The immoralist

Michel and Ménalque must be my favorite literary characters ever conceived, and if not, then they are up there, roaming the highest of ranks. Gide's poetic yet simple style elevates them to the status of sheer ideal. I extol Michel's and Ménalque's vice for it is superior to any man's virtue. Doctrine dictates that one ought to experience, not merely to live. Philistines dare to refute? Oh, just how beautiful this world would be if got rid of moralists!



“You have to let other people be right,” was his answer to their insults. “It consoles them for not being anything else.”


“I have so little that nothing you see here belongs to me; not even, or especially not, the bed I sleep on. I have a horror of comfort; possessions invite comfort, and in their security a man falls asleep; I love life enough to try to live wide awake, and so, even among all my treasures, I cherish a sense of the precarious, by which I provoke or at least arouse my life. I can’t say I love danger, but I love a life of risk, I want life to demand of me, at every moment, all my courage, all my happiness, and all my health.”


“If only these people around us could be convinced. But most of them believe they get nothing good out of themselves except by constraint; they’re only pleased with themselves when they’re under duress. If there’s one thing each of them claims not to resemble it’s … himself. Instead he sets up a model, then imitates it; he doesn’t even choose the model—he accepts it ready-made. Yet I’m sure there’s something more to be read in a man. People dare not—they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry—I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don’t find themselves at all. I hate all this moral agoraphobia—it’s the worst kind of cowardice. You can’t create something without being alone. But who’s trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that’s the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that’s just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.”


"If there’s one thing I detest it’s a man of principles.”


“What’s the use? You who have a wife and child—you stay. Of the thousand forms of life, each of us can know only one. Envying another man’s happiness is madness: you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you had it. Happiness isn’t something that comes ready-made, to order. I’m leaving tomorrow; I know—I’ve tried to cut my happiness to my own measure. You keep your fireside happiness.”
“I’ve cut my happiness to my measure too!” I exclaimed. “But I’ve grown. And now my happiness is too tight for me. Sometimes I’m almost strangled by it.”


"Human poverty is an enslavement; to eat, a poor man consents to joyless labor, and all labor which is not joyous is mere drudgery, I thought. I would pay one man after another to rest, saying, “Stop working—you hate what you’re doing.” For each man I desired that leisure without which nothing new can flower—neither vice nor art."


"I might have wished she were wrong, but I had to admit that to me each man’s worst instinct seemed the most sincere. Then, what was it I called sincerity?"


"I despise those who can acknowledge beauty only when it’s already transcribed, interpreted."


"Memory is an invention of misery."

Really exceptional storytelling in this. Gide is so spellbinding when his characters tell a story and some of the stories in this novel took complete hold of me. I'd say his conceit paid off, too. From beginning to end I really got the sense of being lead down the path of a character's transformation but without very much obtrusive telling and so naturally that by the end, when this self-indulgent protagonist has come into his own, all the guilt and cringe over his character had transferred completely to me, the reader. He pulls this off by using his pontification only to provide the bare amount of context for his detailed descriptions of people and places (and low key masterful dialogue).

I'm reading the companion novel, Strait is the Gait, now and the experience is only making my feelings for The Immoralist swell. Gide took on such an interesting project to explore notions he set forth in Fruits of the Earth. I've only read 2 1/2 of his works but they all cohere in such wonderful ways. I look forward to reading more.