The Socrates Express

3. How to Walk like Rousseau

2:42 p.m. On board Swiss Federal Railways, Train No. 59, en route from Basel to Neuchâtel.

I glance out my window and watch the Swiss countryside unfurl in slow motion. At least I think it’s slow. Speed is relative. Train travel, viewed through the rosy haze of nostalgia, represents a throwback to a simpler, analog time. I take the train to change the rhythm of my life, to remind myself what dawdling feels like.

It wasn’t always this way. When people first rode trains, in the nineteenth century, they reacted with an unease bordering on terror. “I felt like a projectile,” said one early passenger. “Like a human parcel,” said another. The speed—faster than humans had ever traveled on land—transformed the hallowed countryside into an ungodly blur. In a letter dated August 22, 1837, Victor Hugo described the view from his train’s window: “The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red or white… everything becomes a streak; the grainfields are great shocks of yellow hair; fields of alfalfa, long green tresses.… [F]rom time to time, a shadow, a shape, a specter appears and disappears with lightning speed behind the window.” Hugo’s train was traveling at about 15 miles per hour. Speed is relative.

The art critic John Ruskin, one of the loudest voices decrying this newfangled form of transport, devised a maxim that still holds true: “All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.”

As my Swiss train glides (Swiss trains really do glide) through the landscape, whisper-quiet, I wonder what Ruskin would make of air travel. Nothing good, I’m sure.

Transportation traces its own evolutionary arc, a survival of the fastest that erases its antecedents as it speeds ahead. We’re moving too fast to pause and ask how exactly we got here, strapped into an aluminum tube and hurtling through space at a speed so fast it doesn’t blur the scenery but obliterates it. This acceleration didn’t just happen, of course, any more than our outsize brains and opposable thumbs just happened. Before the airplane was the train and before the train the coach and before the coach the saddle. We need to reach further back, though, to the beginning.

In the beginning was the foot.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a man of multitudes: philosopher, novelist, composer, essayist, botanist, autodidact, fugitive, political theorist, masochist. Most of all, he was a walker. He walked often and he walked alone. Yes, a stroll with a close friend has its pleasures, as do walking clubs, but at its heart walking is a private act. We walk by ourselves and for ourselves. Freedom is walking’s essence. The freedom to depart and return when we wish, to meander, to, as Robert Louis Stevenson put it, “follow this way or that, as the freak takes you.”

Rousseau followed his freak. It took him across Europe, from Venice to Paris, Turin to Lyons, and beyond. Rousseau was among the first truly rootless souls, what today we’d call an urban nomad. At home everywhere, and nowhere.

For most of human history, walking was not optional. If you wanted to get anywhere, you had to walk. Today walking is a choice. Rousseau didn’t have as many choices as we do—train travel was not yet invented—but he had some. An extensive network of carriage service crisscrossed Europe. He detested carriage travel and walked whenever he could. “I have never thought so much, existed so much, lived so much, been so much myself… as in the journeys which I have made alone and on foot,” he said. Walking saved Rousseau’s life. It also killed him.

Rousseau grew up in Geneva, the son of an irascible watchmaker named Isaac. His mother died shortly after his birth, a trauma that haunted him. Young Rousseau regularly teamed up with friends to explore the countryside. “I always went farther than any of them without thinking about my return, unless others thought of it for me,” he recalls in his memoir, The Confessions.

One pleasant spring afternoon, in 1728, Rousseau took a walk that changed the vector of his life. He was sixteen years old, apprenticed to an engraver, a job he despised, and feeling “restless, disconnected with everything and with myself.” A typical sixteen-year-old. He had ventured outside the city. It was getting late. He knew he had to return before the city’s gates closed for the night. Rousseau had missed two curfews in the past, and been beaten by his employer. He dreaded what might happen this time.

He ran frantically, but it was no use. He was too late. Sleeping outside the city walls that night, Rousseau vowed never to return to Geneva. From that day, he led a nomadic life, traveling ceaselessly, and almost always by foot.

