Some time back I bought the two volume set of Andre Gide’s Journals in a second hand bookstore. They sat on my bookshelf for about a year until I got round to them. Once I began reading, I noticed that there were a lot of passages of no interest to me and also a few passages that were brilliant and insightful. The latter were almost always marked by a line of ballpoint pen drawn in the margin of the page. No comments or underlining, just the vertical blue line.
I decided to trust my anonymous annotator, and to read just the marked passages. I suppose I’ve lost the sense of Gide as a person living his day to day intellectual life, but I feel like the previous owner of the books has left me a gift, an act of blazing the trail and guiding me to the best of what Gide had to say.
I decided to trust my anonymous annotator, and to read just the marked passages. I suppose I’ve lost the sense of Gide as a person living his day to day intellectual life, but I feel like the previous owner of the books has left me a gift, an act of blazing the trail and guiding me to the best of what Gide had to say.
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