidst flowing water and birdsong, earth offers man, in the harmony of the three kingdoms, a spectacle full of life, interest, and charm, the only spectacle in the world of which his eyes and heart never tire.
The more sensitive the observer’s soul, the more he delights in the ecstasy aroused in him by this harmony. On such occasions, a sweet and deep reverie takes hold of his senses, and he loses himself with delicious intoxication in the immensity of this beautiful system with which he feels at one. Then all individual things escape him; everything he sees and feels is in the whole. Some particular circumstances have to restrict his ideas and limit his imagination for him to be able to observe the separate parts of this universe which he was striving to embrace in its entirety.
This is what happened naturally to me when my heart, constricted by distress, gathered and concentrated all its impulses around itself in order to preserve what was left of its warmth which was about to evaporate and die in my ever deepening depression. I wandered aimlessly in the woods and mountains,
not daring to think for fear of heightening my pain. My imagination, which rejects all painful things, let my senses yield to the gentle but sweet impressions created by the things around me. My eyes roamed continually from one thing to another, and it was inevitable, given such great variety, that some drew them more and caused them to pause for longer.
I came to enjoy this recreation for the eyes, which in misfortune relaxes, amuses, and distracts the mind and lifts the feeling of pain. The nature of the things adds greatly to this distraction and makes it more charming. Sweet smells, bright colours, and the most elegant of shapes seem to vie for the right to seize our attention. One has only to love pleasure to yield to such delightful sensations, and if the effect is not the same on everyone who is so struck, it is because some lack natural sensibility and most have minds which, too preoccupied with other ideas, only furtively yield to the things which strike their senses.
Something else that also serves to put people of taste off the plant kingdom is the habit of seeing plants only as a source of drugs and medicine.* Theophrastus* had approached them differently, and this philosopher can be thought of as the only botanist of antiquity: for that reason, he is virtually unknown among us; but thanks to a certain Dioscorides,* a great compiler of herbal remedies, and to his commentators, medicine has so seized on plants, all deemed to be medicinal, that people see in them only what is not there to be seen, namely the supposed medicinal virtues that anybody and everybody attributes to them. Nobody imagines that the structure of plants could deserve some attention in its own right; people who spend their lives learnedly classifying shells mock botany as a useless study when it is not combined with what they call the study of properties, that is to say, when one does not abandon the observation of nature, which does not lie and which tells us nothing about any of that, in favour of following entirely the authority of men, who are liars and who tell us lots of things for which we have to take their word, which is itself more often than not based on the authority of others. If you pause in a brightly coloured meadow to examine one by one the flowers with which it shimmers, those who see you, assuming you are a surgeon’s assistant, will ask you which plants will cure the mange in children, scabies in men, or glanders in horses. This distasteful prejudice has been partially overcome abroad, and above all in England, thanks to Linnaeus, who has gone some way towards rescuing botany from the schools of pharmacy and returning it to natural history and domestic uses; but in France, where this study has found fewer followers amongst people in polite society, they have remained so barbarous in this respect that a wit from Paris who saw a collector’s garden in London, full of rare trees and plants, could only exclaim by way of praise: ‘What a fine apothecary’s garden.’ According to this view, the first apothecary was Adam. For it is hard to imagine a garden with a better stock of plants than the Garden of Eden.
These medicinal ideas are, to be sure, hardly likely to make the study of botany attractive: they make the colour of the meadows and the brilliance of the flowers fade, they dry out the freshness of the woodland, and they make the greenery and shade dull and disagreeable; all the charming and gracious structures of plants are of very little interest to anyone who simply wants to crush them all in a mortar, and it is pointless looking for garlands for shepherdesses amongst the plants used in enemas.
All this pharmacology did not mar my country images: nothing was further removed from them than infusions and poultices. I have often thought, as I looked closely at fields, orchards, woods, and their numerous inhabitants, that the plant kingdom was a food store given by nature to man and animals. But it has never occurred to me to look in it for drugs and remedies. I can see nothing in all its diversity that indicates such a use to me, and nature would have shown us what was available, if it had intended us to use plants in this way, as it did for the food we eat. Indeed, I feel that the pleasure I take in roaming through woodland would be poisoned by the idea of human ailments, if it made me think of fever, stones, gout, and epilepsy. That said, I shall not deny plants the great virtues that are attributed to them; but I shall simply say that, if these virtues are indeed real, the sick are simply being spiteful by continuing to be ill; for of all the illnesses that men give themselves, not one of them can be completely cured by twenty different kinds of plant.
Such views, which always relate everything to our material interest, which make us seek usefulness or remedies everywhere, and which would make us look at the whole of nature with indifference, if we were always well, are ones I have never shared. In this respect I feel I am completely at odds with other men: everything to do with my needs saddens and spoils my thoughts, and I have only ever found real charm in the pleasures of the mind when I have completely lost sight of the interests of my body. Thus, even if I believed in medicine and even if its remedies were agreeable, in using them I would never experience the kind of joy that comes from pure and disinterested contemplation, and my soul could never take flight and soar over nature if I felt it was bound by the ties of my body. Moreover, although I never placed much trust in medicine, I placed a good deal in doctors whom I respected and liked and let rule with complete authority over my carcass. Fifteen years’ experience have taught me to my cost; now following once again nothing but the laws of nature, I have regained my original health. Even if the doctors had no other complaints against me, who could be surprised that they hate me? I am the living proof of the vanity of their art and the uselessness of their remedies.