Rousseau lived in many cities but was not a city person. He describes his first encounter with Paris, a city most of us associate with beauty and romance, this way: “I saw nothing but dirty stinking little streets, ugly black houses, a general air of squalor and poverty, beggars, carters, menders of clothes, sellers of herb-drinks and old hats.” Then there were the people of Paris, “tiresome” and forever mouthing “stupid witticisms.” No, not a city person.

Not a people person, either. Rousseau was what today we’d call high maintenance. “A difficult friend, a disappointing lover, and an impossible employee,” says author Leo Damrosch in his excellent biography of Rousseau.

Walking enabled Rousseau to escape the eyes of others. He was shy. Severely nearsighted, an insomniac like Marcus, and with a lifelong urinary problem (eventually diagnosed as an enlarged prostate) that required frequent visits to the toilet, he avoided social contact whenever possible. Throughout his life, he imagined people were staring at him. It probably didn’t help that he had an odd compulsion to expose his rear end to strangers. Rousseau was an avowed masochist who enjoyed a good spanking, like the one he received as a delinquent schoolboy. “I found in the pain, in the shame even, a mixture of sensuality that left me desiring more,” he writes in his memoir, among the first to contain such personal, and salacious, details.

Walking was an obvious fit with Rousseau’s philosophy. He advocated a return to nature, and what is more natural than walking? Natural, that is, for most of us.

I am no Rousseau. I am not a child of nature—or even a distant cousin. I do not go camping, nor do I go glamping. My car is not adorned with a bumper sticker that says “I’d rather be fishing.” Ditto hunting, camping (see above), spelunking, kayaking, snorkeling, rock climbing, and bird-watching. I do not own hiking boots. I do not own a sleeping bag. I do not own a crampon. I do own several backpacks, but they are sleek models with names like “city edition” and “urban renegade.”

Mother Nature is something of a nag. She’s constantly reminding me of my core incompetence. I do not know how to pitch a tent or unpitch a tent or do anything involving a tent. I do not know how to navigate using the stars or the sun or any other celestial bodies. My incompetence extends beyond the natural world. I do not know how to change the air filter on my car or talk to my teenage daughter or ease the suffering of an aging parent or do downward dog or sit quietly with my thoughts for more than five seconds without my head exploding.

I thought I knew how to walk, but reading Rousseau, I now question even that basic skill. Yes, I can put one foot in front of the other, repeating as necessary, but that is merely bipedal locomotion. It is not walking.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they walk. The Pentagon recently developed advanced radar that can identify up to 95 percent of individual walks, as distinct as a person’s fingerprints or signature. Everyone has a walking style.

I have several, and they, like my moods, vacillate. I either charge ahead full tilt, like a Black Friday shopper, or lumber like an out-of-shape elephant that’s just downed the all-you-can-eat Indian buffet. Should you find yourself walking behind me, don’t. I am not an easy man to follow.

I wake in Neuchâtel, a city Rousseau didn’t care for, and take the train to a small town called Môtiers, which he cared for even less. “The vilest and most venomous place that one could inhabit,” Rousseau recalled. Apparently, the feeling was mutual.

The house that Rousseau despised in the town he despised is now a small museum, proving that there’s nothing a lot of time and a little curation can’t remedy. A plaque marks the dates that Rousseau lived here: July 10, 1762, to September 8, 1765. Factually accurate, yes, but incomplete. It fails to capture the poisonous animosity between Rousseau and the residents of Môtiers, furious over his writing.

Inside, I find early editions of the two books that ignited that anger: Emile and The Social Contract. I also spot a portrait of Rousseau wearing a caftan, a flowing tunic popular in the Middle East. It was comfortable, but odd-looking. It irked the townsfolk, as did Rousseau’s daily walks, which became fodder for ridicule. One day, that simmering animosity boiled over. Residents, egged on by the town minister, hurled stones at Rousseau’s house. Rousseau, a man who often misread social signals, got this one right. He fled Môtiers, never to return. I do the same.

