Word: gide
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...proclaimed that they had dethroned God and placed Reason on the ramparts of heaven, Frenchmen have struggled over the deathbeds of famous men. Stories, some apocryphal and some authenticated, tell of the last moments of such famed skeptics as Aristide Briand, Paul Valéry, Voltaire and André Gide. Last week the battle was once more joined over the final hours on earth of Edouard Herriot, who had done as much as anyone to insist on the separation of church and state, and had fought tirelessly against church control of public education in France...
...stiff written exams, one appalling day of ten successive 10-minute oral exams by ten gimlet-eyed professors. Those who fail in June (65%) get another chance in September; those who fail then (80%) stay at school another year. Notable first-round failures: Anatole France, Alphonse Daudet, Andre Gide, Franchise Sagan. Though some brave bachot bumblers repeat the year as many as six times, others (like Gide) bid adieu to formal education forever. One result: only 409 French youths per 100,000 population attend college, as compared to 1,950 in the U.S.-an alarming statistic in a classical-bent...
...easy to leave the world, Santayana wrote, once we know what it is. If Santayana was suggesting a satiety of the mind, André Gide, in his 81st year, was more keenly aware of a flagging of the senses. He had discovered a word from the Greek for it, anorexia (lack of appetite), but he added: "I find it hard to console myself for not knowing Greek...
Like late election returns, posthumous books rarely turn the tide of opinion for or against a writer, and So Be It is no exception. It was Gide's luck and genius to do a few things extremely well. In The Counterfeiters, he wrote a novel that must rank in any top-ten list of the 20th century. The four volumes of his Journals are a matchless record of self-search and self-revelation. Renowned as a man of letters, Gide was perhaps more influential and controversial as a kind of culture hero of his time. His cult of untrammeled...
...paragraph, Hamlet-like in itself, sums up the strengths and the weaknesses of André Gide: "I hope the young man who may read me will feel on an equal footing with me. I don't bring any doctrine; I resist giving advice; and in a discussion I beat a hasty retreat. But I know that today many seek their way gropingly and don't know in whom to trust. To them I say: believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it; doubt everything, but don't doubt of yourself. There is more...