As a child, André Gide got into terrible trouble for his public display of private pleasure.

For tossing himself off, I mean.

Oblivious to what some might call the propriety of secrecy – so absorbed was he in his quite solitary searching – Gide lay in the school grounds, alternating this ‘pleasure’ with ‘pralines’.

When a teacher came upon him (Gide: one hand in a box of chocolates, the other elsewhere): what a mess!

But Gide wanted more than private pleasure.

He was also intent upon accessing that which absolutely transcends us: the other person’s experience of pleasure.

I want an impression of a pleasure that is not my pleasure.

Think of Augustine watching St. Ambrose reading silently to himself:

When [Ambrose] read, his eyes moved down the pages and his heart sought out their meaning while his voice and tongue remained silent. Often when we were present – for no one was forbidden to enter, and it was not his custom to have whoever came announced to him – we saw him reading to himself, and never otherwise. After sitting for a long time in silence – who would dare to annoy a man so occupied? – we would go away.

Gide considered that if only he could in some sense disappear, remaining present to another only as an absence – a haunting – could he penetrate their other world.

If only I could stop here, in the dark shadows of this enormous acacia tree … Surely I would only have to stay still for a few minutes before nature closed in on me completely. It would be exactly as though I didn’t exist, and I could forget myself and my presence – to become vision itself.

Sometimes he seemed to think he was another writer, describing a memory that we might actually recognise as Proust’s, or an experience that was Flaubert’s.

It seemed that the landscape was an emanation of myself, a vibrating, projected part of me. I was the centre. The landscape was sleeping before I arrived, inert and virtual, and I created it, step by step, in perceiving its harmonies – I was its very consciousness.

Et je m’avançais émerveillé, dans ce jardin de mon rêve.

Gide maintained his private pleasures, and as a child collected them as themes – thèmes de jouissance. One of these themes was provided by George Sand’s amazing tale of Gribouille, the young boy who loved so selflessly that eventually, like Joan of Arc, he let the flames engulf him for the sake of all others.

Was it his solitude, and his sense of pride Gide loved? Perhaps, but particularly Gribouille’s own magical transformation – a metamorphosis through which Gribouille eventually accessed the garden of his dreams, his own pastoral in which the balance between himself, others and the landscape surrounding them reached a just equilibrium.

Gribouille threw himself into the water, one rainy day, not to save himself from the rain, as his nasty brothers tried to convince him, but to save himself from those mocking brothers. In the river, Gribouille managed to swim for a while, then abandoned himself – and as soon as he let himself go, he found himself carried along by the water. He felt himself become small, light, strange – organic. Leaves grew all over his body ; and soon the river offered up to the bank the delicate oak branch that our friend Gribouille had become.