That evening, back in Neuchâtel, I install myself at a crêperie, order a glass of chardonnay, which I hope pairs well with early Romanticism, and retrieve Rousseau’s memoir from my backpack. I dive in. You don’t dip into Rousseau. You plunge headfirst or not at all.

What grabs my attention and doesn’t let go is the language. Clear, accessible, not your typical philosophical gobbledygook. Nice, I think, taking another sip of my chardonnay, which does in fact pair well.

Soon I realize that the clarity is accompanied by something else. Rousseau is—how do I put this politely?—a drama queen. So impassioned are the words that I swear the pages feel moist. Rousseau cries, regularly and voluminously. He is prone to fits of rapture. He has been known to swoon. He is forever abandoning himself to “the sweetest melancholy” or “the fatality of my lot” or, my favorite, “the indolent and solitary life.” His preferred organ, the heart, is busy. It is either “opening” or “kindling” or “stirring.” Mostly, it beats. It beats with “impatience” or with “joy” or, on more than one occasion, “violently.”

I usually find this sort of cardiac writing off-putting, but not Rousseau’s. The words, while overwrought, are free of artifice. Rousseau isn’t faking it.

Rousseau’s philosophy can be summed up in four words: nature good, society bad. He believed in the “natural goodness of man.” In his Discourse on Inequality, he paints a picture of man in his natural state, “wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without domicile, without want and without liaisons, with no need of his fellow-men, likewise with no desire to harm them.” Nobody is born mean-spirited, petty, vindictive, paranoid. Society makes them that way. Rousseau’s “savage man” lives in each moment with no regrets about the past or worries about the future.

Much of what we take to be human nature is social habit, Rousseau believes. We’re convinced our love of smoked Brie or Instagram is natural when it is cultural. After all, in the 1970s people thought shag carpeting and neckties as wide as a runway were “natural.” Only now do we recognize them for the abominations they are. Even something as “natural” as scenery is prone to cultural influence. For most of European history, people considered mountains barbaric; no sane person would voluntarily travel to one. Only in the eighteenth century did they become objects of admiration. The good news, says Rousseau, is we can change these social habits, provided we recognize them for what they are: social artifices as easily jettisoned as an old pair of bell-bottom jeans.

Rousseau’s Savage Man regularly experiences feelings of self-love, which Rousseau calls amour-de-soi. This healthy emotion differs from the more egoistical variety, which he calls amour-propre. The first stems from human nature, the second from society. Amour-de-soi is the joy you feel when singing in the shower. Amour-propre is the joy you feel while singing at Radio City Music Hall. You may sing poorly in the shower but the delight is yours alone, independent of others’ opinions, and therefore, Rousseau argued, more authentic.

So you can see why Rousseau walked. Walking requires none of the trappings of civilization: no domesticated animals, no carriages, no roads. The walker is free, unencumbered. Pure amour-de-soi.

Sometimes a single walk changes everything. So it was with Rousseau one summer afternoon in 1749. He was on his usual six-mile jaunt from Paris to Vincennes to visit fellow philosopher and friend Denis Diderot, imprisoned for writings deemed blasphemous. It was an especially hot day, and the road was dusty. Rousseau stopped to rest. Sitting in the shade, idly leafing through an issue of Mercure de France, he spotted a prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for the best essay on the topic “Whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has contributed to purify morals.”

Rousseau felt dizzy, disoriented, “like a drunkard.” In that moment, he recalls, “I beheld a different universe and became a different man.” His essay won first prize, launching his career into a high orbit.

Might Rousseau have had the same revelation while sitting in his study, or riding in a carriage? Perhaps, but the walk had primed his imagination. The mind thrives at three miles per hour, the speed of a moderately paced walk. Freed of the pettiness of the office, the tyranny of expectations, it roams, and when the mind roams, unexpected and wonderful things happen. Not always, but more often than you’d think. Walking supplies just the right balance of stimulation and repose, exertion and idleness.

