De Profundis

In my last post, I described being gloriously duped by approaching texts with humility, from the view that they have something to teach me. One of the works I've most loved is the best letter ever written: De Profundis. And I may even mean better than Paul's pointy letters to the Ephesians. [Guys, I may need help with Paul because all I think of is "do this, don't do that,remember this." way to kill the gospel, mate.] This letter was written in the depths of human despair, but rather than contorting hatred to deal with such pain, there is poignant, poignant in the very sense of the word, love.

Oscar Wilde fell in love with an old school fellow, "Bosie" who was a sociopath: Bosie got in a fight with his dad, and Bosie's dad threw O.W. into prison in a legal scuttle. Bosie has not written or visited O.W. since the trial, and in the midst of the silence, O.W. writes the most heartbreakingly beautiful letter you will ever read. Here are some quotes, which maybe spoilers: you are forewarned.

-The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself
- I blame myself for allowing an unintellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things
-Now and then it is a joy to have one's table red with wine and roses
-for formal courtesies will strain a close friendship- but simply the grace of sweet companionship, the charm of pleasant conversation..., and all those gentle humanities that make life lovely...
- I was made for other things
- I had always thought that my giving up to you in small things meant nothing that when a great moment arrived I could myself re-assert my will power in its natural superiority. It was not so.
-Failure is to form habits
-Ethically you had been even still more destructive to me than you had been artistically
-Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation
-It was only in the mire that we met
-It was necessary for me to be a little by myself
-Suffering--curious as it may sound to you-- is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence of our continued identity.
-So much in this place do men live by pain that my friendship with you, in the way through which I am forced to remember it, appears to me always as a prelude with those varying modes of anguish which day I have to realise
-It was not the first time I had been obliged to save you from yourself
-I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it
-It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving. But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place.
-To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominant by law, is the eternal paradox of human life
-In you hate was always stronger than love
-Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole: by which and by which alone we can understand other in their real as in their ideal relation. Only what is fine and finely conceived can feed love.
-Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your character, was entirely the result of the hate that lived in you
-The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable. An unreasonable moment may be one's finest. They are due to man's being logical.
-The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is right.
-Everything must come to one out of one's own nature.
-At all costs, I must keep love in my heart. If I go into prison without love what will become of my soul?
-But love does not traffic in a market place, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, life the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of love is to love. no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had give you my life: and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, Hatred and Vanity and Greed, you had thrown it away. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you. I knew that if I allowed myself to hate you that in the dry desert of existence over which I had to travel and am travelling still, every rock would lost its shadow, every palm tree be withered, every well of water prove poisoned at its source.

-But the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily through them
-Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only records its moods, and chronicle their return.
-Only youth has a right to crown an artist.
-It [sorrow] is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain
-Where there is sorrow there is holy ground
-When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity: made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world [ a man tipped is his hat to him while he sat in a prison cell]
-why literature is, and has been and always will remain the supreme representative art
-I would have written to you in season and out of season in the hope that some mere phrase, some single word, some broken echo even, of love might reach you.
-I knew you had feet of clay.
-Only one whose life is without stain of any kind can forgive sins.
-Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation
- I grew careless of the lives of others
- I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops
-There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility
-Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something tat tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility.
-It is the last thing left in me, and the best
-One cannot acquire it except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one known that one possesses it.
-And the first thing that I have got to do is to keep myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world.
-I have arrived-or am arriving rather, for the journey is long, and 'where I walk there are thorns.'
-When you really want love, you will find it waiting for you.
-There is not a single degradation of the body [prison dress, work, food, etc.] which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul

-It is to absorb into my nature all that bas been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear, or reluctance.
-It is only be realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind
-To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development
-The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.
-Then I must learn how to be happy
-I tried to be as cheerful as possible, and to show my cheerfulness, in order to make them some slight return for their trouble in coming all the way from town to see me
-Sorrow, then, and all this it teaches one, is my new world.
-But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask
-there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality
-For the secret of life is suffering
-I remember talking once on this subject to one of the most beautiful personalities I have ever known... a suggestion of what one might become as well as real help towards becoming it; a soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea
-Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world
-if the world has been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the should of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul
-We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time
-hearts are made to be broken
-for in life as in art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and shuts out the airs of heaven..
-I must be filled with joy if my feet are on the right road and my face set towards 'the gate which is called beautiful', though I may fall many time in the mire and often lose my way
-At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol
-For the artistic life is simple self-development. Humility in the artist if his frank acceptance of all experiences, just as love in the artist is imply the sense of beauty that reveals to the world its body and its soul
-The man who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself
-There was nothing that either Plato of Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there finds its complete fulfilment
-But the very basis of his [Christ's] nature was the same as that of the nature of the artist-- an intense and flamelike imagination. He realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. He understood the leprosy of the leper.
-He wakes in us the temper of wonder
-One always thinks of him as a young bridegroom with his companions, as indeed he somewhere describes himself; as a shepherd straying through a valley with his sheep in search of green meadow or cool stream; as a singer trying to build out of the music the walls of the City of God; or as a lover for whose love the whole world was too small
-He is the leader of all the lovers. He saw that love was the first secret of the world for which the wise men had been looking, and that it was only through love that one could approach either the heart of the leper of the feet of God
-It is man's soul that Christ is always looking for. He calls it 'God's Kingdom', and finds it in every one.
-Most people are other people... their lives is a mimicry
-Christ was not merely the supreme individualist... but he has far more pity for the rich
-that there was no difference at all between the lives of others and one's own life
-Since his coming, the history of each separate individual, is, or can be made, the history of the world
-Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.
-the great sins of the world take place in the brain
- I see also that to Christ imagination was simply a form of love, and that to him love was lord in the fullest meaning of the phrase
-If any love is shown to us we should recognize that we are quite unworthy of it. Nobody is worthy to be loved.
-Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling
-Those whom he saved from their sins are saved simply for beautiful moments in their lives.
-All that Christ says to us by the way of a little warning is that every moment should be beautiful, that the soul should always be ready for the coming of the bridegroom, always waiting for the voice of the lover
-That is because the imagination is simply a manifestation of love, and it is love and the capacity for it that distinguishes one human being from another
-He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something
- I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things
-For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it
- I would not care about being loved on false pretences
- A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.
-It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution

LOVE to you all