Free Urien's Voyage by André Gide

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