When we walk, we are simultaneously doing and not-doing. On one level, our minds are engaged: focusing on the terrain ahead, cognizant of the periphery. Yet none of this thinking occupies much cerebral space. There’s plenty left over for meandering, and freak following.

No wonder so many philosophers walked. Socrates, of course, liked nothing more than strolling in the agora. Nietzsche regularly embarked on spirited two-hour jaunts in the Swiss Alps, convinced “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Thomas Hobbes had a walking stick custom made with a portable inkwell attached so he could record his thoughts as he ambled. Thoreau regularly took four-hour treks across the Concord countryside, his capacious pockets overflowing with nuts, seeds, flowers, Indian arrowheads, and other treasures. Immanuel Kant, naturally, maintained a highly regimented walking routine. Every day, he’d eat lunch at 12:45 p.m., then depart for a one-hour constitutional—never more, never less—on the same boulevard in Königsberg, Prussia (now Russia). So unwavering was Kant’s routine that the people of Königsberg set their watches by his perambulations.

Good walkers, all of them. None, though, compares with Rousseau. He’d regularly walk twenty miles in a single day. He once walked three hundred miles from Geneva to Paris. It took him two weeks.

For Rousseau, walking was like breathing. “I can scarcely think when I remain still; my body must be in motion to make my mind active.” As he walked, he’d jot down thoughts, large and small, on playing cards that he always carried with him. Rousseau was not the first philosopher to walk but he was the first to philosophize so extensively about walking.

The walking philosopher gives the lie to one of the discipline’s greatest myths: that it is a mental pursuit wholly divorced from the body. From Archimedes’s eureka moment in the bath to Descartes’s masterful fencing to Sartre’s sexual escapades, philosophy has a swift corporeal current running through it. There are no disembodied philosophers, or philosophies. “There is more wisdom in your body than in all of your philosophy,” said Nietzsche.

Consider an emotion like anger. When you are outraged, where does “anger” reside? In your mind, yes, but also in your body, as the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains: “I could not imagine the malice and cruelty which I discern in my opponent’s looks, separated from his gestures, speech and body. None of this takes place in some other-worldly realm, in some shrine located beyond the body of the angry man.” Likewise, when we philosophize we do so not only with our minds, but with our bodies, too.

Back at the crêperie, I plunge again. Same wine, different Rousseau: his final and unfinished work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker. It is an odd yet endearing volume, “a book that is and is not about walking,” as Rebecca Solnit points out in her history of walking. Then again, walking itself is and is not about walking.

Reveries is my favorite of Rousseau’s writings. It pulses with the moral clarity and leavened wisdom of a man who, having been expelled, stoned, and ridiculed, no longer gives a fuck. This is not Rousseau the contrarian, or Rousseau the confessor or Rousseau the reformer. This is Rousseau at rest.

The book is arranged in a series of ten walks, or reveries. In each, Rousseau embarks on an outing, but that is merely the vehicle, so to speak, for the real subject of the book: memory. How do we retrieve life’s sweet moments, and do they taste as sweet, or sweeter even, on the second bite?

In the fifth walk, Rousseau recalls his time living on a small island called Saint-Pierre, his refuge from the stone throwers of Môtiers. It was his paradise. “The happiest time of my life,” he recalls.

I read those words and nearly spit up my chardonnay. Rousseau, connoisseur of his own pathologies, wasn’t exactly prone to bouts of happiness. I want to see this island for myself.

I walk toward the train station. It is not a Rousseauvian walk. Too rushed, I say to myself. Too mindless. Focus, damn it, I say, out loud this time, startling the Swiss passersby.

At Neuchâtel’s small but busy station, I board a regional express bound for Rousseau’s happy isle. It departs on time, naturally. Swiss trains deserve their reputation for exceptional punctuality, but their cold efficiency seems at odds with the messy, emotive life of the country’s greatest philosopher.

