I took last Saturday and collected some notes on Gide. I don't imagine they'll be of interest to anyone but me, but I felt compelled. . .

I’ve been reading the journals of Gide. I'm now in the WWI years and soon beyond. This volume is better than the first, with the exception of several pages skipped over tonight at the gym, pages containing his thoughts on the Gospels, and his belief or not in the devil. My god, this man is a little exasperating. On the one hand I read elsewhere about how experimental or ahead of his time he was, but to me he seems stuck in an older generation, an old fogy fussing about his position among the literati, his piano playing, and the incompetent pruning of the trees surrounding his house. He speaks often of his battles to resist temptations, veiled references to his sensual desires, etc., all of which I take to be his great anguish and conflict about being gay. But of course it’s a different era, and I have to remind myself not to be so quick to judge harshly. Edmund White, in his biography of Genet, seems to be pretty hard on Gide, speaking about his “faintly ridiculous defense of homosexuality” in Gide’s book Croydon, which “argues that homosexuality is completely natural since it can be observed in several other species.” According to White, Gide also argues that “male homosexuality is a healthy alternative to prostitution as a way of channeling the sexual needs of young, unmarried men.” I suppose it does all seem a little silly now. Certainly when placed along side the next generation such as Genet, Gide looks stiff, uptight, and silly. But he was among the first to write openly in defense of homosexuality (even if a defense was not exactly what was needed). Gide was married, and seemed to be happily married, at least in his early diaries. But from what I’ve read about his life, he was married for 27 years in an unconsummated marriage, before having a child with another woman. And otherwise he was gay. An odd fellow. I’m beginning to think I shouldn’t be spending so much time reading him, but over the last few weeks I’ve come across a few things that I wanted to note, so . . .

The Gide diary finally came alive for me at the outbreak of World War I. He describes in some detail the first few weeks of the war, the rush of people around Paris, the frenzy at train stations, the complete chaos and upheaval. It contrasts dramatically with the outbreak of war for Americans in recent decades. Certainly with the Iraq war, Americans have experienced nothing like what previous generations have known. Today it’s little more than extended coverage on CNN for all but those with family in the military. What Gide describes in those first few weeks reminded me of what I sensed, and what much of America sensed, I’m guessing, during the morning of Sept. 11. It was a sense that the routines of our daily lives were no longer viable, that there were suddenly no rules and no normalcy, that we had been living in a house of cards. I remember that feeling the morning of Sept. 11, as I watched the towers fall, gathered with other Xerox employees around the television inside the office of some manager. I didn’t feel terror; I felt excitement—excitement to be faced with the possibility of life being uprooted of its routines. That morning no one cared about their jobs, their appointments, their duties and personal agendas. Everything was being questioned. It was as if suddenly society had crumbled and we were all hunters and gatherers, fending for ourselves, and looking after those immediately beside us.

Gide wrote about the wild speculation regarding how things were going at the front. No one knew anything, and everyone clung to the flimsiest morsels of information. Now we know instantly what is happening. For some reason which he doesn’t explain, Gide decided shortly after the beginning of the war not write about its progress. It’s too bad, as his reports on the war are among the most interesting passages of the diary’s second volume.

Occasionally Gide writes about his encounters with other interesting people. His first report of Cocteau is funny. It was 1914, shortly after war had erupted, and Cocteau was still a very young man. Gide writes this: “I had no pleasure in seeing him again, despite his extreme kindness; but he is incapable of seriousness, and all his thoughts, his witticisms, his sensations, all the extraordinary brilliance of his customary conversation shocked me like a luxury article displayed in a period of famine and mourning. . . When speaking of the slaughter of Mulhouse he uses amusing adjectives and mimicry; he imitates the bugle call and the whistling of the shrapnel. Then, changing subjects since he sees that he is not amusing me, he claims to be sad; he wants to adopt your mood and explains it to you. Then he talks of Blanche, mimics Mme R., and talks of the lady at the Red Cross who shouted on the stairway: ‘I was promised fifty wounded men for this morning; I want my fifty wounded men.’ Meanwhile he is crushing a piece of plum cake in his plate and nibbling it; his voice rises suddenly and had odd twists; he laughs, leans forward, bends toward you and touches you.” Funny. Gide is hard on young Cocteau. I think I might have liked him.

In 1918 he writes again of Cocteau. Cocteau makes a reference to Debussy’s funeral. Then Gide writes this: “Nothing is more foreign to me than this concern for modernism which one feels influencing every thought and every decision of Cocteau. I do not claim that he is wrong to believe that art breathes freely only in its newest manifestation. But, all the same, the only thing that matters to me is what a generation will not carry away with it. I do not seek to be of my epoch; I seek to overflow my epoch.”

