I hadn’t appreciated quite to what extent until I visited Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum after reading Laura Cumming’s transcendent memoir Thunderclap.
She wrote — lovingly, evocatively — of lesser-known Dutch painters. When I encountered some of them in the small, warm-lit rooms of the museum it was with a thrill of recognition, even affection. Her words added depths to the two visible dimensions and my appreciation was richer and broader for being better informed.
Informed reading is equally enlightening. Knowing (even a bit) about a writer’s life, context and preoccupations adds texture and meaning; instead of surface, we can savour all that lies beneath.
Today, I’ll be leading a brief guided tour through an excerpt from Oscar Wilde’s prison epistle De Profundis (thanks to Project Gutenberg for the online text).
My A-Level English Language students study this text, and it is always a delight to pore over. Though Wilde is better known for the spiky wit and coruscating word play of The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere’s Fan, etc. De Profundis is more affecting and no less a literary gem.
To delve into the layers of meaning, we’ll begin with an introduction to its context, then dive into Wilde’s unmistakeable words.
(Those of you who follow WTS will know this is the first post of its kind on Write To Success, so please forebear any rough patches).
Below is the text that I’ll analyze in the video — read it yourself first (preferably aloud) to get a feel for its tone and rhythm.
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 flâneur, 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 want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply, and without affectation that the two great turning-points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison. I will not say that prison is the best thing that could have happened to me: for that phrase would savour of too great bitterness towards myself. I would sooner say, or hear it said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity’s sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good.
What is said, however, by myself or by others, matters little. The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed, marred, and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear, or reluctance. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.
Please do share your thoughts on De Profundis, and/or this video, in the comments!
