De Profundis, Oscar Wilde [great novels to read .txt] 📗

De Profundis

 

by Oscar Wilde

 

… Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by

seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.

With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to

circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a

life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable

pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel

at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron

formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in

the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate

itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence

is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers

bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the

vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms

or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know

nothing.

 

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very

sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and

gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled

glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is

grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is

always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no

less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that

you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is

happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow.

Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I

am writing, and in this manner writing… .

 

A week later, I am transferred here. Three more months go over and

my mother dies. No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her.

Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have

no words in which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my

father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured,

not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the

public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I

had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word

among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had

given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools

that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered

then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.

My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should

hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was, all

the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of

so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss. Messages of sympathy

reached me from all who had still affection for me. Even people

who had not known me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had

broken into my life, wrote to ask that some expression of their

condolence should be conveyed to me… .

 

Three months go over. The calendar of my daily conduct and labour

that hangs on the outside of my cell door, with my name and

sentence written upon it, tells me that it is May… .

 

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common

in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.

There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which

sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The

thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the

direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It

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 in holy ground. Some day people will

realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they

do, - and natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down

from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, -

waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd,

whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might

gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I

passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than

that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the

saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss

the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single word to him

about what he did. I do not know to the present moment whether he

is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a

thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I

store it in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a

secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It

is embalmed and kept sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears.

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. When people are

able to understand, not merely how beautiful -‘s action was, but

why it meant so much to me, and always will mean so much, then,

perhaps, they will realise how and in what spirit they should

approach me… .

 

The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than

we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man’s life, a

misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in

others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is ‘in

trouble’ simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the

expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of

our own rank it is different. With us, prison makes a man a

pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air and sun.

Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome when

we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us.

Our very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity

are broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still

live. We are denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us,

that might bring balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul

in pain… .

 

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or

small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to

say so. I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the

present moment. This pitiless indictment I bring without pity

against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I

did to myself was far more terrible still.

 

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture

of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my

manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men

hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so

acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the

historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have

passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made

others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations

were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine

were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue,

of larger scope.

 

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured

into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself

with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded

myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the

spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me

a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went

to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox

was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the

sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness,

or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure

where it pleased me, and passed on. 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 housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I

was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I

allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.

There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.

 

I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has

come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to

look at; terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish

that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was

dumb. I have passed through every possible mood of suffering.

Better than Wordsworth himself I know what Wordsworth meant when he

said -

 

‘Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark

And has the nature of infinity.’

 

But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my

sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without

meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something

that 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: the ultimate

discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh

development. It has come to me right out of myself, so I know that

it has come at the proper time. It could not have come before, nor

later. Had any one told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had

it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I

want to keep it. I must do so. It is the one thing that has in it

the elements of life, of a new life, VITA NUOVA for me. Of all

things it is the strangest. One cannot acquire it, except by

surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost

all things, that one knows that one possesses it.

 

Now I have realised that it is in me, I see quite clearly what I

ought