“You know already what Hate is. Is it beginning to dawn on you what Love is, and what is the nature of Love? It is not too late for you to learn, though to teach it to you I may have had to go to a convict’s cell”.

jesus fucking christ. ( )

Oscar Wilde found himself in prison in 1895 on what amounted to a charge of homosexuality. From there he wrote this eighty page letter to the primary cause, a young Lord Alfred Douglas. As Wilde characterizes it, he had always empathized with Douglas but could not shake him loose as a hanger-on and leech, who introduced on his time as an artist and spent his money in a profligate manner. Reading between the lines - and more explicitly at the end - love played a factor in the relationship.

Reading gave me the discomforting feeling at times of being the third wheel in a room filled with the cacophony of a fight between two lovers. We can't hear Lord Alfred Douglas' whining defence, but it isn't difficult to imagine. Some relationships are like a sea lamprey and a fish. Oscar Wilde was the fish in this case, but one of the most articulate fish imaginable, and when he set pen to paper in the jail cell he occupied he did not hold back. He must have had an amazing memory, or been hurt indeed, to recall so many exact dates and details in his litany. He retained a strong streak of pride while he accepted some measure of the blame for the outcome. It was his foremost concern, however, to ascertain whether Douglas accepted his.

In the later half, Wilde ruminates upon the importance of accepting his fate if he is to carry on, and addresses the story of Christ as a model. Speaking as a man of little faith myself, I got more than I bargained for here. Wilde's argument is compelling. He says that even if you were to take Jesus as merely a man, consider how his story of sacrifice for all the world's sins - past, present, future, in all that enormity - outshines any plot Shakespeare could invent. Wilde writes that Jesus was an individualist, not merely an altruist. His was not the message of self-sacrifice for others that appears on the surface. It was a message about saving one's own soul, however you define it. Jesus pitied the rich as much as the poor. He urged them to give of themselves not to help others, but to save themselves from what their wealth was doing to them. I find that take fascinating, less guilt-laden and more respectable than the norm. ( )

Wilde’s letter to Lord Alfred Douglas (known affectionately as the l’enfant terrible Bosie), penned during his incarceration and hard labour at Reading Gaol for ‘gross indecency’ (or homosexuality), is more than a contemplation of a relationship fated for demise, or the irreparable ruins of his life. With sharp turns of wit specifically Wildean, its beginnings are laced with the elegance of bitterness, where candour relates Douglas’ cruel ambivalence and hedonistic whims. Exposed amidst is the one-sidedness of devotion abound the insatiable material excesses of this doomed affair. The extravagant wining-and-dining and the monetary support Wilde provided, whereas Bosie remain vain and self-indulgent, are recollected in detail. As such, Wilde doesn’t mince words. Even a person with the highest pain tolerance will wreathe and flinch after reading such paragraphs:

"Your defect was not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew so much." (p4)

"Between myself and the memory of joy lies a gulf no less deep than that between myself and joy in its actuality. Had our life together been as the world fancied it to be, one simply of pleasure, profligacy and laughter, I would not be able to recall a single passage in it. It is because it was full of moments and days tragic, bitter, sinister in their warnings, dull or dreadful in their monotonous scenes and unseemly violences, that I can see or hear each separate incident in its detail, can indeed see or hear little else." (p22)

"I need not ask you what influence I had over you. You know I had none. It was one of your frequent boasts that I had none, and the only one indeed that was well-founded. What was there, as a mere matter of fact, in you that I could influence? Your brain? It was underdeveloped. Your imagination? It was dead. Your heart? It was not yet born." (p122)

Every page of De Profundis is fraught with impassioned hurt, set ablaze by a feverish, forbidden, rotten romance which destroyed Wilde’s marriage, dissolved his parental rights, and damaged his reputation. It also effaced his identity in ways that only such a relationship effaces: in only thinking of and for itself. Towards the end, Wilde seeks consolation in things his mind and heart can continue to hold—spirituality, nature, art and literature, even imprisonment itself. Partly generous this is on examining the workings Art too:

"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." (p94)

"In art good intentions are not the smallest of value. All bad art is the result of good intentions." (p115)

But, perhaps, its most universally resonant and poignant surmise—besides the solace Art bestow and the soul-aching after of any relationship—is the immense capacity of such a love to give. And in this giving, there is often the lost self, there is often sorrow. So Wilde mulls, "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." (p82) If so, sorrow, perhaps, can be alchemised to strength, just as love can spring from it.

Society wronged some of its brilliant individuals throughout history. This case is no different. For Wilde to be only posthumously pardoned around 5 years ago only affirms his remark, that the road to the abolishment of homosexuality as a crime is a "road long and red with monstrous martyrdoms." (excerpt from his letter to early homosexual law reform campaigner, George Cecil Ives) ( )

Clearly, prison time was wasted on the author, sorry, Author. Pages upon pages of resentment, spite, anger and bitterness, especially bitterness. I read the history behind it after reading the book and it makes Wilde look rather bad and the claimed humility looks even more fake in its light. ( )

Pitched somewhere between a personal essay and a prose poem, this book, or at least this edition of this book, is one of limited virtue, e.g., the occasional deployment of Wilde's masterful prose, mostly at the book's beginning and at its end, when he narrates his public humiliation and imprisonment near the end of his life. The middle portion of the book is taken up almost entirely by his paean to the Christ; his reflections thereon are somewhere between fanciful and ridiculous. Since the topic which was the reason that two people recommended this book to me is nowhere addressed, I have to assume that this is an abridgement, perhaps issued for purposes of Christian proselytizing, as the book's content here is almost entirely taken up with flimsy apologetics. This homebrew Makerspace edition is replete with typos, capitalization where italics are called for, and omission of the several passages from non-Roman alphabets. ( )