Read Andre Gide‘s The Immoralist some time back. It is one of the best books I have read in some time. It is the story of a man who after years of conforming, suddenly discovers freedom. This throws his life in to disarray and he sets about to free himself. But on attaining his freedom he has the vague feeling that it might be more than he had bargained for.
The story is best summed up in the following lines in the beginning of the book:
“Knowing how to free oneself is nothing; the difficult thing is knowing how to live with that freedom.”
Some other favourite lines of mine from the book:
“But I believe that love reaches a certain pitch once and once only, which the soul ever after seeks in vain to surpass; that in striving to resurrect that happiness, it actually wears it out; that nothing is more fatal to happiness than the memory of happiness.”
“The finest works of mankind are universally concerned with suffering. How would one tell a story of happiness? One can only tell of the origins of happiness and its destruction.”
“One has to allow people to be in the right. It’s some consolation for the fact that they don’t have anything else.”
“I can’t claim that I love danger, but I do like life to be risky, I like it to make demands on my courage, my happiness, my health at every moment…”
“They seem surprised to discover that someone with a questionable reputation can also have virtues. I cannot recognize such distinctions and reservations, for I exist as a single whole. My only claim is to be natural; if something gives me pleasure, I take that as a sign that I should do it.”
The last lines remind me of something I read on the Net which was attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.”
I wish that was what religion was to all of mankind. But then few of us are probably capable enough to live life on such pure terms. Most of us need rules handed down to us. Dostoevsky‘s idea “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” is probably more realistic in that regard.
(That is actually a paraphrased variant of Dostoevsky’s words. In Brothers Karmazov he says,”If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral; everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.”)