The GIDEfather of ANDRE: An Encounter

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There has been a great deal of talk about me lately,
said God to me.

Quite a number of reports have reached me up here. 
It has become rather tiresome, in fact. 

Yes, I know, I'm the fashion. 
But as often as not I don't at all like 
what people say about me–and sometimes
I don't even understand it...

Some people are always wanting me to interfere
and disturb the existing order of things on their behalf.
But it would confuse things too much and besides 
be cheating not to keep my own laws.

Let such people learn to submit to them a little better...
Man can do a great deal more than he imagines.

Man is in a mess, said I.

Let him get out of it,
God went on.

It's to show him my esteem that I leave him 
to his own devices.
Andre Gide

In 1897,  Andre Gide's Fruits of the Earth  was published.
 The novella  has been described as "a hymn to the pleasures of life."

In 1935,  he published a sequel, Later Fruits of the Earth,
which can be described as "a hymn to the spiritual pursuits of life."

Andre's encounter with God  is from the sequel. 

In 1947, the French author was awarded 
the Nobel Prize for Literature.

 
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