Daily Inspiration Quote by Remy de Gourmont

Remy de Gourmont isn’t pitching a fuzzy pantheism here; he’s staking out an ethic of attention in an era that was learning to anesthetize itself. A Symbolist-leaning novelist writing at the fin de siecle, de Gourmont lived amid mass politics, mass media, and mass slaughter-in-waiting - conditions that rewarded detachment as sophistication. His provocation is to treat indifference not as neutrality but as a failure of perception.

The structure does the work. He starts where a modern moralist would: don’t be indifferent to men. Then he deliberately widens the circle to “flocks, to trees,” pushing the reader past the safe confines of humanist concern into the supposedly secondary world of animals and plants. That expansion is the subtext: if your empathy stops at the species line, it’s not empathy, it’s tribe. “Life” can’t be understood through purely social feeling; it requires porousness to the nonhuman textures that make a life feel real - weather, growth, herd movement, the stubborn otherness of a tree that refuses our narratives.

The line “One should be indifferent to nothing” is intentionally impossible. It reads like an absolute because it’s meant as a diagnostic: notice how quickly you object, how quickly you bargain down your responsibility. De Gourmont’s intent is to shame the cultivated shrug, the pose of being above it all. Not indifference, he implies, but selective numbness is what makes modern life illegible.