De Profundis

By Oscar Wilde

Renowned as a wit, poet, dramatist and one of the great conversationalists of his age, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) nevertheless fell victim to the forces of repression and prudery in late Victorian England. As a result of his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde was found guilty of homosexual offenses and jailed for two years.
While in prison, he wrote De Profundis, a long and bitter letter of recrimination addressed to Douglas. In it, he accuses Douglas of shallowness, selfishness, greed, gross interference with his [Wilde's] artistic efforts and other faults and wrongdoing. Nevertheless, it is clear from this letter that Wilde deeply loved Douglas and still harbored strong feelings for him, in spite of Douglas' role in Wilde's downfall. While the letter is a touching cri de coeur that offers fascinating insights into Wilde's life in prison and the background and psychology of a notorious affair, its eloquence, passion, and literary excellence raise it above the level of the purely personal. Instead, it becomes a universal statement about love, injustice and the pain of living in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Mar 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9780486159713

Oscar Wilde

Born in Ireland in 1856, Oscar Wilde was a noted essayist, playwright, fairy tale writer and poet, as well as an early leader of the Aesthetic Movement. His plays include: An Ideal Husband, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, and Lady Windermere's Fan. Among his best known stories are The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Canterville Ghost.

Book preview

e9780486159713_cover.jpge9780486159713_i0001.jpge9780486159713_i0002.jpg

At Dover Publications we’re committed to producing books in an earth-friendly manner and to helping our customers make greener choices.

Manufacturing books in the United States ensures compliance with strict environmental laws and eliminates the need for international freight shipping, a major contributor to global air pollution. And printing on recycled paper helps minimize our consumption of trees, water and fossil fuels.

The text and cover of this book were printed on paper made with post-consumer waste. At Dover, we use Environmental Defense’s Paper Calculator to measure the benefits of these choices, including: the number of trees saved, gallons of water conserved, as well as air emissions and solid waste eliminated.

Courier Corporation, the manufacturer of this book, owns the Green Edition Trademark.

Please visit the product page for this book at www.doverpublications.com to see a detailed

account of the environmental savings we’ve achieved over the life of this book.

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

GENERAL EDITOR: STANLEY APPELBAUM

Copyright

Copyright © 1996 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 1996, is an unaltered, unabridged republication of the work as printed in a standard text. A new Note has been written specially for the present edition, and additional footnotes have been prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900.

De profundis / Oscar Wilde.

p. cm.—(Dover thrift editions)

Unaltered, unabridged republication of the work as printed in a standard text with a new note and additional footnotes.

9780486159713

I. Title. II. Series.

PS5818.D3 1996

826’.8—dc20

96-41693

CIP

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

29308403

www.doverpublications.com

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Note

EPISTOLA: IN CARCERE ET VINCULIS

Note

IN 1895, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was at the apex of his fame. Two of his plays, The Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were playing concurrently in extremely successful London productions. A novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, had shocked the public (as its author had intended) on its publication in book form in 1891, and two earlier works for the stage, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and A Woman of No Importance (1893), had solidly established Wilde as a major dramatist.

In 1891 Wilde had met Lord Alfred Douglas, scion of one of the great aristocratic families of Scotland. The two were soon involved in an intense, profoundly neurotic homosexual affair. Wilde and Douglas were hardly discreet, and it was not long before Douglas’ feather, the Marquess of Queensberry, learned of the situation and began to plague Wilde. Finally, Wilde was goaded into a libel suit against the Marquess—a totally misguided action, for during the course of the trial, in the spring of 1895, so many unsavory aspects of Wilde’s conduct came to light that the Marquess was acquitted.

Now the situation had reversed itself, and Wilde was placed on trial for immoral behavior. The first jury failed to reach a verdict, but the second trial resulted in a conviction, Wilde being sentenced to two years at hard labor, most of it spent at Reading Gaol. There Wilde, the aesthete, was forced to live in brutally hard conditions. It was in Reading, between January and March 1897, that Wilde wrote a long letter of bitter complaint to Bosie (as Lord Alfred was known), in which the poet held him responsible for the dissipation of his talents and his personal ruin and bankruptcy. Titled De Profundis, the document had a long and tortuous history of publication. Although its tone is often querulous, and Wilde at times seems to revel in his new social status as a pariah, it nevertheless provides significant insights into the mind of one of the most original writers in the English language.

Released in 1897, Wilde left England permanently for the Continent, settling in France. He wrote one more important work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), but his creative power was spent. He died in Paris on November 30, 1900.

EPISTOLA: IN CARCERE ET VINCULIS¹

H.M. Prison,

Reading.

DEAR BOSIE,²—After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain.

Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness and contempt should forever take the place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me: and you yourself will, I think, feel in your heart that to write to me as I lie in the loneliness of prison life is better than to publish my letters without my permission or to dedicate poems to me unasked, though the world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or passion, of remorse or indifference you may choose to send as your answer or your appeal.

I have no doubt that in this letter which I have to write of your life and of mine, of the past and of the future, of sweet things changed to bitterness and of bitter things that may be turned into joy, there will be much that will wound your vanity to the quick. If it prove so, read the letter over and over again till it kills your vanity. If you find in it something of which you feel that you are unjustly accused, remember that one should be thankful that there is any fault of which one can be unjustly accused. If there be in it one single passage that brings tears to your eyes, weep as we weep in prison where the day no less than the night is set apart for tears. It is the only thing that can save you. If you go complaining to your mother, as you did with reference to the scorn of you I displayed in my letter to Robbie,³ so that she may flatter and soothe you back into self-complacency or conceit, you will be completely lost. If you find one false excuse for yourself you will soon find a hundred, and be just what you were before. Do you still say, as you said to Robbie in your answer, that I ‘attribute unworthy motives’ to you? Ah! you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely. A motive is an intellectual aim. That you were ‘very young’ when our friendship began? Your defect was not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew so much. The morning dawn of boyhood with its delicate bloom, its clear pure light, its joy of innocence and expectation you had left far behind. With very swift and running feet you had passed from Romance to Realism. The gutter and the things that live in it had begun to fascinate you. That was the origin of the trouble in which you sought my aid, and I, unwisely according to the wisdom of this world, out of pity and kindness, gave it to you. You must read this letter right through, though each word may become to you as the fire or knife of the surgeon that makes the delicate flesh burn or bleed. Remember that the fool to the eyes of the gods and the fool to the eyes of man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant of the modes of art in its revelation or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the vowelled Greek, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song, may yet be full of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You have been such a one too long. Be so no more. Do not be afraid. The supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realised is right. Remember also that whatever is misery to you to read, is still greater misery to me to set down. To you the Unseen Powers have been very good. They have permitted you to see the strange and tragic shapes of life as one sees shadows in a crystal. The head of Medusa that turns living men to stone, you have been allowed to look at in a mirror merely. You yourself have walked free among the flowers. From me the beautiful world of colour and motion has been taken away.

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. As I sit here in this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame myself. In the perturbed and fitful nights of anguish, in the long monotonous days of pain, it is myself I blame. I blame myself for allowing an unintellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, entirely to dominate my life. From the very first there was too wide a gap between us. You had been idle at your school, worse than idle at your university. You did not realise that an artist, and especially such an artist as I am, one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends on the intensification of personality, requires for the development of his art the companionship of ideas, and intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace and solitude. You admired my work when it was finished: you enjoyed the brilliant successes of my first nights, and the brilliant banquets that followed them: you were proud, and quite naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so distinguished: but you could not understand the conditions requisite for the production of artistic work. I am not speaking in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never wrote one single line. Whether at Torquay, Goring, London, Florence, or elsewhere, my life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile and uncreative. And with but few intervals you were, I regret to say, by my side always.

I remember, for instance, in September 1893, to select merely one instance out of many, taking a set of chambers, purely in order to work undisturbed, as I had broken my contract with John Hare for whom I had promised to write a play and who was pressing me on the subject. During the first week you kept away. We had, not unnaturally indeed, differed on the question of the artistic value of your translation of Salomé. So you contented yourself with sending me foolish letters on the subject. In that week I wrote and completed in every detail, as it was ultimately performed, the first act of An Ideal Husband. The second week you returned and my work practically had to be given up. I arrived at St. James’s Place every morning at 11.30 in order to have the opportunity of thinking and writing without the interruption inseparable from my own household, quiet and peaceful as that household was. But the attempt was vain. At 12 o’clock you drove up and stayed smoking cigarettes and chattering till 1.30, when I had to take you out to luncheon at the Café Royal or the Berkeley. Luncheon with its liqueurs lasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired to White’s. At tea-time you appeared again and stayed till it was time to dress for dinner. You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street.⁴ We did not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper at Willis’s had to wind up the entrancing day. That was my life for those three months, every single day, except during the four days when you went abroad. I then, of course, had to go over to Calais to fetch you back. For one of my nature and temperament it was a position at once grotesque and tragic.

You surely must realise that now. You must see now that your incapacity for being alone: your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the attention and time of others: your lack of any power of sustained intellectual concentration: the unfortunate accident—for I like to think it was no more—that you had not yet been able to acquire the ‘Oxford temper’ in intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play gracefully with ideas but had arrived at violence of opinion merely—that all these things, combined with the fact that your desires and your interests were in Life not in Art, were as destructive to your own progress in culture as they were to my work as an artist. When I compare my friendship with you to my friendship with such still younger men as John Gray and Pierre Louÿs I feel ashamed. My real life, my higher life was with them and such as them.

