Urien's Voyage by André Gide Read Free Book Online Page B

until alerted by the sudden coolness.
    Toward evening their numbers kept increasing, as did their size. We moved through them; as they became even more dense, the boat would strike them and scarcely cut through them. Night fell, and we would have lost sight of them completely had not the light from the stars shone through them pale, purified and magnified. Thus through an imperceptible transition that defies narration, after the splendid shores and sunlit gardens, we were finally to pass through a morose climate and frozen seas and come to arid polar shores.
    And imperceptibly also, languishing from her sickness, each day Ellis grew paler, giddier and more blond; she was becoming less and less real, and seemed to be fading away.
    â€œEllis,” I said to her finally, by way of preparing her for what was to come, “you are an obstacle to my union with God, and I can love you only if you too are fused in God himself.” *
    And when the felucca reached a boreal region where wisps of smoke rose from the huts of the Eskimos, when we left her on the shore and immediately set sail for the Pole, she had already lost almost every vestige of reality.
    And we also left there Yvon, Hélain, Aguisel and Lambègue—who were sick with boredom and seemed about to die from drowsiness—and sailed calmly on toward the Pole.
    * The grotesque figure of Ellis recalls Gide’s inability to fuse in a normal manner the physical and the spiritual. Ellis appears in his Journals as Em, and elsewhere as Alissa, Emmanuèle or Madeleine. “All purity, love, and tenderness” in his other works, she is really his cousin (later his wife) Madeleine Rondeaux.
    * We learn from his Journals that Gide frequently suffered embarrassment over his inability to say the right words at the right time.
    * * Up to this point the narrator has used the familiar pronoun tu in addressing Ellis. Here he uses the polite form vous.
    * Urien continues to use the polite form vous in addressing Ellis. Gide revealed the ambivalent nature of his love for Madeleine, and her patient suffering because of it, in Et nunc manet in te, written in 1947 and issued publicly in 1951.

VOYAGE TO A FROZEN SEA
    A rather dilatory auroral sky; purple flashes on the sea where pale blue sheets of ice became iridescent. A rather chilling awakening because the limpid air was no longer pursued by warm breezes. The boreal region where we had left wan Ellis and our four sick companions the day before, though still visible in the distance, was on the verge of disappearing; a delicate buoy far out on the horizon linked the sky to the last waves and seemed to lift and lull the vanishing land. All eight of us assembled on the deck for a morning prayer, serious but not sad; then we raised our solemn voices and felt once more the tide of seraphic joy that had surged through us on the day when we drank crystalline spring water. Then aware of our joyous wills and wishing to seize them and sense them rather than to allow them to vanish, I said to them:
    â€œThe hard trials are over. Far from us now are the morose banks where we thought we would die of boredom, farther still the shores with their forbidden pleasures; let us acknowledge that we are happy to have known them. For one can reach this point only through them; the loftiest cities are reached by the most perilous routes; we are going toward the divine city. Yesterday’s tarnished sun is tinged with rose. Resistance first quickened our wills; nor was our idleness on the gray swards futile, for when the landscape disappeared, we were left with our wills completely free; because of our boredom, our indeterminate souls managed in those regions to become sincere. And when we act, now, it will surely be in keeping with our aims.” *
    The sun was rising as we began our prayers; the sea radiated with reflected splendors; rays shot across the waves, and the illuminated sheets of ice, vibrant and responsive,