The Glass Bead Game

I'm rereading The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. In the Introduction there's mention of Andre Gide's praise. From Wiki I learned...

An inspiration for writers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Gide received the Nobel for Literature in 1947. His obituary in The New York Times described him as "France's greatest contemporary man of letters" and "judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti."^[1]

But THIS stuck out...

"Each volume that Gide wrote was intended to challenge itself, what had preceded it, and what could conceivably follow it. This characteristic, according to Daniel Moutote in his Cahiers de André Gide essay, is what makes Gide's work 'essentially modern': the 'perpetual renewal of the values by which one lives.'"^[27] Gide wrote in his Journal in 1930: "The only drama that really interests me and that I should always be willing to depict anew, is the debate of the individual with whatever keeps him from being authentic, with whatever is opposed to his integrity, to his integration. Most often the obstacle is within him. And all the rest is merely accidental."

Of course, having surmounted the obstacles, one can comfortably retire to one's car.


This too, about Dorothy Bussy.