Urien's Voyage pdf André Gide Free Download

And as I was unable to be sad and to finish the voyage at the same time, I left her and went back to sleep.

The snow is now flying over our heads because of the very violence of the wind. We are at the foot of a great wall. A strange passageway leads there. The wall, as smooth as a mirror and as transparent as crystal is depressed at the end of the passageway. One spot where no snow has fallen is also transparent. Bending under the weight of our presentiments, we read these two words, written on the wall as if by a diamond on glass and reminiscent of a voice from the grave:

HIC DESPERATVS

and then a blurred date.

And under these words we saw, after we had fallen on our knees in a common gesture—we saw a corpse lying inside the transparent ice. Settling all around him, the ice had entombed him, and the intense cold inside his sepulcher had prevented decomposition. His features betrayed frightful fatigue. He held a paper in his hand.

We felt that we had come almost to the end of our voyage; we still felt strong enough, however, to climb down the frozen wall, suspecting all the while that our goal lay beyond but not knowing for sure. And now that we had done everything possible to reach it, we found it almost futile to persevere. Before this unknown tomb we remained still on our knees impassive, unreflective, for we had reached the point where compassion turns to self-pity and where sadness must be ignored if strength is to be conserved. The heart is emboldened only through induration. And for these reasons, rather than to avoid violating the sepulcher, we did not break through the ice despite our desire to read what was written on the paper held by the corpse. After a short prayer we stood up and began painfully to climb up the wall of ice.

I am not sure how the wind that caused the storm arose, for as soon as we had crossed over the wall, it ceased and the atmosphere became almost mild. The other side of the wall was a gentle declivity formed by soft snow. Then there was a row of vegetation; then a small unfrozen lake. I think that the surrounding wall was perfectly circular, for the slopes tapered regularly, and since the wind no longer blew inside this enclosed area, the water in the lake remained calm.

We were sure that this was the end; we could no longer advance; but knowing that we would not know what to do there if we went down to the shore, in order to contrive some sort of conclusion, or some culminating gesture, we had the pious notion of going back to get the unknown corpse and burying it beside the lake. For we thought that this traveler, too, another person had also traveled far to see the lake, and we were sorry that he had been unable to reach his goal.

We went back to his tomb, broke through the ice and removed his body. When we tried to read the paper which he was holding, however, we saw that it was completely blank. Our disappointment was all the more painful because our curiosity had been dissipated. We carried his body to the little polar shore without ever putting into words our feeling that it was better perhaps for him never to have seen the anticipated shore and for the wall to have separated him from his goal during his lifetime, for even if the facts had been different the words chiseled on his tomb would probably have been the same.

A cheerless dawn was breaking as we made one last attempt to blot out our misgivings by digging a grave in the grass between the snow and the water in the lake.

We no longer wished to return to the regions where flowers bloomed more profusely, to the monotonous past, for one does not travel backward and downward to find life. If we had known at the outset that this was what we had come to see, perhaps we would not have started; that is why we gave thanks to God for having hidden from us the goal and for having withheld it from us until our efforts to attain it had afforded us some pleasure, the only certain pleasure; and we also thanked God because our intense suffering had made us hope for a splendid end.

We would have liked indeed to devise anew some tenuous and more pious hope; having satisfied our pride and feeling that the fulfillment of our destinies no longer depended on us, we now waited for the things around us to become a little more faithful to us.

Kneeling still, we probed the black water for the reflection of the heaven of my dreams.

END

* Gide never tired of stressing the Biblical precept that self-affirmation is accomplished through self-negation. Not surprisingly, his deep-seated religious bent was counterbalanced by an extraordinary imaginative sexuality. Tortured by desire, he would pray for release frcm the temptation of the flesh only to recant and beg to remain carnal and lustful until death.

* In 1890 Gide had written of his intense suffering because everyone did not already know “what later I hope to be.”

* The familiar form tu is used here and in the following pages by both Urien and Ellis.

* The metaphor of phosphorus and its glow, as indivisible as body and soul, appealed to Gide. “Only the glow matters,” he wrote concerning the death of Madeleine and the purity of his love for her.

1 Hebrews 11:39-40. Gide’s note.

ENVOY

Madame! I deceived you:

We undertook no voyage.

We beheld no gardens

or pink flamingos beside the sea;

it was not to us that sirens

beckoned with their hands.

If I ate not the fruits,

and slept not under the trees;

if I kissed not the hands

of perfumed Haïatalneful;

if I believed in tomorrows;

if I recounted these deeds;

then they were but mirages,

then they were but phantoms.

I think that I would have resisted; I waited;

But temptations never came to me.

Ellis! Forgive me! I lied.

This voyage is but my dream,

we never left the confines

of the chamber of our thoughts,—

and we passed through life

without ever seeing it. We read.

You would come in the morning

exhausted from your prayers.

Madame, I deceived you:

This whole book is but a lie.

But I did not shout,

for a dreamer is calm.

One day, however, as you know,

I wanted to look at life;

we studied the world about us.

But I found the things of this world

so serious, so terrible,

so responsible on all sides,

that I dared not speak the truth;

I turned away—oh! Madame—forgive me;

I preferred to tell a lie.

I was afraid of shouting too loudly

and destroying poetry

if I had told the Truth,

the Truth that must be heard;

I preferred still to lie

and to wait,—wait, wait …*

La Roque, Summer, 1892.

* In another place (Journal, 1930) Gide stated, “I write only for those who can read between the lines.” The turning away may refer to a crucial episode in the life of the author—his discovery that Madeleine, far from being serene and unapproachable, was apprehensive and in need of his protection; Madeleine, after discovering that her mother had a lover, suffered in silence. Gide took it upon himself to guide her, and have her share his interests in nature, literature and philosophy.

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