Strait is the Gate

Time and again I revert to reading the Classics. For the simple reason that they play no mind games, you can easily settle into them, take their words at face value and indulge in beautiful countrysides. Sometimes, that assurance of simplicity is required after a few involving reads.

But if simplicity was my motivation to pick up Andre Gide's Strait is the Gate, I may have been misinformed. This little novel is going into a mysterious loop that I am unable to fully grasp.

The story is of young Jerome, who falls in love with his cousin Alissa, a deathly serious young woman who seems to be in constant agony and repentance over something. What this something is constitutes most of the mystery of the book.

To begin with, it seemed that the misery was repugnance over her mother's lewd behavior. But that passed, and she continued to be melancholy.

The love story is being described in an idyll - I think these love stories are adorable for their romantic settings of a summer home. How I have longed for such simple delights, of long walks on shaded boulevards!

Then until today morning, I placed the source of Alissa's misery to her sister Juliette's love for Jerome. The younger one is equally animated and beset with love's glow, enjoying her own dreamy walks with the narrator. Both sisters, in a bid to outdo each other, try to sacrifice themselves. For sometime, I felt the tension of an impending death and tragedy.

But having progressed through some more pages, it seems even Juliette's love is not the cause. She moves on, but Alissa continues to be miserable, unable to meet Jerome in person, only showering him with long, indulgent letters. Their love blooms through these letters. The letters are sometimes beautiful. They are of course the out-pours of an emotional girl, but they are written as if to self, as if in a journal, and thus remarkable in their unabashed expression.

There is a beautiful part in the book, where I am now, when Jerome and Alissa meet after two years of ardent letters, and cannot find anything to say to each other. It seems so heart-breaking, yet you cannot imagine any other kind of meeting between people who have become close in imagination. Alissa very perceptively realizes then the 'mirage' of this distant connection.

Here's where I come to the difficult part - Alissa insists on giving herself up to God. And I am completely unable to relate to this need. The way I was not able to understand the black shades in which Alissa's mother was painted, or in the way two sisters fought to sacrifice. I am unable, completely to sympathize with this loftiness, which is slightly annoying. Is this a natural possibility at all? Or is this work a religious text?

I can understand better Tolstoy's ardent arguments for God and religion, but this simple acceptance of God as a way of life seems an exaggeration.

I will have to think more.