If the life and death of Socrates give us a portrait of what it means to be an individual, and Spinoza adds the world in which we live and act, then Rousseau combines the two to provide a portrait of the individual in modern times. Rousseau confronts one of the most contemporary of all our problems: the struggle to remain an individual in an increasingly homogenized world and to express oneself when all the outlets for doing so have become trite and trivial. Though he was perhaps the first literary celebrity, his life was plagued by loneliness. Already during his times, his biography and provocative ideas were widely known. But as much as everyone knew him, or knew about him, he remained elusive. In Rousseau we find the seeds of a modern divide between one’s inner experiences and one’s public image. Rousseau struggled to bridge this divide by writing three autobiographies. The first two—The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques—shocked the authorities and excited a recently formed public readership. He gained fame and was one of the earliest examples of the new category of “man of letters.” Reveries of the Solitary Walker was his last attempt to provide an account of himself—the lone writer—in a manner that was at once philosophical and fundamentally personal.
Biography
Rousseau was an obsessive memoirist: his three autobiographies amounted to an unusually large number for any era, and particularly so in his time. In eighteenth-century Calvinist Europe one had to be royalty, a bishop, or at least a noble to be worthy of a book.
Rousseau was none of that. He was born in Geneva in 1712 and educated as an orthodox Calvinist. His mother died soon after giving birth, and his father abandoned him when he was ten. He was left in the care of a Protestant minister and later served as an apprentice to a tyrannical engraver. At the age of sixteen he fled Geneva and traveled throughout Europe, picking up various occupations as he went. His great love was his older patron and mistress, Madame de Warens, twelve years his elder. They met when he was sixteen—he called her Mamma and she called him Little One. But he lived most of his life with an uneducated servant who was the mother of his five children, all of whom he gave to an orphanage.
One might consider these life details to be irrelevant to the philosopher’s mind and to his ideas. But Rousseau made his own life central to his texts. After all, he explains that his philosophy is not meant for others but for himself to explain and justify his existence: “I have met many men who were more learned in their philosophizing, but their philosophy remained as it were external to them.… They studied human nature in order to speak knowledgeably about it, not in order to know themselves.… For my part, when I have set out to learn something, my aim has been to gain knowledge of myself and not to be a teacher.”1
A few pages later, he summarizes his position by saying: “Their philosophy is meant for others; I need one for myself” (Reveries, 53). The concept of a “personal philosophy,” which is so common for us today, arose partly from the revolution Rousseau helped instigate. Rousseau was never a philosopher in the academic sense. He followed the more ancient Socratic tradition of philosophy as a way of life and an exercise in the art of living. Like Socrates, he was a plebeian whose knowledge was based in love. But unlike Socrates, who wrote nothing, Rousseau was an obsessive recorder of his own experience. He conducted his “care of the self” in the medium of writing; therefore his dialogue becomes an internal exchange within his mind or between himself, as a lone author, and a similarly solitary reader.
Rousseau was a prolific writer: an essayist, novelist, and a musician, best known for his theory of social freedom, rights, education, and religion. He achieved fame for a prize-winning essay about what benefits the arts and sciences conferred on mankind (1750). His novel argument was that, contrary to the position of the Enlightenment, arts and sciences do not benefit mankind; rather, they create wants, and wants enslave man. These ideas were elaborated in the “Discourse on Inequality” (1754), in which he famously asserted that “man is naturally good, and only by institutions is he made bad.” The idea that we are born good and are gradually corrupted is an ironic reversal of the doctrine of original sin and salvation through the Church.
