Winfried Sebald - A Place in the Country

Nor was there any letup for Rousseau, during his stay on the island, in the daily business of writing, even if he claimed, in the fifth Promenade , to have sought to extricate himself from it by any means possible. Apart from his ceaseless correspondence, during these weeks he was occupied with the editing of his Projet de constitution pour la Corse , not published until almost one hundred years later, which he wrote down in two small notebooks today preserved in the Library of

Geneva. The casual remark Rousseau made in The Social Contract , that it was time that a wise man by means of a draft constitution showed the Corsican people — then engaged in their struggle for independence from Genoese rule — how they might set about legislating their affairs of state, had led Captain Mathieu Buttafuoco to pay a visit to Môtiers to ask the philosopher to take this role upon himself. There was in Europe at the time a great deal of support for the Corsicans’ protest against foreign rule, and the Corsican general Pascal Paoli, the father of the fatherland, represented a lodestar for all those who longed to see a better regime. We encounter him in Hölderlin as well as in Hebel’s Alemannic poems, in which a beggar sitting by the side of the road relates: “I ha in schwarzer Wetternacht / vor Laudons Zelt und Fahne gwacht / I bi bim Paschal Paoli / in Korsika Draguner gsi” [“In darkest night, in deepest dark / I watched by Laudon’s tent and flag / I served with Pascal Paoli / with Corsican dragoons did I”]. In Rousseau’s imagination, too, the idea of Corsica takes on legendary traits from the beginning; he believed he had a premonition that “un jour cette petite île étonnera l’Europe,” even if he could not have known in what terrifying manner this prophecy was to be fulfilled within the next fifty years. He saw in Corsica the potential for putting into practice an order in which the evils of the society in which he felt himself trapped could be avoided. His aversion to urban civilization motivated him to suggest the Corsicans adopt agriculture as the only possible basis for a truly good and free life. All forms of hierarchy were to be avoided by means of a legal system administered through rural communities and based on the principle of equality, as in the cantons of central Switzerland. Above and beyond this, Rousseau went so far as to recommend (at the time when Pascal Paoli was busy establishing his own mint in Corte) that the Corsicans abolish monetary economy in favor of a system of bartering. The whole Corsica project outlined on the Île Saint-Pierre is thus a utopian dream in which bourgeois society, increasingly determined by the manufacture of goods and the accumulation of private wealth, is promised a return to more innocent times. Neither Rousseau nor those who came after him were ever able to resolve the inherent contradiction between this nostalgic utopia and the inexorable march of progress toward the brink of the abyss. The gap between our longings and our rational strategy for living is clearly illustrated by the fact that Rousseau, who at that time needed nothing more urgently than a safe haven, could not bring himself to move to Corsica. For all that the Gazette de Berne had already announced that he would be taking up the position of Governor on the Mediterranean island, if truth be told, having acquired his reputation in the salons of the eminent society of the day, he had no inclination to return to what, from his perspective, appeared as a precivilized world, in which, as he notes in the Confessions , the most basic comforts would be lacking. He is positively horrified at the prospect of crossing the Alps and having to transport with him his entire household effects—“linge, habits, vaisselle, batterie de cuisine, papier, livres,” he writes, “il fallait tout porter avec soi.” The place where he had been offered accommodation and a living was Vescovato, a small town huddled high up on one of the steep east-facing slopes of the Castagniccia. In the eighteenth century it was a place of some importance, and the Filippini house which would have been at his disposal was by no means as primitive as perhaps he feared. I visited it a few months after I had been to the Île Saint-Pierre. From the first-floor windows one looks down into a steep gorge, which even at the end of summer is alive with the sound of water. Farther away, one perceives a shimmering blue haze in which it is impossible to distinguish the sea from the sky rising above it. The town is surrounded by cultivated terraces, abandoned now, but in which at that time fruit trees flourished, oranges and apricots and various fruits of the field. In the surrounding area, covering the slopes of the hills, were groves of sweet chestnuts in whose dappled shade Rousseau could have taken the air with his dog at his side. Who can say whether, if he had spent the rest of his life there, far removed from the hubbub of literary business and hypocrisy, he might yet have retained that sense of sanity and proportion which later at times threatened to desert him altogether.

Although Rousseau was by no means idle as an author in the few weeks he spent on the Île Saint-Pierre, in retrospect he nonetheless came to see this time as an attempt to free himself from the exigencies of literary production. He talks of how he longs now for something other than literary renown, the scent of which, as he says, revolted him from the very moment he first got a whiff of it. The dégoût Rousseau now felt with regard to literature was not merely an intermittent emotional reaction but something that for him always went hand in hand with the act of writing. In accordance with his doctrine of the formerly unspoiled state of Nature, he saw the man who reflects as a depraved animal perverted from its natural state, and reflection as a degraded form of mental energy. No one, in the era when the bourgeoisie was proclaiming, with enormous philosophical and literary effort, its entitlement to emancipation, recognized the pathological aspect of thought as acutely as Rousseau, who himself wished for nothing more than to be able to halt the wheels ceaselessly turning within his head. If he nevertheless persevered with writing, then only, as Jean Starobinski notes, in order to hasten the moment when the pen would fall from his hand and the essential things would be said in the silent embrace of reconciliation and return. Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable. The copying out of musical notation, which Rousseau was constrained to undertake in his earlier years and at the last in Paris, was for him one of the few means of keeping at bay the thoughts constantly brewing in his head like storm clouds. How difficult it is in general to bring the machinery of thought to a standstill is shown by Rousseau’s description of his apparently so happy days on the island in the Lac de Bienne. He has, as he writes in the fifth Promenade , deliberately forsworn the burden of work, and his greatest joy has been to leave his books safely shut away and to have neither ink nor paper to hand. However, since the leisure time thus freed up must be put to some use, Rousseau devotes himself to the study of botany, whose basic principles he had acquired in Môtiers on excursions with Jean Antoine d’Ivernois. “I set out to compose,” writes Rousseau in the fifth Promenade , “a Flora Petrinsularis and to describe every single plant on the island in enough detail to keep me busy for the rest of my days. They say a German once wrote a book about a lemon peel; I could have written one about every grass in the meadows, every moss in the woods, every lichen covering the rocks — and I did not want to leave even one blade of grass or atom of vegetation without a full and detailed description. In accordance with this noble plan, every morning after breakfast I would set out with a magnifying glass in my hand and my Systemae Naturae under my arm to study one particular section of the island, which I had divided for this purpose into small squares, intending to visit them all one after another in every season.” The central motif of this passage is not so much the impartial insight into the indigenous plants of the island as that of ordering, classification, and the creation of a perfect system. Thus this apparently innocent occupation — the deliberate resolve no longer to think and merely to look at nature — becomes, for the writer plagued by the chronic need to think and work, a demanding rationalistic project involving the compiling of lists, indices, and catalogs, along with the precise description of, for example, the long stamens of self-heal, the springiness of those of nettle and of wall-pellitory, and the sudden bursting of the seed capsules of balsam and of beech. Nonetheless, the leaves of the small herbaria which Rousseau later compiled for