Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you...

So, I've been reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker (yes, by choice). It's an interesting and funny little book. It is a series of essays structured around the self-examination and reflections on his life that he undertook during his walks written during the last couple of years of his life. (He died in France in 1778.)

Rousseau was an exile, unwelcome in his home country of Switzerland, and he made many enemies in his adopted country as well because of his ideas. He seemed to be a cranky old man, perhaps understandably so, a crankiness borne out of being regularly beseiged. He regularly refers to his "enemies" and "persecutors" (mostly "authors" a word that he uses with the utmost disdain).

He does have some pleasant memories. He writes of their importance, "As I tried to recall so many sweet reveries, I relieved 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."

But still, Rousseau spends most of his time worrying about his enemies and how they are keeping his work from being read, and even his last hope, that after he dies his work will be discovered, appears to be dashed, "I can have no chance of handing on anything precious to future ages without it passing through hands that have an interest in suppressing it." He goes on to write, "The accumulation of so many chance circumstances, the elevation of all my cruelest enemies, as if chosen by fortune, the way in which all those who govern the nation or control public opinion, all those who occupy places of credit and authority seem to have been hand-picked from among those who harbor some secret animosity towards me to take part in the universal conspiracy, all this is too extraordinary to be a mere coincidence....[It] leaves me in no doubt that it is Heaven's eternal decree that their designs will be crowned with complete success."

Phew! The translator of this edition, Peter France, writes in his introduction that while he did have many enemies because of his work, he was perhaps exagerrating their vehemence.

However, Rousseau writes in one of his walks about an accident he had had. He took a fairly serious tumble, but wasn't seriously injured. However, rumors started circulating, and in one village, the talk was that he had died from the accident. As he put it, the rumor spread "quickly and irresistibly" and was even covered in the local paper, the Avignon Courrier. According to the translator's notes, it said, " ' We are sorry not to be able to speak of the talents of this eloquent writer; our readers will no doubt feel that his abuse of them imposes the strictest silence on us.' "