The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau

I stumbled across a musty little hard back copy of a book called 'Emile for today: The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau' by William Boyd and found myself strangely drawn to this treatise on child rearing and education.

As Boyd suggests, 'the modern reader is unlikely to agree with everything Rousseau says', but there is some genuinely helpful common sense in there as well as some beautiful gems of existential wisdom.

This is one of my favourites:

It is not enough merely to keep children alive. They should be fitted to take care of themselves when they grow up. They should learn to bear the blows of fortune; to meet either wealth or poverty, to live if need be in the frosts of Iceland or on the sweltering rock of Malta. The important thing is not to ward off death, but to make sure they really live.

Life is not just breathing: it is action, the functioning of organs, senses, faculties, every part of us that gives the consciousness of existence. The man who gets the most out of life is not the one who has lived longest, but the one who has felt life most deeply.

Thanks Jean Jacques via William Boyd.

An inspiring outlook indeed.