Oscar Wilde and Great Prose

The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play… I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. ” – Oscar Wilde

I read this aloud before I decided to include it, and all I could think about was how well the passage flowed, and how utterly accurate it was at conveying an all too familiar feeling.

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.” -Oscar Wilde

The first six sentences do an excellent job of serving the story while the final two sentences stike effortlessly at the truth. Who hasn’t known someone who was coming up short? Who had more to show or more to give, and did not? And how many people have not felt that way themselves at one time or another?

“But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.” – Oscar Wilde

Regret is a powerful emotion. You don’t need to be out of your twenties for those feelings to ring true.