In 1760 he published his novel Julie (La Nouvelle Héloîs); and in 1762, Émile—a treatise on education—and The Social Contract, which became his most important philosophical works. They achieved such enormous success that they were regarded as dangerous to the political order and to the Church. Like Socrates, Rousseau was accused of introducing a new, unorthodox religion. The accusations leveled against him by the Paris parliamentarians bear an uncanny resemblance to the accusations against Socrates, and they also reveal the general inquietude certain philosophers are able to generate. The judgment describes Rousseau as “asserting blasphemous, ungodly, and detestable principles, containing indecent material offensive to propriety and modesty, together with propositions subversive to sovereign authority, setting forth maxims of education which could only produce men devoted to skepticism and toleration, abandoned to their passions, men given over to the pleasures of the senses.”2
To a modern audience this kind of condemnation from the ruling majority might as well be put on the back cover of the book as an endorsement. But to Rousseau this controversy did not constitute a marketing ploy. Instead, it forced him to flee Continental Europe. Eventually he ended up in England as a guest of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, where he had great social success and was granted a pension by George III. But fame, as we know from our own celebrity culture, carries a toll. Rousseau became suspicious and accused Hume of plotting against him. He fled to Paris and wrote his autobiographies before dying in extreme poverty.
From these pages Rousseau emerges as a truly unique individual: funny, outrageous, extravagant, original, exposed, and yet sensitive and susceptible to the views of others. His writings highlight the tension between the human desire to love and be loved, on the one hand, and the opposing need to maintain a sense of independence and individual autonomy. This tension appears in the Reveries as the conflict between solitude and society and the uncompromising self that yearns for understanding and communion. In almost all Rousseau’s writings he attempts to restore a symbiotic state of natural harmony while maintaining individual freedom.
A Book for No One and Everyone
Rousseau began what was to be his last book in the autumn of 1776, when he was sixty-four years old. The last entry was written in 1778. One month later Rousseau accepted the invitation of a rich admirer and moved to his estate near Paris. He went on a morning walk but came home unexpectedly early. He died soon after, leaving the Reveries as his last, unfinished work.
The Reveries is a very peculiar work. It is genre bending, eluding the distinctions between philosophy and literature, fiction, and biography. At times it seems like the work of an aging madman suffering from persecution mania. But it is also the work of a thinker coming of age, collecting his life into a heartfelt, albeit idiosyncratic, memoir. The literary nature of the work is inseparable from its intimacy, expressiveness, and ability to achieve clarity about itself. In this Rousseau offers us another example of what we call the life of philosophy.
The opening line is a perfect example of Rousseau’s particular mix of personal pathos and philosophical acuity: “So now I am alone in the world” (Reveries, 27). It is a dramatic beginning, no doubt, and one that quickly establishes an unusual connection to the reader of this work. As readers, we are excluded from the book because the author tells us that he is alone in the world. And yet we are brought closer because, like the solitary writer, we are reading alone. We are at once too far away and too close. Is this a double voice, one that calls for our attention at the same time that it makes it impossible? Or perhaps this is the very condition of writing (and reading), which creates intimacy between utter strangers? Writing and reading, as the opening sentence makes clear, is a shared experience that is also one of isolation.
Rousseau employs his solitude as an opportunity to discover who he really is: “But I, detached as I am from them and from the whole world, what am I? This must now be the object of my inquiry” (Reveries, 27). We cannot avoid the feeling that these words are intended for our ears. Is he feigning solitude, or is this “detachment” sincere? How can an author write a book without at least imagining a reader? A diary writer, for example, always contemplates the idea of an outside reader, even if she never intents to publish her words. We are all familiar with this paradox: we write only for ourselves, but somehow there is someone else present, looking over our shoulder. What is this insistence of “the other” that creeps into our most intimate moments of self-reflection? Is it the power of language or the effect of writing? After all, my words are never my own—I did not invent this sentence but only appropriated it. Language is a borrowed tool, and that’s partly why it’s so handy.
Likewise, reading involves this double play between solitude and communication. Reading the Reveries, one hears one’s own voice reflected back from the page—“So now I am alone in the world.” This sentence starts midway, as if continuing an inner conversation that rings in my ear. The voice of the author shapes the inner voice heard by the reader. The doubling of oneself in writing and in reading represents the intimacy of solitary individuals and becomes a way of communicating solitude.
