You know how it happens sometimes... You’re our looking at something and you don’t even know why or for that matter you don’t even know you’re looking at anything, and somebody comes along and asks what you see; and then you try to think of something even halfway intelligent to say, but you can’t. That’s exactly what happened when Rousseau came along today and caught me staring up into a tree. Actually, I was waiting for Margaret and Jim and Irene; and I had decided to pass the time by taking a picture. I’d got that done and was holding the camera down at my side, and for some reason I was standing stone-still staring up into the tree when my friend Rousseau came along and although he didn’t ask, “what’re you looking at?... I knew that’s what he was thinking because he was trying to see what was in the tree, too. Now Rousseau, like his namesake, is something of a philosopher. You can see it in his eyes and in the way he sets his mouth and wrinkles his brow.

Although he never actually says so, I have the feeling that Rousseau, also like his namesake, is trying to grasp an emotional and passionate side of man, which looked like what my friend was trying to figure out about me today. I have the feeling that he believes man, and perhaps other creatures as well, are essentially good when they are in what I think he thinks is “the natural state,” although he’s never spoken to me of it. Now I happen to think his insight is pretty profound. Not to call too much attention to it, but philosophical thinking is actually what I was doing looking up into that tree today, and I could tell Rousseau could tell that’s what I was doing, although, as I said, he didn’t say so. My neighbor Rousseau is a very quiet sort... and perhaps that’s what makes me think he, like his namesake, believes good people are made unhappy and corrupted by their experiences in society, which the guy from Geneva with the same name certainly believed and wrote a whole book about it. I prefer to think I was pensive but not unhappy looking up into that tree today; but whatever it was, Rousseau caught onto it right away. He didn’t press me for anything except a pat on the head, which is the usual thing when we get together.

I don’t think I mentioned it, but Rousseau, who lives upstairs in my building, is a dog, and I mean that in the kindest possible way.