Books: Aged Child

THE JOURNALS OF ANDRE GIDE (380 pp.) —Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Justin O'Brien—Knopf ($5).

"Dare to be yourself," wrote Andre Gide in his diary at 22. "My mind is becoming voluptuously impious and pagan. I must stress that tendency." If he felt like a pagan, he still acted like a Protestant; he carried a pocket Bible everywhere with him. But he was always seesawing between the assurances of prayer and the doubts of spiritual confusion. Twenty-one years later, he confided to his journal: "Catholicism is inadmissible. Protestantism is intolerable. And I...

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