Varieties of Loneliness
It has been mentioned before that the beginning line, “So now I am alone in the world” is reminiscent of Descartes’s “Ego cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”).3 The resonance comes fully in the French: Rousseau’s “Me voici donc seule” picks up on Descartes’s famous assertion, which translates into French as “Je pense donc je suis.” The story of Descartes’s realization is well known. Attempting to find an absolute certainty, he starts by methodologically doubting whatever he can. He dismisses the evidence of the senses and proceeds to more extreme, hyperbolic, skeptical arguments regarding hallucinations, madness, dreams, and a deceptive God. From the senses to mathematics, everything can be doubted, and only one thing remains. “I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”4 According to this reasoning, as long as I meditate, I exist, even though the essence of this existence and whatever I know about the world might be wrong. The fact of existence remains always beyond the possibility of doubt. The Cogito, as the argument is commonly known, is therefore the bedrock of certainty on which the edifice of knowledge can be erected.
Rousseau is not interested in objective certainty but in knowing how he is detached from everyone else. His method is not doubt but existential isolation—a mental exercise that makes others disappear: “For now they are strangers and foreigners to me; they no longer exist for me, since this is their will.” And the crucial question then arises, which is worth repeating here again: “But I, detached as I am from them and from the whole world, what am I?” (Reveries, 27).
Descartes proceeds in similar fashion but arrives at a different result. To the question “What am I?” he undoubtedly responds, I am “a thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions” (Second Meditation, 28). That is not Rousseau’s answer. Thinking about thinking is not his way of achieving certainty. In fact, it causes a greater confusion: “the more I think about my present situation, the less I can understand what has become of me” (Reveries, 27). The Reveries, as the term indicates, is not a conscious attempt to achieve the clarity of thinking. Rather, it is a way of releasing one’s thinking, drawing on the imagination, and investigating oneself as an experiencing subject, outside the influence of others and, as much as possible, prior to language.
“These pages,” he tells either himself or his presumed reader, “will be no more than a formless record of my reveries.… I shall say what I have thought just as it comes to me, with little connection as the thoughts of this morning have with those of last night” (Reveries, 32). By pledging not to censor himself, Rousseau offers the record of his sincere self-examination. Rousseau goes as far as comparing it to a “barometer reading of my soul” (Reveries, 33). Since we cannot be present as readers, this record can only serve the author himself, a way of commemorating his existence and making friends with himself: “in writing them … I shall as it were double the space of my existence, and in my decrepitude I shall live with my earlier self as I might with a younger friend” (Reveries, 34).
Rousseau’s solitary Cogito can also be compared to a more removed assertion—Abraham’s response “Here I am” 
to God’s call to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham’s response expresses the existential solitude of man facing the invisible demand of God. His “Here I am” is traditionally interpreted as the representation of absolute submission or faith. God calls on him to perform the impossible—to sacrifice his son—and he asks no questions and expresses no doubt. It is the polar opposite of Descartes’s “I think therefore I am.” The Cogito is absolute trust in one’s own independent thinking, and the Abrahamic “Here I am” is absolute trust in a power beyond oneself.
Rousseau holds the paradoxical middle between these two extremes. His opening line is both an attempt to rely solely on himself and a realization of the absolute dependence of the self on others. Like Descartes, Rousseau searches for his true self—his existence as an individual human being. His experience of loneliness takes the shape of contemplative solitude and finds its voice in writing. Following Abraham, Rousseau’s cry is tormented and conflicted: it renounces external knowledge and affirms faith. “So I am alone” is a moment of clarity and of obscurity. It brings the self back to itself, to the certainty of one’s experience, as well as fracturing it such that one’s self is infused with otherness.
Friendship
Devoid of all companionship, Rousseau transforms the classic demand to “examine oneself” into a more modern project of becoming friends with oneself: “I shall take the barometer readings of my soul.… When the time for my departure draws near, I shall recall in reading them the pleasure I have in writing them and by thus reviving times past I shall as it were double the space of my existence … I shall live with my earlier self as I might with a young friend” (Reveries, 33–34).
