Third Walk
(Abridged)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Growing older, I learn all the time.
Solon often repeated this line in his old age. In a sense I could say the same, but the knowledge that the experience of twenty years has brought me is a poor thing, and even ignorance would be preferable. No doubt adversity is a great teacher, but its lessons are dearly bought, and often the profit we gain from them is not worth the price they cost us. What is more, these lessons come so late in the day that by the time we master them they are of no use to us. Youth is the time to study wisdom, age the time to practice it. Experience is always instructive, I admit, but it is only useful in the time we have left to live. When death is already at the door, is it worth learning how we should have lived?
What use to me are the insights I have gained so late and so painfully into my destiny an
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d the passions of those who have made it what it is? If I have learned to know men better, it is only to feel more keenly the misery into which they have plunged me, nor has this knowledge, while laying bare all their traps, enabled me to avoid a single one. Why did I not remain in that foolish yet blessed faith, which made me for so many years the prey and plaything of my vociferous friends with never the least suspicion of all the plots enveloping me? I was their cso>新疆艺术学院学报dupe and their victim, to be sure, but I believed they love me, my heart enjoyed the friendship they had inspired in me, and I credited them with the same feelings. Those sweet illusions have been destroyed. The sad truth that time and reason have revealed to me in making me aware of my misfortune, has convinced me that there is no remedy and that resignation is my only course. Thus all the experience of my old age is of no use to me in my present state, nor will it help me in the future.We enter the race when we are born and we leave it when we die. Why learn to drive your chariot better when you are close to the finishing post? All you have to consider then is how to make your exit. If an old man has something to learn, it is the art of dying, and this is precisely what occupies people at least my age; we think of anything rather than th
at. Old men are all more attracted to life than children, and they leave it with a worse grace than the young. This is because all their labours have had this life in view, and at the end they see that it has all been in vain. When they go, they leave everything behind, all their concerns, all their goods, and the fruits of all their tireless endeavours. They have not thought to acquire anything during their lives that they could take with them when they die.
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I told myself all this when there was still time, and if I have not been able to make better use of my reflections, this is not because they came too late or remained undigested. Thrown into the whirlpool of life while still a child, I learned from early experience that I was not made for this world, and that in it I would never attain the state to which my heart aspired. Ceasing therefore to seek among men the happiness which I felt I could never find there, my ardent imagination learned to leap over the boundaries of life which was as yet hardly begun, as if it were flying over an alien land in search of a fixed and stable resting place.
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This desire, fostered by my early education and later strengthened by the long train of miseries and misfortunes that have filled my life, has at all times led me to seek after the nature and purpose of my being with greater interest and determination than I have seen in anyone else. I have met many men who were more learned in their philosophizing, but their philosophy remained as it were external to them. Wishing to know more than other people, they studied the working of the universe, as they might have studied some machine they had come across, out of sheer curiosity. They studied human nature in order to speak knowledgeably about it, not in order to know themselves; their efforts were directed to the instruction of others and not to their own inner enlightenment. Several of them merely wanted to write a book, any book, so long as it was successful. Once it was written and published, its contents no longer interested them in the least. All they wanted was to have it accepted by other people and to defend it when it was attacked; beyond this they neither took anything from it for their own use nor concerned themselves with its truth or falsehood, provided it escaped refutation. For my part, when I have set out to learn something, my aim has been to gain knowledge for myself and not to be a teacher;
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I have always thought that before instructing others one should begin by knowing enough for one’s own needs, and of all the studies I have undertaken in my life among men, there is hardly one that I would not equally have undertaken if I had been confined to a desert island for the rest of my days. What we ought to do depends largely on what we ought to believe, and in all matters other than the basic needs of our nature our opinions govern our actions. This principle, to which I have always adhered, has frequently led me to seek at length for the true purpose of my life so as to be able to determine its conduct, and feeling that this purpose was not to be found among men, I soon became reconciled to my incapacity for worldly success.
Born into a moral and pious family and brought up affectionately by a minister full of virtue and religion, I had received from my earliest years principles and maxims – prejudices, some might say – which have never entirely deserted me. While I was still a child, left to my own devices, led on by my kindness, seduced by vanity, duped by hope and compelled by necessity, I became a Catholic, but I remained a Christian and soon my heart, under the influence of habit, became sincerely attached to my new religion. The
instruction and good example I received from Madame de Warens confirmed me in this attachment. The rural solitude in which I spent the best days of my youth, and reading of good books which completely absorbed me, strengthened my naturally affectionate tendencies in her company and led me to an almost Fenelon-like devotion, lonely meditation, the study of nature and the contemplation of the universe lead the solitary to aspire continually to the maker of all things and to seek with a pleasing disquiet for the purpose of all he sees and the cause of all he feels. When my destiny cast me back into the torrent of this world, I found nothing there which could satisfy my heart for a single moment. Regret for the sweet liberty I had lost followed me everywhere and threw a veil of indifference or distaste over everything around me which might have brought me fame and fortune. Wavering in my uncertain desires, I hoped for little and obtained less, and even amidst the gleams of prosperity that came my way I felt that had I obtained all I thought I wanted, it would not have given me the happiness that my heart thirsted after without knowing clearly what it was. In this way everything conspired to detach my affection from this world, even before the onset of those misfortunes which were to make
me a total stranger to it. I reached the age of forty, oscillating between poverty and riches, wisdom and error, full of vices born of habit, but with a heart free of evil inclinations, living at random with no rational principles, and careless but not scornful of my duties, of which I was often not fully aware.
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