On the Road Again (reading notes # 1)

When I travel I usually bring a book or two. Thoreau's writings are always in my bag. His short essays Civil Disobedience and Life without Principle are always worth another read. On other trips I have brought with me the writings of Emerson or Walt Whitman. For this trip I brought for the first time Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract and Discourses.  Rousseau, who was Swiss originally, wrote this body of work just over 250 years ago. I have heard about it, and read articles that discussed it for most of my adult life. I have even discussed it in class ( inappropriately as it turns out). What a wonderful book!! I suspect that I will be reading it again and again for some time in the future.

It is on occasion clear, and quite wonderful. Far more often it is complicated, dense and a bit of a hard slog to get through it. I find myself re-reading the same passages again and again- not too sure what he was trying to say. I wonder sometimes whether or not I have lost some of my reading skills that I nurtured so very carefully just a few years ago. At the very least I am out of practice reading something so intellectual challenging.

But what I have manage to read and hopefully to understand is absolutely brilliant. I had no idea that Rousseau was to much of socialist. Quite before his time. While he approached the distribution of wealth from a different perspective than did Marx - he gets to the same point.We should only have what we need. To own more than that is unequal and unsustainable. Or at least that is what I think he was saying.

More on this in the future.