I thought these snippets clipped from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Reveries of the Solitary Walker’ posted without additional comment would be worthy of your consideration.
What am I? This must now be the object of my inquiry.
If an old man has something to learn, it is the art of dying.
I decided to devote my walk of the following day to a self-examination on the subject of falsehood, and I embarked on it in the firm conviction that the 'Know Thyself' of the temple at Delphi was not such an easy precept to observe as I had thought in my Confessions.
Botany is the ideal study for the idle, unoccupied solitary; a blade and a magnifying glass are all the equipment he needs for his observations. He wanders about, passing freely from one object to another, he considers each plant in turn with interest and curiosity, and as soon as he begins to grasp the laws of their structure he receives from his observations an effortless pleasure as intense as if it had cost him a great deal of labour. This ideal occupation has a charm which can only be felt when the passions are entirely at rest, but which is then enough to make our lives pleasant and happy; but as soon as our self-interest or vanity are brought into play and we are concerned to obtain positions or write books, as soon as we learn only in order to teach, and devote ourselves to botany merely for the sake of becoming authors or professors, all this sweet charm vanishes, we see plants simply as the instruments of our passions, we take no real pleasure in studying them, we do not want to know, but to show that we know, and the woods become for us merely a public stage where we seek applause—or else, confining our attention to the study or at best the botanical garden, rather than observing plants in their natural setting, we concern ourselves solely with systems and methods, a subject for endless argument, but which does not discover a single unknown plant or throw any real light on natural history or the vegetable kingdom. Thence come all the hate and jealousy that the struggle for fame arouses in authors of botanical works just as much as in other scholars—perhaps even more so. They distort this delightful study, robbing it of its true nature and transplanting it to towns and academies, where it degenerates no less than exotic plants in the gardens of collectors.
