aklinstopia

He had always intended to marry when he could afford it; and once he had been in love, violently in love, but had laid the passion aside, and told it to wait till a more convenient season.  This was, of course, the proper thing to do, and prudence should have been rewarded.  But when, after the lapse of fifteen years, he went, as it were, to his spiritual larder and took down Love from the top shelf to offer him to Mrs. Orr, he was rather dismayed.  Something had happened.  Perhaps the god had flown; perhaps he had been eaten by the rats.  At all events, he was not there.

            He was conscientious and romantic, and knew that marriage without love is intolerable.  On the other hand, he could not admit that love had vanished from him.  To admit this, would argue that he had deteriorated.

            Whereas he knew for a fact that he had improved, year by year.  Each year he grew more moral, more efficient, more learned, more genial.  So how could he fail to be more loving?  He did not speak to himself as follows, because he never spoke to himself; but the following notions moved in the recesses of his mind:  “It is not the fire of youth.  But I am not sure that I approve of the fire of youth.  Look at my sister!  Once she has suffered, twice she had been most imprudent, and put me to great inconvenience besides, for if she was stopping with me she would have done the housekeeping.  I rather suspect that it is a nobler, riper emotion that I am laying at the feet of Mrs. Orr.”  It never took him long to get muddled, or to reverse cause and effect.  In a short time he believed that he had been pining for years and only waiting for this good fortune to ask the lady to share it with him.

            Mrs. Orr was quiet, clever, kindly, capable, and amusing, and they were old acquaintances.  Altogether it was not surprising that he should ask her to be his wife, nor very surprising that she should refuse.  But she refused with a violence that alarmed them both.  He left her house declaring that he had been insulted, and she, as soon as he left, passed from disgust into tears.

The Longest Journey

“Influence does not create; it awakens,” I said back in 1900, in my first lecture—-and I am satisfied if my books have been able to help young people to ascertain and liberate whatever heroic was sleeping in them. To raise man above himself, to deliver him from his weight, to help him go beyond himself, by exalting him, reassuring him, warning him, tempering him, is not that the secret aim of literature?

From his youth a secret ambition activates him, of such a nature that I cannot imagine a more noble one; in comparison with it, Balzac’s heroes make us smile. On the secular or worldly plane, where the game is played for the latter, Valery will succeed moreover and, furthermore, better than any of them; he knows how honors are obtained, what they are worth, and what they costs in peace of mind. He will accept the price, if it should only be to show others and to prove conclusively to himself that there is nothing there he cannot attain; a matter of earning the right to scorn all that. For he has a tendency to despise everything; that is his strength. The domination he wishes is something entirely different; it is that of the mind. The rest appears laughable to him. To dominate not the mind of others but his own; to get acquainted with its functioning, make himself master of it in order to dispose of it at his will, it is to that he continuously applies his effort. Curious Narcissus; to dominate the mind by the mind. From then on the result hardly matters to him; the product, no, but the means to obtain it; when he wishes, as he wishes, to be capable of…. “My nature is potential,” he said.

“Remember to distrust yourself.” Distrust which he applied to everything, to beings, to things, to convictions, to profession of faith, above all to words, those atoms, and one knows what latent energy the decomposition of the latter sets in motion.

“How does it happen,” he said to me, “that men take to their rest so quickly? Why are they content with so little?”

Andre Gide (1950)