Note: The large quoted portions are taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (Penguin Classics edition). I am not Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or J. M. Cohen who translated Rousseau, or Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The Confessions
"'So there I was, settled at last in her house. This, however, was still not the moment from which I date the happy period of my life, but it served to pave the way for it...'"
Collins thought that perhaps his lover had fallen asleep, but her abrupt cry of mirth proved him wrong. "I'm sorry," she said. "'The happy period?' The one single happy period? How awful."
"Don't make fun, Angel," said Collins, gently cuffing her upturned behind. She giggled again, burying her face in the cushion. "I know what he means. This is the happy period of my life."
"You've been happy before. You've been happy a thousand times."
"So had he," said Collins, more gravely. "Books and trees and the open road all made him happy, but they were different."
Angel sighed. It had started with a question that naturally had been plaguing her for months. 'Collins? Tell me about your first love?' Now, a week and a half later, she was sprawled across his lap on the couch with a yellowed paperback cradled against the small of her back, for he had decided that simply telling her wouldn't do when he could personally introduce her to the man.
"'Although the emotional sensibility that gives rise to real joy is a work of Nature, and perhaps innate in our constitutions, it stands in need of situations in which it can develop. Lacking the right circumstances, a man born with acute sensibility would feel nothing, and would die without ever having known his true nature.'" Collins paused, feeling Angel shift as he read the words–letting them settle in her mind. After a moment, she spoke.
"But some of us don't let circumstances keep us down."
"I know, baby."
She lifted her head an inch or two, staring at her folded hands. "How long ago did you say this was written?"
"Seventeen-sixties, seventeen-seventies. We're still in the thirties at this point in the story, though."
"It's amazing how much people back then were the same as people now."
"They were. Exactly the same. That's one of the things that attracted me to philosophy. 'Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.'"
"And who said that?"
"Emerson."
"A later love affair, I presume?"
"I guess you could say that."
Angel put her head down again–positioned as if she were sunbathing. "Honey, keep reading."
Collins smiled. "Sorry." He ran his thumb over the text. "'I had been more or less in that condition till then, and should have been so always perhaps had I never met Mme de Warens, or even, having known her, had I not lived close to her for long enough to contract the sweet habit of affection with which she inspired me. I will venture to say that anyone who feels no more than love misses the sweetest thing in life. For I know another feeling, less impetuous perhaps but a thousand times more delightful, which is sometimes joined with love and sometimes separate from it. This feeling is something other than friendship, something less temperate and more tender.'"
Angel stretched and sat up. "That's wonderful," she said. "I think I can see how you fell for this guy. It seems like he really understands how people are. He gets to the heart of the matter, so to speak."
"Right." Collins pressed a brief kiss to Angel's throat. "That struck me the first time I read him. And in all these years, I've met only one other person who could do it."
"Really?" Angel moved closer.
"Yeah. But you haven't heard the next line yet. Listen." He swiftly raised the book again, holding it a few inches short of his face, teasingly resting the spine against Angel's nose (despite her sputter of protest). "'I do not think that it can be be felt for anyone of the same sex.' Well, that's enough to prove how much more you know than poor Jean-Jacques."
Angel laughed. "Well, I won't hold that part against him, since he's mostly right about the rest of it." She trailed three fingers down the side of her lover's face. "And at least now I know that I don't have to be jealous."
Collins tugged her down for a kiss. Rousseau fluttered to the floor.