Abstract

Quixotic Platonism

The article presents information about the book "Preface to a Life," by Zona Gale. The hero of Miss Gale's new novel, Bernard Mead loves abstractions better than their concrete embodiments. Mead loves honor more. And so he forces the woman he loves, and who loves him, to live lonely all her life so that he can also force himself and the woman he marries to live equally lonely and unloved. He embraces for his life, the lumber business that he hates, because he has permitted his dying father to extort from him a promise to do so. And about the time he reaches fifty-one he seems to the neighbors to go to pieces. People sometimes do. And it almost seems as if Mead, in trying to pierce too abruptly through appearances to reality, assaults the life he has denied.