By writing himself, he is able to double “the space of my existence” as if the record left in writing will allow the older Rousseau to enjoy his younger self. The interesting fact is that the very act of recording the experience already anticipates the future reading, and so the doubling of existence is achieved in the present. As we mentioned, the act of writing here and now anticipates a reading in some other time and place. Therefore, the relationship between the biographical “I” in the text and the author who creates that text is never easy or harmonious. The two are not identical. And the Reveries is outstanding not because of this inherent difference, which is true for all biographies, but because it lets us see the difference. The thoughts and events Rousseau narrates show more of the person than what the author intends. For instance, while the author asserts his renunciation of the human race, we can sense his yearning for social connection, growing paranoia, and desire to control and shape his public image. At times we wish to protect Rousseau, the person, from the text Rousseau the author lays. We see him cause harm to himself, and we wish to correct him for his own benefit. At times this peculiar text puts us in the odd position of knowing more or better than the author about himself.
In The Social Contract Rousseau distinguishes between two kinds of relations one can have toward oneself: a beneficial one, arising from the state of nature, and a restrictive one, resulting from the corruption of society. The first, amour de soi meme, is necessary for personal happiness and enhances one’s well-being among others. The second, amour propre, arises from comparing oneself with others and imposing standards of excellence that are alien to one’s own nature. Friendship with oneself is a way of returning to natural self-love and rejecting the conditions of social alienation. The condition of solitude allows Rousseau to reflect on himself without comparisons or judgment, and this reflection resembles a mature form of amour de soi meme. For Rousseau, the consequences are not only personal happiness but also harmony with others. This could be Rousseau’s ethical imperative—write yourself such that you would be the person you would enjoy meeting again in your older years.
Achieving this imperative is no small task, and it could come at the expense of friendships with others. Rousseau is not unaware of this risk. Like Socrates, Rousseau positions himself as living outside the norms of his society, and outside his times—but also as representing the most basic human tendencies. His condition of being utterly alone is one that all of us share, particularly when reading or writing. His claim to be completely unique is, ironically, what each of us feels. Our inability to communicate our inner self and our craving for such communicability is captured, most precisely, by this “most peculiar human being that has ever lived.” With Rousseau individual intimacy is not separated from universal communicability because we are all intimate and inaccessible in the same way.
Both Socrates and Rousseau are outstanding human beings because they are just that and nothing more—human beings. After all, the hardest thing is to just be what one is. They are not divine or mystical and they do not posses any special wisdom. This is what distinguishes the practice of philosophy from other religious, poetic, or doctrinal practices. Its role models are not saints, geniuses, or enlightened individuals but very earthy ones. They wear their faults—Socrates’ vanity, Rousseau’s excessive self-pity and self-love—plainly on their sleeves. We care about these individuals. We can be their friends because they are individuals and we are placed in a position to continue their project of the “care of the self” not because they completed it to perfection but because they did not.
Rousseau’s Method of Self-Examination: The Reveries
Rousseau’s self-examination is not intended to yield an abstract theory but a new relationship with himself that extends his existence and establishes a friendship within it. Achieving this goal requires a unique form of experiencing and an original form of writing that corresponds with experience. Rousseau calls both by the same name, reveries, because they are two dimensions of the same process.
The walks, which are more like strolls than goal-oriented exercises, create an opportunity for a wandering of the soul. They bring about a state of freedom in which thoughts move freely without the requirement of reaching a certain objective. More than daydreaming or hallucinating, a reverie is the process of thinking profoundly (penser profondement), such that a thought sinks into itself and discovers its different voices and forms. Thinking becomes much richer when we stop using it as a tool for practical gains. Reveries, therefore, are a way of embodying thinking fully and appreciating its imaginative and emotional dimensions. A reverie, in Rousseau’s conception, is a certain way of thinking that refuses to give up the richness of meaning for the sake of order and systematization. Inherently a solitary endeavor, it’s a way of noting the movement of experience, the thoughts and sensations that go by while drifting with the flow of life. This may sound similar to some schools of Eastern meditation, and, indeed, Rousseau’s reveries at times suggest the calmness and peace of mind of meditational practices. But it is dissimilar in the sense that reveries serve a particular philosophical purpose—a way of achieving happiness and calmness not just here and now for the solitary self but communicating this state and sharing it with others.