Of the appalling results of my friendship with you I don’t speak at present. I am thinking merely of its quality while it lasted. It was intellectually degrading to me. You had the rudiments of an artistic temperament in its germ. But I met you either too late or too soon, I don’t know which. When you were away I was all right. The moment, in the early December of the year to which I have been alluding, I had succeeded in inducing your mother to send you out of England, I collected again the torn and ravelled web of my imagination, got my life back into my own hands, and not merely finished the three remaining acts of An Ideal Husband but conceived and had almost completed two other plays of a completely different type, the Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane, when suddenly, unbidden, unwelcome, and under circumstances fatal to my happiness, you returned. The two works left then imperfect I was unable to take up again. The mood that created them I could never recover. You now, having yourself published a volume of verse, will be able to recognise the truth of everything I have said here. Whether you can or not, it remains as a hideous truth in the very heart of our friendship. While you were with me you were the absolute ruin of my art, and in allowing you to stand persistently between Art and myself I give to myself shame and blame in the fullest degree. You couldn’t know, you couldn’t understand, you couldn’t appreciate. I had no right to expect it of you at all. Your interests were merely in your meals and moods. Your desires were simply for amusements, for ordinary or less ordinary pleasures. They were what your temperament needed, or thought it needed for the

Reviews for De Profundis

[gbill_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The end of Oscar Wilde’s life was so sad it makes me shiver to think about. The world was his oyster, and he was a highly successful playwright and wit at the height of his powers when he was convicted of “gross indecency”, and then sentenced to two years in prison. Humiliated, jeered at by crowds, not allowed to read or write for portions of his imprisonment, scrubbing floors and performing other menial tasks so ridiculously beneath such a brilliant, eloquent mind, losing his children as well as a lot of weight, suffering injuries that would later contribute to his early death, and becoming a pauper – all for essentially being gay. How appropriate to have bought this book in Dublin after seeing the Pride parade march through the streets there. Never again, and always remember.De Profundis, or, ‘From the Depths’, is a long letter Wilde was allowed to write but not send to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, towards the end of his imprisonment. When he was released in 1897 he gave the letter to Robert Ross, instructing him to give it to Douglas, which may or may not have ever happened. Over the objections of the families on both sides, Wilde did meet Douglas again for short intervals in France and Italy, but died a few years afterwards in 1900, disgraced and impoverished. The letter was then published posthumously five years later.There is a pervasive feeling of overwhelming sadness in De Profundis, as well as Wilde’s attempts to come to terms with the absurdity and cruelty of it all. Prison was so damaging to his sensitive, artistic soul, and yet he tried to make sense of it, find meaning, and become a better person for having been there. His words flow so beautifully, and while the content at times was not all that interesting, such as the Christian themes and likening Christ to an artist, one cannot help but feel sadness for the condition he was in, and the tragedy of his life and career being cut short so senselessly.Unfortunately, while finding the first edition from 1905 was very cool, it came with a significant drawback, for when the book was first published, large portions of the letter were suppressed – in particular, Wilde’s recounting of his personal time with Douglas, and everything that led up to his arrest – and it’s worse for it, losing the ‘feel’ of a letter and the stories from his life. Gone are the passion and myriad feelings towards Douglas, who had influenced Wilde into a playboy lifestyle and then encouraged him to sue his father for libel, which of course ended in the disastrous U-turn of events and Wilde’s own arrest. It’s for this reason I knock down the review score a bit, though it may be a bit unfair, not having the full text which appeared in later editions.Quotes:On beauty:“…merely to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.”On prison, and the charity of the poor:“The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes, prison is a tragedy in a man’s life, a misfortune, a casualty, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is ‘in trouble’ simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prison makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome when we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us. Our very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity are broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live. We are denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, that might bring balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain…”On regret:“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 flaneur, 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.”On the other hand: (love the poetry in this one)“I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.”Lastly, on solitude, this at the book’s end:“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”

[cjyurkanin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful, fascinating, poetic, and heartbreaking, Wilde becomes the “spectator of his own tragedy” in De Profundis and attempts a sort of mystical Confiteor to make sense of the suffering of his soul.

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 realizing 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 be always haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant as much for me as for anyone else -- the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, 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 reject one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny 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."

