The Immoralist By Andre Gide

There is nothing more tragic for a man who has been expecting to die than a long convalescence.

After that touch from the wing of Death, what seemed important is so no longer; other things become so which had at first seemed unimportant, or which one did not even know existed. The miscellaneous mass of acquired knowledge of every kind that has overlain the mind gets peeled off in places like a mask of paint, exposing the bare skin-the very flesh of the authentic creature that had lain hidden beneath it.

I have a horror of honest folk. I may have nothing to fear from them,but I have nothing to learn either. And besides, they have nothing to say..Honest Swiss nation! What does their health do for them? They have neither crimes, nor history, nor literature, nor arts..a hardy rose-tree, without thorns or flowers.

Marceline did not mistake my thoughts; when I came back from the port, I did not conceal from her

what sort of wretches I had been frequenting. Every kind of thing goes to the making of man. Marceline knew well enough what I was trying so furiously to discover; and as I reproached her for being too apt to credit everyone she knew with special virtues of her own invention, “You,” said she, “are never satisfied until you have made people exhibit some vice. Don’t you understand that by looking at any particular trait, we develop and exaggerate it? And that we make a man become what we think him?”

To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom.

My lectures began soon after; the subject was congenial and I poured into the first · of them all my newly born passion. Speaking of the later Latin civilization,I depicted artistic culture as welling up in a whole people, like a secretion, which is at first a sign of plethora, of a superabundance of health, but which afterwards stiffens, hardens, forbids the perfect contact of the mind with nature, hides under the persistent appearance of life a diminution of life, turns into an outside sheath, in which the cramped mind languishes and pines, in which at last it dies. Finally, pushing my thought to its logical conclusion,I showed culture, born of life, as the destroyer of life.The historians criticized a tendency, as they phrased it, to too rapid generalization. Other people blamed my method; and those who complimented me were those who understood me least.

So, in the very midst of my riches, I maintain the sensation of a state of precariousness, by which means I aggravate, or at any rate intensify, my life. I will not say I like danger, but I like life to be hazardous,and I want it to demand at every moment the whole of my courage, my happiness, my health . .

“Indeed, I hope so,” answered Menalque. “If only the people we know could persuade themselves

of the truth of this! But most of them believe that it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn’t even choose the pattern he imitates; he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don’t dare to-they don’t dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone-that is what they suffer from and so they don’t find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia-the most odious cowardice, I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything-but they don’t want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value-and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.”