Confessions, volumes 1 and 2

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778)

“Thus I have acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.”

Rousseau’s lengthy and sometimes anguished dossier on the Self is one of the most remarkable and courageous works of introspection ever undertaken. Some readers may be repelled by his tendency to revel in embarrassing accounts of humiliation and fiasco, as if he were striving too hard to achieve an ultimate nakedness, a nakedness of the soul perhaps. Others may recall the compulsive self-searching of the narrator of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, who also rather dwelt on the co-existence in the individual of the vile and the virtuous.

The two opening volumes of the Confessions, presented in this inevitably censored edition of 1903, deal with the author’s childhood and callow adolescence.

Here he is... (Summary by Martin Geeson)

Genre(s): Psychology, Memoirs

Language: English

Group: The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Section Chapter Reader Time
Play 01 01 - Vol. 1: "I have entered upon a performance..." Martin Geeson
00:22:48
Play 02 02 - "How could I become cruel or vicious..." Martin Geeson
00:20:35
Play 03 03 - "If ever education was perfectly chaste..." Martin Geeson
00:18:07
Play 04 04 - Near thirty years passed away..." Martin Geeson
00:20:51
Play 05 05 - "I had already become a redresser of grievances..." Martin Geeson
00:13:07
Play 06 06 - "Thus before my future destination..." Martin Geeson
00:12:07
Play 07 07 - "My master had a journeyman..." Martin Geeson
00:16:23
Play 08 08 - "I never thought money so desirable..." Martin Geeson
00:14:25
Play 09 09 - "In less than a year I had exhausted..." Martin Geeson
00:12:53
Play 10 10 - Vol. 2: "The moment in which fear..." Martin Geeson
00:18:56
Play 11 11 - "Louise-Eleonore de Warens..." Martin Geeson
00:16:35
Play 12 12 - "The difficulty still remained..." Martin Geeson
00:17:08
Play 13 13 - "My pleasing inquietudes..." Martin Geeson
00:18:47
Play 14 14 - "It is understood, I believe, that a child..." Martin Geeson
00:16:01
Play 15 15 - "At length, sufficiently instructed..." Martin Geeson
00:15:04
Play 16 16 - "Walking one morning, pretty early..." Martin Geeson
00:18:21
Play 17 17 - "To return to our Aegisthus, the fluter..." Martin Geeson
00:17:53
Play 18 18 - "Madame de Vercellis never addressed a word to me..." Martin Geeson
00:20:30