Good Gentle Gide

     "Books have taught me that every liberty is provisional and never anything but the power to choose one's slavery, or at any rate one's devotion — as the thistle seed flies hither and thither, seeking a fertile soil in which to fix its roots — and can only flower when motionless. But as I had learned at school that men are not guided by reasoning and that every argument may be opposed by a contrary one which needs only to be found, I set about looking for it, sometimes, in the course of my long journeyings.
— Andrè Gide, The fruits of the Earth, Book IV, p. 66.

     And now, Nathaniel, throw away my book. Shake yourself free of it. Leave me. Leave me; now you are in my way; you hamper me; I have exaggerated my love for you and it occupies me too much. I am tired of pretending I can educate anyone. When have I said that I wanted you to be like me? It is because you differ from me that I love you; the only thing I love in you is what differs from me. Educate! Whom should I educate but myself? Nathaniel, shall I tell you? I have educated myself interminably. And you? I have not done yet. I only esteem myself for my possibilities.
     Nathaniel, throw away my book; do not let it satisfy you. Do not think your truth can be found by anyone else; be ashamed of nothing more than of that. If I found your food for you, you would have no apetite for it; if I made your bed, you would not be able to sleep in it.
     Throw away my book; say to yourself that it is only one of the thousand possible postures in life. Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write, what someone else could say, could write, as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else, and out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, ah, Nathaniel, the most irreplaceable of beings.
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., ENVOI (entire), p. 179.

     This morning I am like the man who knows that his pen is a little too full of ink and for fear of making a blot, traces a garland of words.
— Andrè Gide, The New Fruits, Book I, in Ibid., p. 200.

     "He who is happy," I once wrote, "and who yet thinks, he shall be called the truly worthy." For what good to me is a happiness built upon ignorance? Christ's first word is to embrace sadness itself in joy: "Blessed are those who weep." And he has little understanding of this word who sees in it nothing but an encouragement to weep!
— Andrè Gide, Ibid., p. 222.

       The Earth Worm

The worm artist
out of soil, by passage
of himself
constructing.
Castles of metaphor!
Delicate
            dungeon turrets!
He throws off
artifice as he
contracts and expands the
muscle of his being,
ringed in himself,
tilling. He
is homage to
earth, aerates
the ground of his living.
— Denise Levertov, in The Sorrow Dance, p. 26.