De Profundis
by Oscar Wilde
- Pages
- about 65
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 71 min at 250 wpm
From the opening
Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen & Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org. Note that later editions of De Profundis contained
more material. The most complete editions are still in copyright in the
U.S.A.
. . . 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. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance
of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and
drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to
the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes
each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to
communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose
existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers
bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the
vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or
strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.
For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and
moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the
light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small
iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is
always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart.
And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion
is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or
can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-
morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of
why I am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .
A short sample. Read the whole book
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