Reveries imply communication, even if their communication is first an inner dialogue within oneself. Rousseau wishes to keep a “faithful record” without restricting his wandering thoughts. But here he encounters an obstacle: how can he document his thoughts without thereby transforming them or restricting their freedom? “Surrounded by such riches, how was I to keep a faithful record of them all? As I tried to recall so many sweet reveries, I relived them instead of describing them. The memory of this state is enough to bring it back to life; if we completely ceased to experience it, we should soon lose all knowledge of it” (Reveries, 36). The problem is simple enough: if you live your experiences, you cannot write them, and if you write them then you are not living in the present. It is impossible to write from inside an experience, since the writing will evidently change the experience; and it is impossible to write from outside an experience because the writer is distanced from it. Rousseau captures the fundamental tension between writing and experiencing by acknowledging that the intimacy of experience is exactly what escapes representation.
Why then try at all? Why try to put my intimacy into words? The answer here has to do with the fact that having an experience partly implies being able to share it with others. Experience itself involves a movement toward communication. We can notice this in certain extreme situations, usually when communication itself is restricted because of internal or external circumstances. Take the experience of beauty, for example. When we listen to a beautiful piece of music, we immediately want to share it, even though the very thing we want to share—the beauty of the music—is exactly what can’t be explained. When I find beauty in a painting, I want to point at it and share it with others. I can talk about the colors or the shape; I can mention the history of art and the biography of the painter. But what is most special about this—beauty itself—escapes representation. In the case of beauty, the desire to share is clearly felt because it is never fully satisfied. Beauty is what we want to share and feel unable to, a fact that makes the desire to communicate all the more visceral.
The experience of art might be a special case, because it pushes communication to its limit. But communicability is a dimension of every experience. In a certain sense, experience is never absolutely solitary since it includes the drive to share it with others. Rousseau reveals the working of that impulse since in his case it persists even though there is no one else around.
Rousseau’s Reveries are an attempt to communicate experience without reliving or killing it. It is here that Reveries become a literary experiment in self-expression—in the writing of the self. In his reading of the Reveries, philosopher Eli Friedlander claims that the book itself can be read as an allegory of writing: “in reading the Reveries it is easy to miss the fact that writing itself is Rousseau’s foremost concern. He writes about the writing of his reveries: not the experiences or the reveries it triggers, but rather what it is to recollect them in writing.” Therefore, Friedlander concludes, “writing is the fundamental activity in the Reveries, and all else, all the other activities Rousseau engages in, are allegories of that writing, and therefore also allegories of reading that text” (An Afterlife of Words, 16–7).
This emphasis on writing is crucial for understanding Rousseau’s Reveries. Rousseau writes about the writing of experience and the difficulties of doing so. The Reveries serve as a bridge between experience and language, writing and life. The project here is to make experience and writing come together so that it is possible to write oneself by way of experiencing oneself or to experience oneself by way of writing. And if Rousseau is successful, then he can be assured that the writing will not alienate him from his experiences or become a lifeless transcription. In the Reveries experience and the writing of experience are two manifestations of the same underlying activity.
Reconstructing Experience
The continuum between writing and life is perhaps most pronounced in the Second Walk. Our hero is attacked by a Great Dane and knocked unconscious. Neither fully conscious nor unconscious, Rousseau describes his awakening from the fall:
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 whole 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.
(Reveries, 39)
As Rousseau regains his consciousness, he cannot fully distinguish between himself and the world. In this awakening he is reborn, and the world is born with him. His awareness is entirely claimed by the present, and a perfect calm dawns upon him as he watches his own blood flowing like a stream.
This awakening transports him, and the reader is transported with him through his prose. Individual objects lose their distinctness. As consciousness merges with the unconscious, the physical world unites with the body, and the reader comes into this orbit as well. But inasmuch as this is a condition of rebirth or resurrection, it is also, weirdly, an experience of utmost alienation. Rousseau describes himself as elevated and disembodied from his experiential self: “I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me” (Reveries, 39). The continuity between himself and the world is simultaneously the most extreme case of self-estrangement.
