The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Volume 09

The ninth volume of Rousseau's revolutionary autobiographical project finds the philosopher at his hermitage, that small refuge he carved from the world in retreat from it. Here, in these pages, Rousseau performs what he does better than any writer before him: he examines the contradictions within his own soul with a candor that still startles. He craves solitude yet hungers for connection. He has fled public life yet cannot stop measuring himself against it. The man who declared himself the model for all reflective lives reveals himself unsure whether he can bear the silence he sought. This volume traces his reckoning with what it means to love, to befriend, and to exist in relation to others when one has declared war on society. Rousseau's genius lies in his refusal to prettify himself, in his insistence that true knowledge of the self requires confronting the chaos there. For readers willing to follow him into that darkness, the rewards are extraordinary: a portrait of the artist as a complicated, often uncomfortable human being, written by the man who invented the modern idea of the self.