Gide writes of frequent gatherings with Darius Milhaud, one of the group of French composers know as Les Six, so designated by Cocteau. At one such meeting Milhaud plays for Gide a symphonic poem he’d just written. Gide comments, “It was nothing but noise to me.” He writes a few times of meeting Edith Wharton. He liked her; they seemed to be friends. On one occasion he writes, “Mrs. Wharton tomorrow morning at the Gare du Nord. Henry James and Arnold Bennett were expecting me.” Quite good company.

During one afternoon with Wharton, Gide met a Paul Bourget. At one point when Wharton was away from the room this Bourget asks Gide about his novel “The Immoralist.” “Now that we are alone, tell me, Monsieur Gide, whether or not your immoralist is a pederast.” After regaining his composure Gide replies, “He is probably more likely an unconscious homosexual.” Bourget goes on, “There are two classes of perversions: those that fall under the head of sadism and those that belong to masochism. To achieve sexual pleasure both the sadist and the masochist turn to cruelty. . .” Gide then asks, “Do you class homosexuals under one or the other of these perversions?” Bourget begins to respond, “Of course. . .” but then Wharton enters the room and Gide never gets the full answer. I have to confess myself that I don’t really know the difference between sadism and masochism. I imagine sadists like to impose pain, and masochists to receive it. I wonder if today these are still accepted terms among people informed about sexuality. They strike me as a bit silly and outmoded, perhaps useful in earlier times when people were so interested in classifications. Neither term seems to describe the great majority of gay sexuality today, though.

Here’s another passage about Gide and his veiled homosexuality: “The trait I have most trouble struggling against is my sensual curiosity. The drunkard’s glass of absinthe is not more attractive than, for me, certain faces encountered by chance—and I would give up everything to follow them. . . Why, to be sure this involves such an imperious urge, such an insidious, such a secret counsel, so inveterate a habit that I often wonder if I can escape it without outside aid.”

My real interest in reading this volume of Gide’s diary is what he says about Proust. This volume covers 1914-1927. The first mention of Proust comes in 1916. By then Proust had written much of his masterpiece. Only the first three? volumes were published before he died in 1922. Proust did ask Gide and the publishing company he owned to publish the work, but Gide or the company turned him down, a decision Gide greatly regretted much later. This is what Gide first writes of Proust: “Finished the evening at the home of Marcel Proust (whom I had not seen since ’92). I had promised myself to relate that visit at length; but I no longer have the interest to do so this morning.” What a shame. He should have mustered the interest. It would have been more interesting than most anything else in his diary (at least for me).

In 1918 he again mentions Proust. “In Paris I reread to Jean-Paul Allegret a few pages of Proust—dazzled.” And then later he writes about work on his memoirs, but he says, “But I have no further taste for them; the fews pages that I read aloud . . . disappointed me; and the comparison I made between then and the pages of Proust’s marvelous book, which I was rereading at the same time, overwhelmed and finished me off”

Here’s a passage about Gide’s tortures: “Night haunted, devastated, laid waste by the almost palpable phantom of X., with whom I walk for two hours or in whose arms I roll on the very steps of hell. And this morning I get up with my head empty, my mind distraught, my nerves on edge, and offering an easy access to evil. Yet last night I did not quite yield to pleasure, but this morning, not even benefiting from that repulsion which follows pleasure, I wonder if that semblance of resistance was not perhaps worse. One is always wrong to open a conversation with the devil, for, however, he goes about it, he always insists upon having the last word.”

In 1918 he seems to fall in love with some man in Paris whom he designates as ‘M.’ “I cry for that health, that happy equilibrium, which I enjoy in M’s presence and which makes even chastity easy for me when I am with him, and my flesh smilingly at ease.” He finds himself torn between M and Em., his wife: “Recalled to Paris again. . . Em. Can never know how my heart is torn at the thought of leaving her, and in order to find happiness far from her.” This is another thing about Gide that interests me—his clear homosexuality, yet his marriage and his love for Em. He seemed to live the life I am leading right now, only nearly a century earlier.

This last week I heard three pieces of music that made me instantly happy. First was a song by Crowded House. I don’t remember the name, but it reminded me how much I can enjoy some pop music. Then on the radio I heard the Polovtsian Dances of Borodin. They have an otherworldly feel to them, dark but not foreboding, a cross between the world of Oz, Tolkien’s middle earth, and a snowy winter retreat in the Russian Alps. The third piece was something by the contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. I think she’s one of today’s most innovative and important composers. It’s funny that among my list of such composers, two near the top are women composers. These days women are producing great works in art music. For centuries it was a man’s domain, but women like Saariaho and Jennifer Higdon are today among the world’s greatest composers.

A beautiful young black woman with a narrow, exposed waist and a bushy Afro lifted her arm to reveal a tiny carpet of curly black underarm hair. Sexy.

Lately I’ve been envying Judge John Roberts, soon to be the nation’s new chief justice. He’ll be untouchable. Life tenure at the top. Accountable to no one, with the whole nation hanging on every word he says and writes. I don’t want to answer to people, yet I want power, respect, and position. He’ll have it all.