Dangerous Acquaintances [antikvár]

PRUFACl] TO DANGEROUS ACQUAINTANCES BY AlVDB^ GIDE JFhat a tremendous hook! Tackling it afresh., as I have just done, the first thing I realise is how vivid and detailed are my recollections of my first reading of it, forty years ago?- At the same time I am more than ever convinced of the importance of a work that can leave such traces on the memory, and certain that I had by no means overestimated its beauty or its greatness. To look back over a scene already familiar is often more profitable than to survey new countries of the mind. It is ourselves that have changed, not the landscape. Comparing our later reaction with our memories of the old, we realise this change in ourselves, and are fortunate if it is a sign of maturity and not merely of the weariness and repugnance of old age. And so, every summer, I read over again a few great books, books sanctified by the admiration of several generations, to find in them, almost always, virtues unseen before. I appreciate them no less than I did at the first reading, though not always for the same reasons as then. I turn back also to some that I admire less, or not at all, in the desire to make certain whether the grounds on which others admire them are well founded, whether my own reasons for being deaf to their appeal are really sound ones. I have very little use for conventional pieties, and insist on my right to hold nothing as established unless I have first of all put it to the test for myself. Well, Laclos' book stands the test. Re-reading it confirms my view of its importance, and convinces me that it well deserves to be held in high esteem. ' The respectability, the standardised outlooli, the virtuous prosiness of conventional literature filled me with such a degree of distaste that at the age of thirty I welcomed Dangerous Acquaintances with enormous satisfaction, a thrill of deep-seated deliglit. At last I was getting off the beaten track! At last I had found something I could talk to!