Ramuz, Rousseau and Hesse all share an interest in how the individual tries to live in a society where he sometimes feels like an outsider. An attempt to heroize these three great Swiss authors, who see nature as a source of authenticity.
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, It's the mountains that speak, the snow that thinks, the earth that trembles under the footsteps of simple men. In his rough sentences, the writer from the canton of Vaud conjures up the epic where others see the banal. He doesn't write Switzerland, he sculpts it with his words. For him, reality wavers, nature commands, and men, tiny but dignified, advance against the wind. He did not seek the universal - he found it in the shadow of a chalet.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is the voice of a solitary wanderer who still disturbs the crowds. He's a citizen of Geneva who shuns the salons, but reinvents the world. In the silence of the woods, he hears the cry of freedom. He writes from the heart, thinks from the gut, and clicks with his ideas. He believed in the goodness of man as one believes in the sun behind the clouds. Rousseau belongs to no one, except perhaps to dreamers who have never stopped hoping.
Hermann Hesse, is an immobile traveler, his soul on the move between East and West. This adopted native of Ticino seeks within himself what the world does not give him: peace, truth, unity. In Siddhartha ou Le Loup des steppes (Siddhartha or The Steppe Wolf), he explores the flaws of the human being with a pen that is both gentle and sharp. Solitary but never closed, he listens to the inner murmur that so many refuse to perceive. Hesse writes as one meditates: to lose oneself, and perhaps to find oneself.
Founder of the Cercle fribourgeois de débat, Antoine Lévêque is an editor at Regard Libre. Write to the author: antoine.leveque@leregardlibre.com
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