The First Walk

Here I am, then, alone on earth, having no brother, neighbour, friend or society but myself. The most sociable and loving of men has been proscribed from it by a unanimous agreement. They have sought, in the refinements of their hatred, what torment could be cruellest to my sensitive soul, and they have violently broken all the ties that bound me to them. I would have loved men in spite of themselves. They could only cease to be men by ceasing to deserve my affection. So now they are strangers, unknown, nothing to me, since they have willed it. But I, detached from them and from everything — what am I? That is what remains for me to find out.

For fifteen years and more that I have been in this strange position, it still seems to me a dream. I imagine that I am suffering from indigestion, that I am sleeping badly, and that I shall wake up delivered of my pain and among my friends. Yes, no doubt, I must have taken, without noticing, a leap from waking to sleep, or rather from life to death. Torn I know not how from the order of things, I have seen myself thrown into an incomprehensible chaos where I see nothing at all.

Everything is finished for me on earth. Nothing more can be done to me, for good or ill. I have nothing more to hope for or to fear in this world; and here I am, tranquil at the bottom of the abyss, a poor unhappy mortal, but impassive like God himself.

Everything external is foreign to me from now on. I have no more neighbours in this world, nor fellows, nor brothers. I am on the earth as on a strange planet onto which I have fallen from the one I lived on. Alone for the rest of my life, since I find consolation, hope and peace only in myself, I must and will occupy myself only with myself. It is in this state that I take up again the continuation of the severe and sincere examination I once called my Confessions. I consecrate my last days to studying myself, and to preparing in advance the account I shall not be long in giving of myself.

These pages will be properly only a shapeless diary of my reveries. I shall speak much of myself, because a solitary who reflects necessarily thinks much of himself. My enterprise is the same as Montaigne's, but with an aim entirely contrary to his: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself. If in my older days, at the approach of departure, I remain, as I hope, in the same disposition as now, reading them will recall to me the sweetness I find in writing them, and, making the past time be reborn for me, will double, so to speak, my existence. In spite of men, I shall still be able to enjoy the charm of society, and, decrepit, I shall live with myself in another age, as I would live with a less old friend.