I take a walk almost every day. Not only is walking healthy for the body, it is good for the soul. It also stimulates the mind. In this series, I want to share with you some thoughts–philosophical, theological, moral, and political–I’ve had while walking.

Let me tell you first about my title “Thoughts of a Solitary Walker.” Years ago, in preparing a lecture for one of my classes, I ran across a book of essays by J.J. Rousseau by the title The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Each chapter describes Rousseau’s experiences and feelings on a walk. Rousseau (1712-78) is known as the “father of the romantic movement.” I am amazed at his ability to describe his inner feelings and reactions to passing scenes. My admiration for him is limited to his gifts, however, not the use he made of them. Though brilliant and extraordinarily talented, Rousseau was a deeply flawed man. Like Karl Marx, Percy Shelly and other unemployed intellectuals that came after him, he was a narcissist, a moocher, and a grifter. He sponged off of his friends and abused them when they complained. He forced his mistress to surrender their five children to the local orphanage.

Nevertheless, to begin this series I want to give credit to Rousseau for my title and for the idea of the series. Below I quote Rousseau’s account of his fifth walk. In the lecture to which I referred above, I have students compare and contrast the experience Rousseau describes in this reading with the experiences Augustine describes in his Confessions, Books 9 & 10.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Fifth Walk)

“I have noticed in the vicissitudes of a long life that the periods of the sweetest joys and the most lively pleasures are not, however, those of which the memory attracts me and touches me most. These brief moments of delirium and passion, however lively they may be, are still, and by their very vivacity, only points scattered along the line of life. They are too rare and too rapid to constitute a state. And the happiness that my heart regrets is not composed of fugitive instances but is a simple and permanent state—a state which is nothing lively in itself but whose duration increases their delight to the point of finding there, at last, the supreme happiness.

All is in a continual flux on earth: nothing on it keeps a constant and fixed form, and our affections, which attach us to exterior things, pass and change necessarily as the things pass and change. Always ahead of us or behind us, they recall the past which is no longer or anticipate the future which often is not to be: there is nothing solid there to which the heart can attach itself. Also, here below one scarcely has anything but fleeting pleasure; as for lasting happiness, I doubt that it is known here. Scarcely is there in our most lively joys an instant when the heart can truly say to us: I wish that this instant would last forever; and how can one call “happiness” a fugitive state which leaves us with a heart still troubled and empty, which makes us regret something before or still desire something after?

But if there is a state where the soul finds a solid enough base to rest itself entirely and gather together there its entire being without having to recall the past or to step over into the future; where time is nothing for it, where the present lasts always, without, however, marking its duration and without any trace of succession, without any other feeling—of privation or joy, of pleasure or pain, of desire or fear—than that alone of our existence, and this feeling alone can fill it completely; [then] as long as this state lasts, whoever finds himself in it can call himself happy, not with an imperfect happiness poor and relative such as what one finds in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient happiness perfect and full which leaves in the soul no void which it feels the need of filling. Such is the state where I found myself often on the Island of St. Pierre in my solitary reveries, whether lying in my boat which I let drift at the mercy of the water, whether sitting on the shore of the agitated lake, whether somewhere else on the edge of a beautiful river or of a brook murmuring on the gravel.

What does one enjoy in such a situation? Nothing exterior to the self, nothing except the self and one’s own existence. As long as this state lasts, one is sufficient to oneself, like God. The sentiment of existence, stripped of all other affections, is by itself a precious sentiment of contentment and peace which would be sufficient alone to make existence dear and sweet to whoever knows how to set aside from himself all the sensual and earthly impressions which ceaselessly come to distract us from it and to disturb its sweetness here below. But most men, agitated by continual passions, hardly know this state and, having tasted it only imperfectly for a few instances, keep only an obscure and confused idea of it which does not make them feel its charm. It would not even be good, in the present constitution of things, that, eager for these sweet ecstasies, they would be revolted by the active life for which their needs, always reborn, prescribe the duty to them. But an unfortunate who has been cut off from human society and who is no longer able here below to do anything useful and good for others or for himself can find in this state some consolations for all human happiness—consolations that fortune and men could not take away from him” (pp. 68-69).

Next Time: Is the world a material machine or a spiritual organism?