Against the Grain
1884
The most beautiful book about the death of beauty ever written. Des Esseintes, the last scion of a noble house, has come to understand that the world is unbearable, and so he flees it, retreating to a secluded villa at Fontenay where he constructs a universe of pure aesthetic sensation. Here, in rooms perfumed with exotic incense and lined with rare books, he conducts his own private religion of beauty: a tortoise encrusted with precious gems that dies beneath the weight of its own ornamentation; a dining table laid with food artificially colored to match the paintings he loves; a pharmacy of perfumes that conjure phantom cathedrals and Oriental landscapes. Huysmans wrote this novel, his narrator explained, "to see how far one could go in the direction of what one had made one's hobby." The result is a fever dream of excess, a document of aristocratic despair, and a portrait of consciousness refined until it becomes unbearable to itself. It is a book for anyone who has ever wanted to retreat from the vulgar modern world into something more perfect and more alone.
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“Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms, untried pleasures.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul; the conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and Christ - all this was bound to engender those internal discords in which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been more obstinate in its pursuit.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“…he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“He lived within himself, nourished by his own substance, like some torpid creature which hibernates in caves. Solitude had reacted upon his brain like a narcotic. After having strained and enervated it, his mind had fallen victim to a sluggishness which annihilated his plans, broke his will power and invoked a cortège of vague reveries to which he passively submitted.The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“...he shrunk more and more from the realities of life and above all from the society of his day which he regarded with an ever growing horror,--a detestation which had reacted strongly on his literary and artistic tastes; he refused, as far as possible, to have anything to do with pictures and books whose subjects were in any way connected with modern existence.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