It’s a short ride, just a few stops, but I decide to sample Reveries. “Everything is in constant flux on this Earth,” Rousseau writes, echoing the Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s dictum: “All is flux.” The river we step in is never the same twice, nor are we.

The train glides along the tracks so smoothly that, were it not for the changing scenery, I’d swear we weren’t moving at all. And movement, Rousseau tells me, is vital. It must be of a certain kind, though. “If the movement is irregular or too violent it arouses us from our dreams.”

Rousseau’s mention of violent movement reminds me of my Amtrak journey across the United States, in the company of that insomniac philosopher-emperor Marcus. Somewhere in North Dakota, bored by the monotonous scenery, I needed to do something, anything.

On the hard rails of Amtrak, routine activities are fraught with difficulty. Shaving, for instance. (My one attempt left me a bloody mess.) Walking, too. I teetered and tottered like a drunkard at sea. This made sense from an evolutionary perspective. We humans come from the sea, a fact reflected in the etymology of the word “walk.” In the eleventh century, it meant “to roll about, toss” like the sea. It wasn’t until the thirteenth century that “walking” came ashore, toweled off, and acquired its contemporary meaning. Words evolve.

Not me. As I attempted to walk, I was devolving, straight back to the eleventh century. I rolled and tossed down the aisles. I careened into luggage. I body-slammed strangers.

“You’ve got to dance with the train,” said an older woman witnessing my incompetence.

She was right. I had been fighting the train. I needed to dance with it. Let the train lead. It took me a while, but I got the hang of it. The secret, I learned, is to stay loose. The train pitched left then right, and so did I. No resistance. Finally, I made it to my destination, the lounge car, as elated as if I had summited K2.

About six million years ago, early hominids got off their knuckles, stood up straight, and walked on two feet. This new, erect posture had many unexpected benefits. It freed up hands for toolmaking, as well as pointing, caressing, gesturing, hand-holding, bird-flipping, nose-picking, and nail-biting. Walking is about more than walking, and always has been.

Walking may be natural but that doesn’t mean it comes easily. Here Joseph Amato, in his encyclopedic history of walking, On Foot, describes the physiology of a single stride. “It requires spending three-fourths of one’s time on one foot or the other. As one strikes the ground with one stiff leg after another, all of one’s weight is set against a descending heel, only to be transferred to the big toe as one rotates hips and redirects the plane of foot and leg.” All of this happens automatically, of course. Think about the biomechanics too much and you might fall on your face, as I nearly did after reading the above passage.

We walk on two feet but we do so on a skeleton designed for four. This disconnect between ancient anatomy and modern usage keeps podiatrists in business. Flat feet, swollen feet, blisters, bunions, and hammertoes are just a few of the podiatric prices we pay for our bipedal existence. Rousseau suffered from painful corns most of his life. He walked on his heels, defiantly.

Rousseau was a devoted walker but not a heroic one. He walked slowly, owing to his corns, and could “never jump an ordinary ditch.” He did not carry a loaded rucksack, or other accoutrements. He did not fend off thieves or wild dogs. He did not rescue those in distress, damsels or otherwise. He just walked, without judgment or expectation. When we walk like this, the experience approaches the sacred.

The train pulls into a small station a short bus ride from Saint-Pierre. It is an island full of surprises. For starters, it is no longer an island. Since Rousseau’s time, a small land bridge has formed, connecting it to the mainland. All is flux.

I step onto the island that is no longer an island and see why Rousseau was so fond of it. It’s idyllic in an unpretentious way, lush but not luscious, green but not too green. From nearly every vantage point, there’s a view of Lake Bienne. This view is nature at her best, what the poet Philip Larkin called “serious earth.”

