Light, Beauty, and Sorrow
“Dear Bosie,” starts the beginning of one of the most tragically beautiful love letters ever written. When I read Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, the 50,000-word letter Wilde had written to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas while in prison, I was shocked. De Profundis was dark and bitter and scornful. In the first half of the letter, he recounts the events that landed him in prison. Wilde proclaimed he’d avoided, ran from, and begged to stop seeing “Bosie” to no avail. Then, in the latter half, he talked of sorrow and suffering. It was nothing like his other writings.
His words are always gorgeous and charming; his writing is light-hearted but with such depth in the corners and crevices of some phrases that any reader can tell he’s looked inwards and seen the darkness of society and humanity. The purposeful lightness he takes to play with heavy words are seen in the titles of many of his works like The Importance of Being Earnest or An Ideal Husband, a witty touch I greatly admired. In 10th grade, I promised myself that I’d read any and all of Oscar Wilde’s writing that I could get my hands on. Truthfully, I adore reading his works, not for the clever stories he spins—though they are enjoyable as well—but for his words; the ones he chooses and the way he strings them together are exquisite and sensual, pretty in every sense of the word.
In De Profundis, his words are still gorgeous and charming as ever, but now completely encompassed with abhorrence and resentment. It was painful for me to read, watching someone I thought of as charming and delightful, living like a happy prince, brought down to hating and lamenting a few, though major, mistakes he’d made in his life. He used to make fun of the superficial face of nineteenth-century English society but was now disgraced and humiliated in it, his name tarnished by the crimes he’d been convicted of. As I was reading, I was pulled out of the fantasy world that I liked to stroll in, the world where everything was beautiful and lovely, by the very man who had shown me this ideal world. The letter showed me that no matter how beautiful art is and no matter how pretty words sound, the world is still as it is and will stay as it always has always been, with sorrow and suffering alongside beauty and light. It was like cough medicine was finally shoved down my throat to clear my feverish mind. Wilde, my favorite author of all time, had taught me, and countless others, of beauty in art and life, but through this letter, he also taught, as he put it in the last lines of his letter, “something more wonderful—the meaning of sorrow and its beauty.”
Cover Photo by Anguskirk. Edited by Katrina Kwok.
