February 19 , 1951

Andre Gide (November 22, 1869 to February 19, 1951) came from a bourgeois family of intellectuals. He was one of the few, the brave, those thinkers, who denounced communism in the 1930s. In 1947 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1952 his books were placed on a list of books the Roman Catholic church banned.

In his journals we find this self-description "I am like the cat of the fable who wanted to see the other side of the mirror."(1902).  He was describing a guest, a young man he was interested in, but the description is good for a certain kind of intellectual objectivity.

We found this in volume 1 of his Journals, that edition translated by Justin O'Brien.{2000}.