I can picture Rousseau taking long and aimless walks here, accompanied by his beloved dog, Sultan, or perhaps collecting plant samples. I find the path that traverses Saint-Pierre, and I walk. One foot in front of the other, I say to myself, just as I’ve been doing all my life, only better. I translate “better” into “faster” and soon I’m moving at a ridiculous clip. I catch myself and compensate by slowing to elephant speed. Why can’t I find my middle gear? What is wrong with me?

To my surprise, it is the philosopher-emperor Marcus who answers. Respond to adversity, real or imagined, not with self-pity or hand-wringing, but simply by starting over. Viewed this way, life no longer feels like a narrative gone awry, or a botched ending. None of that is real. There are no endings. Only an infinite chain of beginnings.

So I begin. One foot in front of the other. Good. Now again.

I follow the trail, stopping occasionally to gaze at the lake or the wispy clouds. Eventually I find the small room where Rousseau lived. It’s a simple space, with a canopied bed, a Spartan sitting area, and, in one corner, a wooden trapdoor Rousseau used to make his getaway when fans, or enemies, tracked him down.

His herbarium is here, too: dried and pressed plants, long delicate stalks, frozen in time. A small plaque mentions Rousseau’s “contradictory personality,” an understatement if ever there were one.

Something is noticeably absent: books. So hurried was Rousseau’s escape from Môtiers he didn’t have time to pack his considerable library. In Reveries, he calls this dearth of reading material “one of my greatest joys.” This observation seems awfully peculiar for a man who spent a lifetime reading and writing books. At another point, Rousseau describes walking to a secluded spot by the edge of the lake and listening to the ebb and flow of the water, “lapping against my ears and my eyes… and it was enough to make me pleasantly aware of my existence without troubling myself with thought.” Okay, first he stopped reading; now he has stopped thinking. Was he devolving—or was he onto something?

Rousseau, like Socrates, was a kind of antiphilosopher. He had no patience for “empty logic-chopping” or “hair splitting metaphysical subtleties.” He was a thinker but not an overthinker. Rousseau knew that his favorite organ, the heart, possessed its own intelligence, one we access not with furrowed brow and tight jaw but with loose legs and swinging arms.

People strut and swagger in front of others, but rarely alone. These are social gestures. Walking, the slowest form of travel, is the quickest route to our more authentic selves. We can’t return to some long-lost paradise that probably never was. But we can walk. We can walk to work. We can walk our daughter to school. We can walk, alone, to nowhere in particular on a crisp and breezy autumn afternoon.

We walk to forget. We walk to forget the cranky boss, the spat with the spouse, the pile of unpaid bills, the flashing warning light in your Subaru, indicating either that the tire pressure is low or the car is on fire. We walk to forget, if only momentarily, a world that is “too much with us,” as William Wordsworth, another fine walker, put it.

We walk to forget ourselves, too. I know I do. The surplus fifteen pounds resistant to every diet known to man, the recidivist nasal hair, the decade-old blemish that suddenly, for reasons known only to it, has decided to self-actualize on the crown of my bald head, spreading like an inkblot. All forgotten when I walk.

I recall once watching the summer Olympics on TV and taking a keen interest in competitive walking. Earnest young athletes traipsing toward gold. They looked absurd. Walking is not a sport. The phrase “competitive walking” makes about as much sense as “competitive meditation.” In our Age of the Accessory, walking is one of the few unadorned activities still available to us, one that, as author Rebecca Solnit points out, remains “essentially unimproved since the dawn of time.”

Walking is democratic. Barring a disability, anyone can walk. The wealthy walker has no advantage over the impoverished one. Rousseau, despite his literary success, always saw himself as “the son of a worker,” what we now call blue-collar. People like that didn’t ride in fancy carriages. They walked.

They walked as I do now: attentively, one step at a time, relishing the sturdiness, and the springiness, too, of serious earth.

