Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Reveries Of The Solitary Walker - 1776

SECOND WALK

My afternoon went by amid these peaceful meditations, and as i was making my way home, very pleased with my day, when the flow of the reveries was suddenly interrupted by the event which i must now relate.

At about six in the evening I was on the hill leading down from Menilmontant, almost opposite the Jolly Gardener, when some people walking in front of me suddenly stepped aside and i saw a Great Dane rushing at full tilt towards me, followed by a carriage. It saw me too late to be able to check it's speed or change it's course. I judged that my only hope of avoiding being knocked down was to leap into the air at precisely the right moment to allow the dog to pass underneath me. This lightning plan of action, which I had no time either to examine or to put into practice. was my last thought before I went down. I felt neither the impact nor my fall, nor indeed anything else until I eventually came to.

It was nearly night when I regained consciousness. I was in the arms of two or three of the young men who told me what had happened. The Great Dane, unable to check its onrush, had run straight into my legs and it's combined mass and speed had caused me to fall forward on my face. My upper jaw, bearing the full weight of my body, had struck against the bumpy cobblestones, and my fall had been all the more violent because I was on a downhill slope, so that my head finished up lower than my feet. The carriage to which the dog belonged was directly behind it and would have run right over me had not the coachman instantly reined up his horses. So much I learned from those who had picked me up and were still holding me when I came to. But what I felt at that moment was too remarkable to be passed over in silence.

Night was coming on. I saw the sky, some stars, and a few leaves. This first sensation was a moment of delight. I was conscious of nothing else. In this instant I was being born again, and it seemed as if all I perceived was filled with my frail existence. Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.

FIFTH WALK

When the lake was not calm enough for boating, I would spend the afternoon roaming about the island, stopping to sit now in the most charming and isolated corners where I could dream undisturbed, and now on the terraces and little hills, where I could let my eyes wander over the beautiful and entrancing spectacle of the lake and it's shores, crowned on one side by the near-by mountains and on the other extending in rich and fertile plains where the view was limited only by the more distant range of blue mountains.

As evening approached, I came down from the heights of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the edge of the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movements of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all the other agitation from my soul, would plunge it into a delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unaware. The ebb and flow of the water, it's continuous yet undulating noise, kept lapping against my ears and my eyes, taking the place of all the inward movements which my reverie had calmed within me, and it was enough to make me pleasurably aware of my existence, without troubling myself with thought. From time to time some brief and insubstantial reflection arose concerning the instability of the things of this world, whose image I saw in the surface of the water, but soon these fragile impression gave way before the unchanging and ceaseless movement which lulled me and without any active on my part occupied me so completely that even when time and the habitual signal called me home I could hardly bring myself to go.

After supper, when the evening was fine, we all went out once again to walk on the terrace and breathe the coolness of the lake air. We would sit down to rest in the summer-house and laugh and talk and sing some old song which was fully the equal of all our modern frills and fancies, and then we would go off to bed satisfied with our day and only wishing for the next day to be the same.