There are so many great reviews of this here on GR that I'll just add an aspect that I think hasn't been touched upon. Wilde’s meditations on his pre-prison life were colored by the reading he undertook while in prison: the Bible, Dante, Saint Augustine, and Cardinal Newman among others. However, it was still his situational antinomianism upon which he filtered his philosophy even as he found in himself parallels with the prodigal son:

Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realize what he had done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that. It is the means by which one alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their gnomic aphorisms "Even the Gods cannot alter the past." Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it. That it was the one thing he could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said — I feel quite certain about it — that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept he really made his having wasted his substance with harlots, and then kept swine and hungered for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy incidents in his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare say one has to go to prison to understand it. If so, it may be worthwhile going to prison.

Wilde puts the past transgressions (despite what you/I/we see today as transgressions) of the prodigal son into the category of “beautiful and holy things” rather than the effect that later resulted from them, thus making the evil things good rather than accepting that God may bring good from evil. He’s justified his own actions as necessary for the remaking of the man he thought he was become.

It is tempting to see him as a new man born from his catastrophe but the short, mostly depressed and alcohol-soaked life of poverty he lived afterward was not exemplary of someone on the road to wisdom or salvation. Instead, it seems he'd become even more mired in "the depths" from which he thought he was rising. However, that detracts nothing from him being one of the masters of the English language.

[tlekstrum · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

You are in front of a letter written by the renowned Irish writer Oscar Wilde to his dear friend, and allegedly lover, Alfred Douglas (Bosie), it confers a querulous, and a lamentable account of Oscar Wilde's relationship/friendship with Bosie, and how toxic it was for him. Wilde speaks of a toxic friendship, his trial, and also of love and hate and how each of them could lead to different results. Besides, He speaks of his suffering and prison life at the end of the last few pages.

Relevant to the work, I believe that this letter should not only be regarded as merely a love letter, but as a confessional letter to one's self. Wilde describes his suffering and its reasons. He blames himself first for his poor choices. However, he came to realise that his suffering, like any meted fate, is what he needed in his life to face his former self. This revelation and epiphany made Wilde highly sensitive of his predicament. Therefore, he offered in this letter, an account of his new philosophy about life and how to live it.

[wonderperson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very moving account of his emotional state in Prison.

[thereshegoes_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"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 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. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you."This is another book that I wish I could have given 3½ star to because I'm not sure whether to give it a 3 or a 4. De Profundis is the 50 000-word letter (yes, imagine writing that by hand with ink.) that Oscar Wilde wrote to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, whilst in prison. Some say it is a love letter, other says it is not. It's not the relationship between them that makes the "love letter or not" debatable - because there is no denying that Wilde loved Douglas - it's the fact that most of the time, Wilde portrays Douglas as a - how should I put this - douchebag. The letter begins with a very detailed account of how Wilde was put into prison in the first place. He describes detailed and with his own words the moments between him and Douglas and everything that lead to to the trial. I thought this part was the most interesting. I'm not that fond of autobiographies and memoirs but I've always been interested in Oscar Wilde (or anything else LGTB-related for that matter) and hearing Wilde put everything into his own words and describing, to Douglas, how he was to blame for the misery and downfall of Wilde, and still loving the man, was very fascinating. Like always, his language is beautiful and there are lots of wit and aphorism. He writes about how much he loved Douglas and the things he had done for him yet at the same time, condemns him for behaving so selfish and rude. What makes me hesitate about giving it a four star instead of a three is the middle part of the letter when Wilde all of the sudden goes into deep contemplation and comparison between religion, Christ and artists. I find religion interesting too but those pages were simply put, boring. The third half of the book becomes better however when he goes back to talk about Douglas actions and the philosophy of life. It's filled with emotions and you can tell that there is a lot of misery, sorrow and grief. One of my favourite passages that describe the sorrow very well and at the same time shows the beauty is this: "Of course to one so modern as I am, `Enfant de mon siècle,’ merely to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer. Like Gautier, I have always been one of those ‘pour qui le monde visible existe.’"I was planning on continuing this review but now I am left speechless again and I think I will, after all, give this a four star. Here are several memorable quotes however to read and admire.Memorable Quotes"I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful.""To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny 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.""Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. ""We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.""There is no room for Love and Hate in the same soul. They cannot live together in that fair cavern house. Love is fed by imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feel Love. But anything will feed Hate.""After my terrible sentence, when the prison dress was on me, and the prison house closed, I sat amidst the ruins of my wonderful life, crushed by anguish, bewildered with terror, dazed through pain. But I would not hate you. Every day I said to myself: 'I must keep love in my heart today, else how shall I live through the day?'""The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart — hearts are made to be broken — but that it turns one's heart to stone.""Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.""Morality did not help me. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes."

[heatherheartsbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A moving, angry love letter. I recommend this second only to The Picture of Dorian Gray to people who aren't familiar with Wilde's work. Even then, it's a very close second. Beautiful. My copy is a hardcover from approx. 1910. The "unabridged" version wasn't available until approx. 1960.