De Profundis

I read a remarkable letter that Oscar Wilde wrote to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, aka Bosie during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol.  It is a letter about instrospection, where Wilde tries to see things as they are. Finally in the dark of his imprisonment, Wilde can see all the damage caused by a relationship ruled by vanity, luxury and excess. Below are some great quotes from the letter, which can be read in its entirely here. 

“I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply, and without affectation, that the two great turning points in my life where when my father sent me to Oxford and when Society sent me to prison,””

““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 to blame...for allowing an unintellectual friendship ... entirely to dominate my life....”

“You demanded without grace and received without thanks, you grew to think that you had a sort of right to live at my expense and in a profuse luxury t which you had never been accustomed... Out of the reckless dinners with you nothing remains but the memory that too much was eaten and too much was drunk. And my yielding to your demands was bad for you...It made you grasping... unscrupulous...ungracious...”

“I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has someday to cry aloud on the house-tops.”