There is a Rousseau everyone quotes and a Russo everyone watches, and the gap between them is, I would argue, the entire spiritual project.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau said civilization corrupts. Man is naturally good. Strip away the noise and the performance and something honest remains underneath. He said the general will is not the will of the majority. He said go back. Return.

He was very popular at retreats. He is still very popular at retreats.

Rene Russo starred opposite Pierce Brosnan in The Thomas Crown Affair and was, by most accounts, the better reason to watch it.

These are not the same person.

Most people know this.

Most people, however, have also had the experience of being confidently mid-sentence about civilization and natural goodness and the corruption of modern life, and someone says “which Rousseau?” and for three full seconds the philosopher and the actor occupy the same name in your head, and something — not large, not dramatic, not tote-bag-worthy — shifts.

That is enlightenment.

I am not being metaphorical.

I mean: you were holding an idea with both hands. You loosened your grip. The idea did not fall. But you noticed, briefly, that you had been holding it as though it might.

The seekers — the ones with the curated bookshelves, the Krishnamurti underlines, the strong opinions about silence — they recover from this very fast. Obviously I meant Jean-Jacques. The room is tidied before Rene Russo has finished walking through it.

Jean-Jacques himself did this. Constantly. He spent four decades explaining that the Rousseau causing everyone problems was not the Rousseau that mattered. He wrote the Confessions to set the record straight. Then he wrote the Reveries because the Confessions had not quite done it. He sent all five of his children to a foundling hospital and wrote Émile, the most influential book on how to raise children, and somewhere in the middle of that he presumably did not notice the Rene Russo walking through his room.

Or he noticed. And tidied very fast.

I do this. I have a highly efficient tidying operation. An idea arrives with a complication and I locate the complication in a footnote before it can sit down. The footnote is well-organised. The footnote has sub-sections.

The untidied version is less comfortable and more accurate.

The untidied version is: Jean-Jacques Rousseau was right about civilization and a disaster at living in it, and Rene Russo was in a film I have seen three times, and enlightenment is probably just the moment you stop separating the filing into different drawers and let it all sit, briefly, in the same hallway.

The hallway is fine.

The hallway is where everything actually is.
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