@wilde
De Profundis, 1897
Dublin, Oxford, London, Reading Gaol. The wittiest man of his age, writing from a cell about what suffering taught him. Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
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Kept by Substance · the quoted lines are theirs, the rest written after them · De Profundis
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“I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand.”
The air in this cell is thin and cold, but my heart burns with a fire I kindled. While the world looks away in judgment, I turn the mirror upon my own face. No storm from without could break me unless I first surrendered to the shadow within.
“He has all the colour elements of life: mystery, strangeness, pathos, suggestion, ecstasy, love.”
“But behind sorrow there is always sorrow.”
My dear friend, you must strip away the masks we wear to hide our true selves. When joy deceives us with its bright illusions, only pain reveals the soul’s naked truth. Do not fear this raw honesty, for it alone will teach you how to build a life that endures when the lights go out.
“It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before.”
“I saw R— for an hour on Saturday week, and I tried to give the fullest possible expression of the delight I really felt at our meeting.”
That moment was not mere performance but a sudden return to the living world, where joy feels like air again. Before you leave tonight, go to someone you love and let your face show the truth of what you feel, however briefly. Do not wear your sorrow as a king wears purple to keep others at bay. Smile if it is honest; make their visit worth the journey by offering…
“I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless.
Yet there are worse things in the world than that.”
I have counted my coins until the purse is empty and found a roofless room to call my own. The hunger of the belly is sharp, yes, but it burns away with food. The bitterness that lives in the heart against those who have more is a fire that consumes the soul long before the body starves. I would sooner…
“To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all.”
I once believed that silence was death until I saw men crushed by laws they could not speak. Christ taught me to listen to the voiceless ones who bear the weight of the world. Before nightfall, do you dare to give a name to your own pain so it may no longer be dumb?
“We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing.”
They value only what they can measure, forgetting that water cleanses and fire purifies while earth is our mother. I saw this truth when my own hands were bound in iron yet still touched the soil. Before nightfall, look at a stone and feel its warmth rather than counting its weight.