Rousseau more and more has been coming into focus for me as the philosopher; Rousseau, a provincial boy who wrangled with the Parisian elites, makes more sense to me personally than more sure-handed philosophers and thinkers. He could be selfish and cold. He was a sinner. And ultimately his confessions were necessary. This all makes sense to me, too: exile, fucking up, working your way back in, exile again, confession, reverie. Because Rousseau didn't win at society, at the game of society, he could reasonably perform the role of critic of “society's unbearable perversion of the human heart” in Hannah Arendt’s words.
Thinking about another and earlier Confessions, I came across, reading Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine, something curious: Augustine underwent a period of crisis after his early career as Professor of Rhetoric—which made him famous—at Milan ended when he abandoned Manicheanism for Christianity, which was precipitated by the “physical manifestations of a nervous breakdown”—tightening of the chest, racing heart, weak voice—or what Augustine himself called a “pain in the chest.”
Incidentally, I experienced something like this in the last days of December—about 72 hours of a mildly racing heart, a tight feeling in my chest, mild nausea (all entirely psychosomatic). This is a meaningless coincidence, objectively speaking, but subjectively, I felt fortified by the biographical discovery. My own life is in transition…