"The person who is most willing to confide in the next life is Wilde." This is what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once felt. According to a survey, Wilde was selected as Britain's most humorous person, while Prime Minister Winston Churchill was ranked fifth.
Leaving aside the label titles such as Britain's greatest writer and representative of aestheticism, after the movie "Wilde" was broadcast in China, the highest praise on the Douban short review: "How many girls on Douban don't love Oscar Wilde?" ", you can glimpse its influence across the East and the West.
"How in the world can there be such a poisonous mouth, such a sincere heart!" To this day, there will still be fans who sigh like this, and then attract more people to approach this wise man who has seen through the bottom card of life.
Suppose a man walks past you – 1.93 meters tall, with shoulder-length hair, a scarlet velvet women's top, and high heels under his feet... Don't say that more than 100 years ago, even today, it is also a fashion trendster and an "outlier" in the crowd?
And he obediently and viciously tongued, satirizing love and never being soft-mouthed: "Love, starting with self-deception, and finally deceiving others, this is the so-called romance."
When it comes to money, it's ironic: "When I was young, I thought money was the most important thing in the world, and when I got old, I didn't know that it was really the case."
▲ The Republic of China writer Zhang Ailing was deeply influenced by Wilde,
In terms of writing style, the two have many similarities:
"I like money because I haven't suffered from money.
Don't know the disadvantages of money, only the benefits of money. ”
Is this kind of honesty and honesty familiar?
This is not enough, arrogant to almost everything, is also his style of conduct.
Once he took a boat to the United States to give a speech, and when he entered the customs, he rolled his eyes at the customs officer and said, "I have nothing to declare, except my talent."
Oscar Wilde was perhaps the first man of his time to become famous by "being himself."
So take ten thousand steps back, even if you are not familiar with his life experience, have not seen his complete works, those have long been mixed on the Internet with a familiar golden sentence, with a sharp, anti-chicken soup, to the point of the style impact on our hearts, people can't help but "turn the road to powder" -
"We're all in the gutter,
But there are still people looking up at the stars. ”
"Loving yourself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
"You like everyone,
That is, you are indifferent to everyone. ”
It is such a person, there is a kind of strange faceless Laipi, the more others scold him, the more fearless he is, and one day, many people will be moved by the truth and transparency of him.
This is also confirmed today, more than 120 years later: its tombstone at the Lachaise Cemetery in Paris is full of lip prints from admirers from all over the world, and in the end, the local government has to add tempered glass to the tombstone: "We have advised tourists countless times not to kiss Wilde's tomb, but this is useless." ”
Wilde's tomb is stamped with the lip prints of fans from all over the world
"The real things in a person's life are not the things he did, but the legends that formed around him, and it is only through them that we can have a slight understanding of a person's true appearance." In various versions of Wilde's maxim, there is this sentence that almost sums up his life.
So, what is the legend that belongs to Wilde? We can talk about the word "beauty".
Wilde lived at the end of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing in Britain, and behind the rapid development of modern scientific and material civilization, there was a spiritual crisis lurking in society.
At this time Wilde wrote: "In this turbulent and turbulent age, in this terrible moment of strife and despair, there is only the carefree temple of beauty that can make people forget and make people happy." A group of "aestheticists" who were dismissive of rational and pragmatic life emerged.
They try to detach themselves from reality, immerse themselves in the "ideal country of beauty", frantically pursue the instant pleasure brought by sensory pleasures, and obtain some enjoyment of beauty in the process of escapism, so as to maintain a posture of rebellion against the established social order.
In fact, when most of his peers around him preferred to treasure knives and other things, Wilde in his childhood had a fondness for flowers, sunsets, and ancient Greek literature.
On his 20th birthday, he was awarded a scholarship to Modlin College, Oxford, and quickly changed his Irish accent, and with his extremely elaborate dress, height and sharp conversation, he quickly became a prominent member of Oxford, and it became his code of conduct to always maintain elegance and decency and only talk to elegant and decent people.
And according to the bills left behind, Wilde almost arranged his room as a salon space, buying a large number of lilies, and also using exquisite Venetian goblets, ruby champagne glasses, and ornate gilded porcelain.
In the 18th century, the European aristocracy was keen to collect blue and white porcelain
He also hired a servant who specially served red wine for the guests, but the requirement was that the servant should wear felt slippers to avoid rubbing the sound on the floor, and must avoid going to the bedroom when opening the wine, because the sound of pulling out the cork Wilde felt very low, and he could not stand anything that was not beautiful.