In late October 1776, Rousseau was navigating a narrow Parisian street, on his way home after a long walk, when, as the biographer Leo Damrosch relays, “a nobleman’s carriage came hurtling toward him, flanked by a huge, galloping Great Dane. He was unable to dodge in time, the dog bowled him over, and he fell hard on the cobblestone street, bleeding profusely and unconscious.” Rousseau likely suffered a concussion and neurological damage. He never recovered fully. Less than two years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau returned from his morning walk, collapsed, and died.

By all accounts, he died a happy man. Toward the end of his life, his walking had taken on a softer, more sanguine quality. There are still traces of the usual self-pity (“So here I am alone on the earth”) and of the paranoia (“The ceiling above my head has eyes, the walls around me have ears”) but gone is the neediness. He no longer walked to flee or to find or to make a philosophical point. He simply walked.

Rousseau’s legacy is vast. It includes Hallmark cards, Hollywood tearjerkers, heart-shaped emojis, and tell-all memoirs. If you’ve ever said, “I need a good cry,” you can thank Rousseau. If you’ve ever said, “Use your imagination,” you’re being Rousseauvian. If, in the heat of an argument, you’ve actually uttered the words “I don’t care if it makes no sense, it’s how I feel,” Rousseau is your man. If you’ve ever answered heartbreak with a long and angry walk, Rousseau. If your spouse has ever dragged you on a ten-mile trek on a damp, cold day, because “it will be good for you,” you can thank, or curse, Rousseau. Because of him, we think and feel differently, and we think about our feelings differently.

If Descartes was the modern era’s philosopher of the head, Rousseau was its philosopher of the heart. He elevated the passions and made feelings acceptable, not on par with reason, but close. This wasn’t easy. During Rousseau’s time, the Age of Reason, imaginative thinking was suspect. Two centuries later, no less a rationalist than Albert Einstein declared that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”

It’s tempting to dismiss Rousseau as a tree-hugging Luddite who would like to see us all hunting and gathering again and fighting over the good rock, next to the fire. That is not what he had in mind. Rousseau wasn’t advocating a return to the cave but a realignment with nature. A better cave. He foresaw environmental issues decades before the industrial revolution and centuries before California freeways.

Rousseau’s naturalism was never intended as a prescription. It was a thought experiment. What if, Rousseau posited, we peel away the layers of artifice society has applied liberally, like so much rouge, and reveal a more authentic self? Lurking beneath the prim insurance executive lies a rabble-rouser and inside every office worker a mountaineer, itching to break free.

I step out of Rousseau’s old room on the island that is no longer an island and shield my eyes from the sun. I have a choice: rush to catch the water taxi back to town or walk. I decide to walk.

I walk alone. I walk with intention. I let my mind wander, but not too far. I’m getting good at this. No, that is pride speaking. Silence that voice. Connect with the earth. That’s better.

I find a rhythm. I sense my surroundings—the birds singing, the satisfying crunch of gravel underfoot. I walk, and walk some more. My legs ache. My feet grow sore. Yet, still, I walk. It hurts, and it feels good.

I’m making good progress now. How many steps, I wonder? Reflexively, I twist my wrist and am about to check my Fitbit when I stop myself. I inhale deeply, greedily, like a diver coming up for air.

Somewhere along the path, I sense a subtle but definite shift in my… my what? My consciousness? No, it’s my heart. The expectations freeloading in my mind—of “getting” Rousseau, of making progress in my philosophical investigations—melt away. I walk but it doesn’t feel like I am the one doing the walking. I’m all verb, no subject.

The Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel described the Sabbath as a “sanctuary in time.” Walking is a sanctuary in motion. The peace we experience with each step adheres, and it conveys. Portable serenity.

The pain evaporates. With each step, I feel less burdened, more buoyant, as if someone had inflated my shoes. I sense the seriousness of the earth, and its lightness, too. Step. Step.

As the sun bows low in the sky, I grow aware of a peculiar presence, as if my feet were grazing a large and benevolent creature. It’s not anything I can name, this presence, yet I know, and with unaccustomed certainty, that it is older than old, bubbling up from a long ago time, before words.