![]() Savages suffer less than other men from curiosity and from tedium everything is the same to them–themselves, not their possessions–and they are never weary. He thinks they have an inferior sensibility too: He thinks that only Frenchmen can travel where they like and be citizens of the world but that people of colour should stay where they are because they’re not as wise as Europeans. ![]() (Nursing mothers should not eat meat, he says, because decaying animal matter swarms with worms and so children who are nursed on human milk from meat-eating women, get worms. In Book 1 he rants about the evils of swaddling clothes mothers who won’t do their duty by nursing their own children and eating meat. (The other four are solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life and intercourse with women and young people) (p.335). You can get a glimpse of how I felt about Rousseau’s attitudes to women from my recent snippet and yes, tested well beyond the limits of my patience, I nearly abandoned this book when I came to Book 5 and found reading at the top of his list of Five Perilous Paths to be avoided by adolescents. For a start, it’s quite long at 500+ pages, and it’s a task made more challenging because in amongst his insights for which he is lionised, Rousseau had some very odd ideas which I suspect may make many readers abandon him in dismay. ![]() Émile, or On Educationby Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is a difficult book to read. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, portrait by Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704–1788) Source: Wikipedia Commons ![]()
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