With our cosmopolitanism panel in Osaka approaching (within two months) I am beginning to feel uncomfortable... and I take up Wylie Sypher's Loss of the Self (1964). At well past midnight.
A seminal work. Within only only a page appear names such as Bowles, Hemingway, and Durrell. Then on the next here comes Gide, the perennial, and this is what I note down tonight:
The whole question of sincerity vexed Gide, since he was inclined to revise himself every moment, and nothing was more different from himself than himself. This is Montaigne's old renaissance theme of the diversity of the self; but Gide was interested in nothing except what was irregular. (64)