No, nothing personal and nothing to do with the interests of my body can truly concern my soul. My meditations and reveries are never more delightful than when I forget myself. I feel ecstasy and inexpressible rapture when I melt, so to speak, into the system of beings and identify myself with the whole of nature. For as long as men were my brothers, I would make plans for my happiness on earth; since these plans were always formed with reference to the whole, I could only be happy in so far as the public at large was happy, and the only time the idea of individual happiness touched my heart was when I saw my brothers seeking their happiness solely in my misery. So, in order to avoid hating them, I had to flee them; taking refuge in our common mother, in her arms I tried to avoid her children’s attacks and I became a solitary or, as they call it, unsociable and misanthropic, because the fiercest solitude seems to me preferable to the society of the wicked, which thrives only on treachery and hatred.
Forced to abstain from thinking for fear of thinking in spite of myself about my misfortunes, forced to repress what remains of a happy but declining imagination, which so many woes could finally scare off completely, and forced to try to forget men who pile ignominy and outrages upon me, for fear that my indignation might finally make me bitter towards them, I am, however, unable to concentrate entirely on myself because my expansive soul seeks, in spite of my best efforts, to extend its feelings and its existence to other beings, and I can no longer, as I once did, plunge headlong into this vast ocean of nature because my weakened and diminished faculties can no longer find any things that are sufficiently distinct, stable, and within my grasp to latch firmly onto and because I no longer feel I have enough strength to swim in the chaos of my former ecstasies. My ideas are now little more than sensations, and the sphere of my understanding is limited to the things closest to me.
Fleeing men, seeking solitude, no longer using my imagination, and thinking still less, yet endowed with a lively temperament that keeps me from falling into listless and melancholy apathy, I began to take an interest in everything around me, and, following a very natural instinct, I preferred the most pleasant things. The mineral kingdom has nothing inherently likeable or attractive about it; its riches, locked up deep inside the earth, seem to have been placed far from the sight of men so as not to appeal to their greed. They are there as a kind of reserve to be used one day as a supplement to those true riches which are more readily in man’s grasp and for which he gradually loses his taste as he becomes more corrupt. Then he has to call on dexterity, hard work, and toil t
o help him in his need; he digs down deep into the bowels of the earth, risking his own life and at the expense of his health, looking in its centre for imaginary gains to replace the real riches that the earth herself freely offered him when he was in a position to enjoy them. He flees the sun and the light, which he is no longer worthy of seeing; he buries himself alive, and rightly so, since he no longer deserves to live in the light of day. There, quarries, chasms, forges, furnaces, and a whole array of anvils, hammers, smoke, and fire take the place of the sweet images of rustic labour. The haggard faces of the wretches languishing in the foul vapours of the mines, blacksmiths covered in soot, and hideous Cyclops are the spectacle that the mining works present deep down inside the earth, instead of that of greenery and flowers, azure sky, shepherds in love, and hearty labourers on the surface.
It is easy, I admit, to go around picking up sand and stones, to fill your pockets and your cabinet of curiosities with them, and thus to make yourself look like a naturalist: but those who engage in, and limit themselves to, these kinds of collections are on the whole rich, ignorant people who in so doing seek only the pleasure of showing off what they have collected. In order to gain something useful from studying minerals, one has to be a chemist or a physicist; one has to perform difficult and costly experiments, work in laboratories, and spend a great deal of money and time amidst coal, crucibles, furnaces, retorts, smoke, and suffocating fumes, always risking one’s life and often damaging one’s health. The result of all this wretched and tiring work is usually far less knowledge than pride: for where is the most mediocre chemist who does not believe that he has made sense of all the great works of nature simply because he has discovered, possibly by chance, a few minor chemical compounds?
The animal kingdom is more within our grasp and certainly more deserving of study. But does not this study, too, have its own difficulties, obstacles, annoyances, and trials, above all for a solitary individual who can expect no help from anyone while at play or at work? How is one to observe, dissect, study, and gain knowledge of the birds in the air, the fish in the water, or the quadrupeds which are lighter than the wind and stronger than man and which are no more inclined to come and offer themselves up for my research than I am to go running after them and subject them to it by force? I would, then, have to turn to snails, worms, and flies, and I would spend my life getting out of breath chasing after butterflies, impaling poor insects, and dissecting mice when I could catch them or the carcasses of animals that I happened to find dead. The study of animals is as nothing without anatomy;* it teaches us how to classify them and distinguish between the different families and species. If I were to study them by their behaviour and characteristics, I would need aviaries, fish-pools, and cages; I would need somehow to force them to stay close to me. I have neither the desire nor the means to keep them in captivity, nor the necessary agility to pursue them as they move about when they are free. So I would have to study them dead, tear them apart, remove their bones, and dig about at will in their palpitating entrails! What an awful place an anatomy theatre is: stinking corpses, oozing and livid flesh, blood, disgusting intestines, awful skeletons, and pestilential fumes! Believe me, that is not the place where J.-J. will go looking for amusement.
Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Oxford World's Classics) Page 12