Even more striking, these eloquent descriptions of his accident—and the ecstasy and confusion it entailed—were constructed from secondhand reports he heard afterwards. Rousseau does not hide this fact. Instead, he acknowledges it as he describes his awakening: “I was in the arms of two or three men who told me what had happened” (Reveries, 38). And he does so again after detailing the incident: “So much I learned from those who had picked me up and were still holding me when I came to” (Reveries, 39). The elegance of his prose often hides these small caveats, and as readers we tend to fall for the “authenticity” and “originality” of his writing. However the most intimate experience of inner peace and self-contentment is not even his own; it is a fiction constructed after the event.
This rebuilding of events is not necessarily a lie. On the contrary, what Rousseau shows is that a textual recreation is inherent to experience as such. Experience is never wholly present in one moment. It is an extension of our being over time. To have an experience means being able to recollect it, and this recollection is always a reconstruction from hindsight. The dog’s attack only dramatizes the fact that experience is always already mediated, and this mediation occurs through language.
The reveries, as a textual genre, bridge this duality. They involve both simple, unobstructed experiences and the marks left by those experiences upon subsequent reflection. The majority of the text focuses not on the reconstruction that is inherent to experience but on an immediate “presentness.” This might seem confusing until we are reminded that this is a text and that the immediacy described is always achieved in and through mediation—such as the example of Rousseau’s stay on the island of Saint-Pierre, described in the Fifth Walk:
But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy.… Such is the state which I often experienced on the Island of Saint-Pierre. In my solitary reveries, whether I lay in a boat and drifted where the water carried me, or sat by the shores of the stormy lake, or elsewhere, on the banks of a lovely river or a stream murmuring over the stones.
(Reveries, 88–89)
This description, which conjures up waves gently rocking the drifting boat, tempts us to believe that a reverie is nothing more than a state wherein the mind flows continuously with its surroundings and, in the process, achieves happiness. Time “runs on indefinitely,” but even this duration “goes unnoticed.” Living contently in the present is a way of achieving the eternal. As Wittgenstein writes, “eternal life belongs to the one who lives in the present.”5 By immersing ourselves in the present, we merge with the flow of existence. When we are in perfect harmony with the world, time runs without notice, effortlessly.
But this flowing rumination of the soul, which Rousseau describes, is only half the story. The other side involves the textual construction of this experience. It is hard to bring to words the wonder of our existence. But this difficulty is for the philosopher a challenge and a calling. Note that the long quote just given goes on effortlessly for thirteen lines without a period to separate the sentences. It forms a wavelike stream and rocks us in its cradle. At the end of the Fifth Walk Rousseau will admit that he might not have had this experience at all, but rather dreamed it into being and put it into words.
The Book of Life
In the Seventh Walk Rousseau reflects on how nature informs his reflections on his life. He wonders why he is so drawn to botany—“why this particular activity should attract me and what charm I can find in a fruitless study where I neither make any progress nor learn anything useful” (Reveries, 106). As he gradually discovers, collecting plants lays a foundation for reflection and reverie. Gathering and classifying these fragments of nature prompts him to meditate on a “natural order” and to appreciate the complex interweaving of natural beings that unites humans with the world. Ironically, he discovers this unity by employing an arbitrary system of classification that subdivides and orders species according to arcane Latin names.
Botany is, of course, another way of writing life. And the book Rousseau plans to write (about “each blade of grass,” as he tells us) is the book of life. What distinguishes Rousseau’s exploration of nature from that of the scientist is that he does not want to know nature for theoretical or practical purposes. His botanical excavations involve focusing on nature and lavishing small, caring gestures upon it through the marking of language.
Life and language come together not because they are one but because of the movement of reverie that relates them. This is not a simple fusion; the tension is palpable and the problem is always alive. But the project is nevertheless not to speak over but to give voice to what remains silent and apart. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes: “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.… Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distance continues to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.”6 Accepting and embracing the distance makes love and friendship possible. When I think I know you, I wrong you. When I resign myself to the impossibility of knowledge, I wrong you. But when I live this tension, making it formative of our relations, I see you “whole and against a wide sky.”
This tension operates between the author and the written self and between the text and the reader. Thus a book that begins by asserting its isolation ends up making friends.