Part 1 (1/2)

De Profundis

by Oscar Wilde

DE PROFUNDIS

Suffering is one very long moment We cannot divide it by seasons

We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return With us tiress It revolves It see iulated 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-tirape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blosso and can know nothing

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow The very sun and old, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-lass of the srey 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 ti ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to ain to- morrow Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I a

A week later, I ao over and my mother dies No one kne deeply I loved and honoured her Her death was terrible to e, have no words in which to express uish and my shame She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not y, and science, but in the public history of raced that na low people I had dragged it through the very ht ht 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 fros of so irreparable, so irrees of sympathy reached me from all who had still affection forthat a new sorrow had broken into my life, wrote to ask that some expression of their condolence should be conveyed to o over The calendar of s 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, rain and common in fibre, but sorrow is thethat stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation The thin beaten-out leaf of treold 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 h not in pain

Where there is sorrow there in holy ground Some day people will realise what thatof 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 police dreary corridor that, before the whole crohoht gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed his 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 lad 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: ht me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harreat 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 alill 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, edy in athat 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 ht to air and sun Our presence taints the pleasures of others We are unwelcolimpses 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 thatbalm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain

I reat or small can be ruined except by his own hand I ah they may not think it at the present ainst myself Terrible as hat the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still

I was a man who stood in sye I had realised this for e to realise it afterwards Few men hold such a position in their own lifetied It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the e have passed away With me it was different I felt it ure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion Mine were to so er scope

The Gods had givenspells of senseless and sensual ease I a a _flaneur_, a dandy, a man of fashi+on I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the enius, and to waste an eternal youth gave hts, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation What the paradox was to ht, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion Desire, at the end, was a rew careless of the lives of others I took pleasure where it pleased ot 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 er the captain of my soul, and did not know it I allowed pleasure to dorace There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility

I have lain in prison for nearly two years Out of rief that was piteous even to look at; terrible and iuish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was du Better than Wordsworth himself I knohat Wordsworthis permanent, obscure, and dark And has the nature of infinity'

But while there were tis were to be endless, I could not bear the Now I find hidden so in the whole world ishidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Hu left in me, and the best: the ulti-point for a fresh developht 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 ht to me, I would have refused it As I found it, I want to keep it Ithat has in it the elements of life, of a new life, _Vita Nuova_ for est 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 ht to do; in fact, must do And when I use such a phrase as that, I need not say that I a to any external sanction or command I admit none I a seeets out of oneself My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation That is all I aot to do is to free ainst the world

I am completely penniless, and absolutely hos in the world than that I ao out froainst the world, I would gladly and readily begfro at the house of the poor Those who have reedy; those who have little always share I would not a bit rass in su myself by the warreat barn, provided I had love in s of life seem to me now of no importance at all You can see to what intensity of individualis rather, for the journey is long, and 'where I walk there are thorns'

Of course I know that to ask alhway is not to be ht-tio out of prison, R--- will be waiting for ate, and he is the symbol, not merely of his own affection, but of the affection of h to live on for about eighteen months at any rate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I reater? After that, I hope to be able to recreate s different: had I not a friend left in the world; were there not a single house open to ed cloak of sheer penury: as long as I am free from all resentment, hardness and scorn, I would be able to face the life with much more calm and confidence than I would were my body in purple and fine linen, and the soul within me sick with hate

And I really shall have no difficulty When you really want love you will find it waiting for you

I need not say that my task does not end there It would be comparatively easy if it did There is much more before me I have hills far steeper to cliet it all out of ion, morality, nor reason can help me at all

Morality does not help me I am a born antinomian I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is so in what one becoion does not help ive to what one can touch, and look at My Gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who _cannot_ believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one ht call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, ht celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice eion