Reveries of the Solitary Blogger

Have you really been utterly destroyed?

This is the first time in over a month that I’ve felt like writing much. This is because I’ve slept for 14 hours. I slept for 14 hours because a walk around the arboretum exhausts me. Even though I can see flowering dogwood, bluebells, hellebore, can see them on an excursion with my wife and mother, delight in those things. But regardless of all the delight, or perhaps because of the delight (at least in part) I was completely exhausted, the usual nerve pain, concentrated in the joints and behind the eyes, returned, so I had to go back home and sleep for 14 hours. That rest was, actually, quite restful, despite me having a recurrent dream about being tortured. I’ve described this torture in detail in a few drafts I’ve written for the newsletter, and it’s for the best that the drafts have remained drafts. Visceral self-disclosure is best when it’s kept off the internet, when it’s disclosed in books and other printed matter, separated from the crude mechanics of social media. I had a nice rest despite the usual nightmare, despite bad dreams. Let’s keep it at that.

In Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes about in the infirmities and isolation of his old age, circumstances which led him to take up botany as an exercise for his mind. The practice was delightful to him because it had no practical application. The apothecaries, he goes on to say, are disreputable people because “they tarnish the enamel of the meadows, cause the vivid dyes of the flowers to fade, and wither the freshness of the groves, rendering their shades and verdure not only insipid but disgusting. All those charming and beautiful statures which continually present themselves, are nothing to those who only wish to pound them in a mortar; and who would seek or imagine garlands for smiling shepherdesses, among the ingredients for a clister?”

For my part, I do wish taking some brew or herbal tincture would make me feel better; I’d pick the flowers myself. The Tramadol I take for pain and fatigue isn’t gathered from the sap of poppies but synthesized I don’t know where—(in the not so recent past, synthesized in New Jersey or Nordrhein-Westphalia, and today, probably somewhere in China or India.) — (Someone with a better command of pharmacology, organic chemistry, and economic geography could write an interesting essay on the subject. — Anyway, I’m not as old as Rousseau was when he wrote Reveries—he was in his early 60s—but often feel geriatric, have the energy and agility of a geriatric. Anyway, I haven’t given up on making myself feel well. I’d pick a field of flowers to make myself feel well, leaving a reserve to pollinate themselves and go to seed.

Early-to-mid 60s isn’t that old anymore. 65—the age when Rousseau died—isn’t that old. But we live in an age of modern medicine. It might take a great deal of wealth, might take selling off a house or two, but life can be reliably extended past that point. Rousseau’s public had to wait until after his death to read Reveries. I find his incessant, wounded self-regard amusing rather than exhausting. That’s probably because—being a writer too, after all—I’m fairly egotistical myself. I doubt my patience would’ve been extended towards Rousseau as a living person. I’ve never translated a living person, and I don’t think I’ll start anytime soon.

Nevertheless, I believe Rousseau, think he’s being mostly sincere, when he expresses gratitude towards his enemies, credits them with destroying his reputation utterly, so that he can live out the rest of his life in peace. But I also don’t doubt that he would have gladly stepped back into the limelight had it been an option for him. Hermits love an audience. How else are we supposed to imbibe their wisdom? Rousseau knew full well that he had an audience for his work. The humility he expresses is transparent affectation—not the worst kind of affectation, since the writing is brilliant—transparent since those who are utterly ruined by life disappear completely from it. Their traces disappear in an instant, like grass springing up after someone has trodden over it.

I haven’t been ruined by life because however unpleasant it is to be me on a day-to-day basis, I can still share the earth with people that I care about, who care for me; an audience, no matter how large, would be a poor substitute for that. If there’s any psychological toll for the daily aches and pains it’s knowing how many people, most people, don’t have the resources to escape from it. I’m not forced, like my paternal grandfather, to work through that kind of pain. A recent acquaintance of mine, a feminist as she labels herself, once said that having a wife who earns more than you is “always emasculating”. I disagree, but even if that were the case, emasculation is a fair trade for paid hospital bills and being with someone who trusts that even if you hurt too much to hold them, you would hold them if you could. I wish the earth was always this gentle.