Oscar Wilde

De Profundis Oscar Wilde

. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record itsmoods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems tocircle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which isregulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel atleast for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makeseach dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to thoseexternal forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, ofthe reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass inthe orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothingand can know nothing. For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken fromus. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thicklymuffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It isalways twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, noless than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that you personally have long agoforgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again tomorrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in thismanner writing. . . .