DE PROFUNDIS: OSCAR WILDE ON LOVE

 

 
 De Profundisis a long letter written by Oscar Wilde in 1897.

Oscar Wilde wrote this letter while he was jailed for sodomy and the addressee of this letter is Lord Alfred Douglas, Bosie, his lover.

However, their love story is not idyllic. Wilde describes Alfred as a man who used him just for money.

Lord Douglas was fascinated by luxury, he always wanted to eat in elegant restaurants, he liked buying new expensive clothes, and he was fond of gambling. Because of his life style, he had many debts. Therefore, Oscar Wilde often paid  since he loved him.

The writer understood that Alfred had a bad influence on him and his art, so he tried more than once to distance himself, but every time he didn’t succeed.

“Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster’s scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and the most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view.”

Therefore, through this letter Oscar Wilde wants to refelct on and analyse his relationship with Alfred.

He describes Alfred as blinded with hatred. Because of that, he could not recognise love nor give it. His hate destroyed love, which Wilde tried to give him.

“Hatred is, considered intellectually, eternal denial. Considered from the point of view of emotions, he is a form of atrophy, and kills everything but himself”

So, he starts reflecting about love. According to him, the ability of Love is to create. Indeed, it is fed by Imagination. Through this, the world was made. Consequently, the Earth was created by the hands of Love.

“He sees all the lovely influences of life as modes of light: the imagination itself is the world of light. The world made by it, and yet the world cannot understand it: that is because the imagination is simply a manifestation of love, and it is love and the capacity for it that distinguishes one human being from another.”

Moreover, Love is important since, through it, we can become a better human beings. Love has the ability to elevate the human soul because it feeds only on pure things. Instead, hatred feeds on everything, pure or not, and destroys everything but itself.

“Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed love. But anything will feed hate”

Therefore, he understands that Love is necessary in his life: his art comes to life thanks to Imagination.

“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live”

Because of this, he cannot feel hate: there is no place in his heart for both Hate and Love. In fact, the aim of this letter is taken distance from Hatred. To do it, he has to forgive Alfred who has abandoned him once he was involved in the scandal which led to his imprisonment.

“I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you”

Moreover, he reflects on his life before his imprisonment. He figures out that he spent his life chasing any form of pleasure. He does not regret it: he regrets that he chased only pleasure. He tried nothing but pleasure.

“I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall:- all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for season, indeed, no other food at all.”

Therefore, he has to taste failure, disgrace, poverty and sorrow in the same time. But, he comprehends that this experience is important for his growth. Maybe the most important. 

“When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else- the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the season, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver- would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

Sorrow becomes something sacred to him. In fact, through this, he can admire everything around him and, above all, love, which his friends give him. 

“Where there is sorrow there is holy ground”

Therefore, by Sorrow, we can welcome Love in our hearts. Doing that, we can become wiser humans.

“While the resolution of being a better man is an experimental and hypocritical act; to have become, instead, more deeply man is the privilege of those who have suffered”

So, according to him, Sorrow is important because, through this, we can comprehend what Love is.

“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. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hand of Love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection.                                                             

Angelica Tozzi, 5sc B