oscar wilde letter to bosie de profundis

'I need not ask you what influence I had over you.

It is because it was full of moments and days tragic, bitter, sinister in their warnings, dull or dreadful in their monotonous scenes and unseemly violences, that I can see or hear each separate incident in its detail, can indeed see or hear little else.' (p22) Had our life together been as the world fancied it to be, one simply of pleasure, profligacy and laughter, I would not be able to recall a single passage in it.

'Between myself and the memory of joy lies a gulf no less deep than that between myself and joy in its actuality. 'Your defect was not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew so much.' (p4) Even a person with the highest pain tolerance will wreathe and flinch after reading such paragraphs: The extravagant wining-and-dining and the monetary support Wilde provided, whereas Bosie remain vain and self-indulgent, are recollected in detail. Exposed amidst is the one-sidedness of devotion abound the insatiable material excesses of this doomed affair. With sharp turns of wit specifically Wildean, its beginnings are laced with the elegance of bitterness, where candour relates Douglas’ cruel ambivalence and hedonistic whims. Wilde’s letter to Lord Alfred Douglas (known affectionately as the l’enfant terrible Bosie), penned during his incarceration and hard labour at Reading Gaol for ‘gross indecency’ (or homosexuality), is more than a contemplation of a relationship fated for demise, or the irreparable ruins of his life.

Oscar wilde letter to bosie de profundis