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Andre
Gide
Early in life I put myself on guard against beliefs I owed to
habits encouraged by my parents, to my protestant upbringing, and
even to my own country. By no means did I preconceive them as bad.
I rather chose not to admit them again before I had proved their
excellence myself, passed them in review, compared them to
othe~
submitt~cl
them to my critical appraisal and had assured myself that
they gave out a pure and full tone.
I did not realize until much later, and even only recently,
that a number of these conceptions-I mean those which I accepted
after testing-were the product, often indirect, of my social condition,
of the privileges of fate (which had allowed me to be born into an
easy, comfortable situation, sheltered from material cares), of the
society in which I had lived, . including my parents, and saying it
more simply, of my
class.
This word, not so long ago, did not mean
anything much to me. Men I knew, were more or less fortunate, and,
my sympathy carrying me towards the most unfortunate, I had
scarcely had any but poor friends-that is to say those who wert
obliged, and often most painfully, to earn a living. No matter! The
problems of the social order interested me hardly at all, and
my
mind allowed itself to be carried away or occupied only by problems
which seemed to me to be common to all men. And no doubt I had
first of all to realize how bad a form of society was which
guarantee~
the happiness of a few privileged people by the misery of the great
majority, a society which profits by this misery and maintains it. Then
I realized that a number of those ideas which I had accepted and
which I had considered acceptable, which my thoughts dwelt on, had
only been formed by virtue of this inequality and were
themselve~
part of a system which seemed to me indefensible. I did not condemn
these ideas out of hand, for to some of them I owed my art and
whatever in my eyes justified my existence; but at least they seemed
suspect to me and I began to look askance at them and particularly
those which flattered my class, those in which the bourgeois
clas
could find support, comfort, and justification.
My most critical attention was reserved for those concepts from
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