The Truth
Our Graduate Student
 
Copyright 2010 by David Scully
All rights reserved.
davidscully@hotmail.com
 
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"When In Doubt, Tell The Truth"

Mark Twain
 
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DEDICATED
 
TO

Dr. Diane Ravitch,
Dinesh D'Souza,
Richard Dawkins,
Tom Sowell,
Frank McCourt,
Thomas Fleming
Will and Ariel Durant,
Voltaire,
y Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

They Always Told The Truth,
 
 
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INTRODUCTION
 
"Left to wander for twelve years
among alien cities and conflicting faiths,
repudiated by society and civilization...
driven from place to place as a dangerous rebel,
suspected of crime and insanity...
how did it come about that this man...
transformed education,
elevated the morals of France,
inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution,
influenced the philosophy of Kant and Shopenhauer,
the plays of Shiller,
the novels of Goethe,
the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley,
the socialism of Marx,
the ethics of Tolstoi,
had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker
of that eighteenth century in which writers were more influential
than they had ever been before ?
 
"...after his voice was stilled, all Europe listened to him...
and while Rousseau,
berated and despised,
hid in the obscurity of a Paris room,
the age of Rousseau began.
 
"In the decline of his life,
he composed the most famous of autobiographies,
The Confessions...
he began in 1762,
on the urging of a publisher,
to write his own account of his history and character...
Rousseau, condemned by the Church,
outlawed by three states,
and deserted by his closest friends,
had the right to defend himself,
even at great length...
his foes secured a government ban on further public readings
of his manuscript.
Discouraged, he left it at his death
with a passionate plea to posterity,
 
'Here is the sole human portrait...
the only sure monument of my character
that has not been disfigured by my enemies.'
 
"...Not that The Confessions had no forbears;
but even St. Augustine could not match the fullness...
or its claim to truth.
It begins with a burst of challenging eloquence,
 
'I am forming an enterprise which has had no example,
and whose execution will have no imitator.
I wish to show my fellow men
a man in all the truth of nature;
and this man shall be myself.
 
'Myself alone.
I know my heart,
and I am aqcuainted with men.
I am not made like any one of those who exist.
If I am not better, at least I am different.
If nature has done well or ill in breaking the mold in which I was cast,
this is something of which
no one can judge except after having read me.
 
Let the trumpet of the Last Judgment sound when it will,
I shall come, this book in hand,
to present myself before the Sovereign Judge.
I shall say loudly,
 
This is how I have acted,
how I have thought,
what I have been.
I have told the good and the bad with the same candor.
I have concealed nothing of evil,
added nothing of good...
and I have unveiled my inmost soul...'
 
"...This claim to complete sincerity is repeated again and again...
Part I has an air of candor that is disarming;
Part II...complains of persecution and conspiracy.
Whatever else the book is,
it is one of the most
revealing psychological studies known to us,
the story of a sensitive and poetic spirit
in painful conflict with a hard and prosaic century.
In any case,
the Confessions,
if it were not an autobiography,
would be one of the great novels of the world."
 
"Rousseau and Revolution" (pp. 3-5) by Will and Ariel Durant, 1967

In the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
I welcome you, My Dear Reader,
to the true narrative of my life and experiences.

No one can judge except after having read me.

David Scully, Our Graduate Student
December 18, 2010

         

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