Emile

Man is a social animal. Even hermits like the Unabomber issue broadsheets. Their recusal is, in fact, the message. People find many ways to join and one of them is standing apart. Proust retired to his cork-lined room. For Emily Dickinson it was Amherst. In fact her soubriquet does little justice to the complexities of her negotiation with reality. Emile, or On Education is the title of a work by Rousseau dealing with the individual's tortured relationship with so called civilization. The  first sentence reads "Everything is good as it leaves the Author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man." Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents addresses the price humans must pay and what they have to forgo in order to live in society. Apparently, humanity must jump through hoops to commune with with itself. 

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