I remember the First Communion. I remember the long afternoons trapped in the cage of Catechism; hours spent chasing the footsteps of Christ, the Apostles, and the immaculate Saints, while all I wanted was to roll in the mud and trade cards with friends. I remember the ceremony; the priest, moved, gave us chubby cherubs the Savior's body, filling our stomachs with eternal salvation. I remember the refreshment at the end of the day, in a farmhouse. I felt so smeared, so compressed by uplifting examples and good news that I felt an uncontrollable urge to free myself, to purge myself of all that Christian molasses. So, in solitude, I grabbed a bottle of salt and, spying a slug peacefully trotting on a lettuce leaf on the edge of the garden, I poured it over him. One can be so sadistic only as a child; I remember that poor creature literally melting in front of me, leaving me astonished and filled with a childish Luciferian pride.

Years later, when I first read “The Immoralist” and found these words on the first page: “To be able to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom”, the image of the poor slug came back to my mind.

This short novel, which in my opinion is Gide's youthful masterpiece, shows us an author finally ready to cast off the ballast of his puritanical and constrictive upbringing and set sail for the conquest of his true essence, his true identity, and his true literary style. A true watershed in his production and largely autobiographical, the book tells the story of a man who, miraculously surviving tuberculosis, completely reconsiders his life. In the immobility of convalescence, where the disease spreads from body to spirit, the protagonist auscultates every subtle oscillation of his being and, once healed, decides to follow only the laws of his "new" nature. The inhibitory brakes imposed by a dull religious morality fall away and, little by little, he emerges from a library mouse to a sensual satyr, greedy for pleasures and unconcerned with the feelings of others.

Naturally, such a journey can only lead to unhappiness; different from that of the gray bibliophile, but equally desperate. This indiscriminate voracity, this perpetual race toward nothingness, this pathetic and petty escape from all human empathy progressively empty of meaning the actions of this man who communicates to us with less and less enthusiasm the effects of his rebirth, retreating into an affective atonality worthy of Camus's “The Stranger.”

The style is of truly inimitable fluidity and grace; the words seem to glide over the page and the existential doubts that Gide's alter-ego expresses to us penetrate us, enveloping us in warm spirals of steam. How different from Dostoevsky's nervous and lacerating periods! Whereas the great Russian writer managed to make us converse with his characters through terrifying ruptures, Gide does so by caressing and captivating us with precious words and subtle, venomous ironies.

Finally, I believe that the protagonist of “The Immoralist” (note that the term sounds as unpleasant as "moralist") is also a kind of putative father of that Swann who, in Proust's “In Search of Lost Time,” symbolized, among other things, the danger of a dissolute and comfortable life, filled only with excesses and amusements, which in the long run buries artistic creativity and the search for a life truly in tune with one's spirit.

I remember that a few days later I recounted my slug adventure to my older brother. I expected a reprimand, but it only made him burst into laughter; I felt hurt, but talking about it did me good, alleviating my shame. It was an act of that “Psychomagic” so dear to Jodorowsky that freed my heart from anxiety. After all, Gide also said, “If I had not written The Immoralist, I would have become it.”

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