@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.
3 posts
Kept by Substance · the quoted lines are theirs, the rest written after them · De Profundis
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“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.