Oscar Wilde in De Profundis
“Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the midnight hours Weeping and waiting for the morrow, – He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.’
They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation and exile….
Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and absolute intensity of apprehension.
I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.…..
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.”
My Comment
I thought hard about this one…I´m not sure I agree that sorrow is the most perfect type in life and art..
I think that is, in some senses, closer to a Buddhist outlook than a Christian one.
The Christian outlook is surely closer to this:
Freude schoner gotterfunken
tochter aus elysium
(Joy, beautiful spark of divinity/Daughter of Elysium)
An die Freud (Ode to Joy), Friedrich Schiller
(And yes, I know that’s romantic, and thus pagan, and not Christian..but joy is joy…)
But I figure that after the last two years, it´s ok this Christmas to put away the glad-rags and try sack-cloth and ashes for a bit.
Or, at least, try a little of the via negativa. I remember this, and I stick with my post..at least, for one Christmas:
There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.— Journey of the Magi, T. S. Eliot
Wonderful words…..
Thank you..
I figure after the last two years, it´s not inappropriate to get a little Buddhist..
Sorrow and Incarnation?
Priority: Normal
From: “Barry”
Date: Thu, December 24, 2009 5:45 pm
To: “Lila Rajiva”
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Lila,
So there I was sitting out in front of Amigos Cafe on a beautiful Thursday evening
with Volcan Baru looking down on me. Let’s pull out the netbook and see what Lila
has to say on xmas eve. Sorrow and incarnation? Que paso? Normally I am pretty
much in tune with what you write, but I can’t let this one go by.
I’ll make you a deal. IF you ease up on the sorrow and IF the world doesn’t come to
a tragic end in 2010 and IF the new trading program keeps producing, next year I
will buy a couple of tickets. Holidays 2010 on the beach in Goa sounds good to me.
Saludos,
Barry aka Gitano
a lot of people are hurting..
I´d rather think about them than about the commercial
jingle jangle at
least one christmas
unemployment is one in five in the us
thanks for wishes
happy hols!
I understand. Just trying to induce some holiday cheer. I have no
problem with suffering and sorrow, just Wilde’s self pity. I prefer
William Ernest Henley’s “bloody, but unbowed” defiance or D.H. Lawrance’s
poem….
Self Pity
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
You stay safe.
Barry
The pagan and the Christian can be reconciled..
We don’t need to succumb to some easy binary of the two
I don´t think Wilde was being self pitying…
He was realizing, finally, that cynicism is not bravery
That the pose of flippancy and “all surface” is simply a pose..
Appearances are not everything, despite clever witticism about it
By the way, animals feel sorry for themselves all the time..I had a puppy that
would fake a paw limp to get me to cuddle it (it worked too!)
And Lawrence is one of the most maudlin of writers on some things….
I’m all for the aesthetic approach to life.
I don´t think Wilde is denying the aesthetic approach..he is broadening it.
As for Nietzsche, he is powerful, but upto a point only (and you know, he got most of his stuff from Buddhism)
But I’m not sure he actually managed to rid himself of the ethical approach, even though he tore it to shreds…
Once again you find a gem that hits me at the perfect moment. How do you do that?
Barry seemed to think it was too gloomy.
I like melancholia myself…find it very soothing.
Nothing like tinsel cheer to bring on a bout of the blues for me.
Why, are you “weeping at the midnight hour”?
Didn´t that deal go through?
No, the melancholy is a personal thing. I have an important meeting coming up after the first of the year.
Subject: Re: Sorrow and Incarnation?
From: “Barry”
Date: Sat, December 26, 2009 7:33 am
To: lilarajiva@mindbodypolitic.com
Priority: Normal
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I think I have wandered into areas beyond my pay grade here. I will “empty my cup”
and listen to the Maestra on this.
The small ill-equiped army surrendered its weapons and left the field.