He even imagined his future life to his friends: "Maybe I will live a pleasant life for a certain period of time, and then rest all day and do nothing." Plato said that in the human world, what is the highest state that a person can attain? It's just sitting there meditating on beautiful things, and that may be my goal. ”
Because of his love of beauty, he created "Salome", an image of killing people for beauty fans;
Because of his love of beauty, almost all of his works are gorgeous and colorful;
Also because of his love of beauty, when he knew that it was a mistake to associate with his same-sex lover, Posey, he was still a moth to the fire, abandon his wife and children, and have no remorse...
It can be said that for the sake of aesthetics and art, Wilde almost reached a morbid degree, which also affected his proposition of love: "Love can tolerate all betrayals, can pity all weaknesses and helplessness, and sacrifice themselves", which is Wilde's love.
Movie Wilde
Especially after four years of dating Posey, a beautiful boy with a handsome Greek face, Posey's father, the Marquis of Queensbury, discovered their affair, and the tyrannical father ran to Wilde's celebrity club to put up a note: "To Oscar Wilde, a pretentious sodomite" and took Wilde to court.
In the face of the judge's cross-examination, "What is love that dare not say its name?" Wilde hesitated for a moment and then uttered the famous statement:
In the end, he was found guilty, imprisoned, and since then, his reputation has been swept away, and he has experienced multiple blows such as divorce, bankruptcy, and loss of his mother, while outside of prison, Posey still spends a lot of time, without a visit, a letter...
In prison, Wilde's words born of pain and sorrow show a thickness of life, as he wrote in his Song of Reading Prison:
Everyone will eventually kill the loved ones
The difference is only in the means
Someone with a vicious look,
Some people use flattering rhetoric.
We kill our loved ones,
The cowardly kiss, the brave with the sword.
Wilde and Posey
The lust and affection that Posey brought him eventually destroyed the talented poet, causing Wilde to die in humiliation and abject poverty.
Perhaps, Wilde loved not only Percy, but the eternal ideal of mankind: pure, dedicated, selfless love, the purpose of love is love, no more, no less.
Looking at today, a century later, absolute beauty and loyal love are not the ideals that you and I aspire to protect in the hearts of each of us?
Borges said: "Millennial literature has produced authors who are far more complex or imaginative than Wilde, but no one is more charismatic than him." In addition to these embodied in Wilde's plays and poetry, these are also projected into the 9 fairy tales he left in his life.
Perhaps the most familiar to Chinese readers are The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and the Rose.
In "The Happy Prince", the prince gouges out his eyes in order to save the poor, and he loses all the jewel decorations, but he is the supreme and beautiful existence.
"The Nightingale and the Rose" is more thorough about love and love. Nightingale stains the white rose red with the blood of his heart, just so that the poor student can get a red rose, but his sweetheart does not appreciate it, and eventually the rose is discarded in the stinky ditch and crushed by a passing carriage.
Two stories of self-sacrifice that go unrequited, as Wilde wrote to Posey in "Deep Down," "That's how you grabbed my life and didn't know what to do, so you broke it."
With a strong irony and metaphor of the adult world, Wilde's fairy tale ending points to death without a trace of blood and cruelty, which allows many readers to see the splendor at the end of life and the endless pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty.
In this sense, death is not the end, but a new birth, transcendence, and death allows finite life to reach the other side of infinity.
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Obviously, in the fairy tale world constructed by Wilde, it is full of human complexity, pain and helplessness. The goodness and beauty in the story are not lofty, but lifelike, which makes people smile and can deeply reminisce.
Although wrapped in the cloak of fairy tales, it hides something far more profound than fairy tales. The words are full of the light of humanity and the warmth of talent.
In addition to fairy tales, do you want to get to know this genius who wields his own talents a little closer? You can start with these books:
"Samira"
The Sameral is the most famous tragedy wilde's life. The dry and simple story of the Bible was unearthed by Wilde's clever hand to unearth the darkest and deepest connotations. The entanglement of desire, the outbreak of deformity, and the eerie atmosphere are all developed to the extreme by him in this short space. The work has a lofty intention and a beautiful rhetoric, and has become the highest model of British aesthetic literature.
Portrait of Dowling Gray
The publication of Portrait of Dowling Gray in 1891 caused a great uproar and was violently attacked by the media. Wilde also became acquainted with Sir Alfrey Douglas that year, and his tragic fate began.
"Portrait of Dowling Gray" is a masterpiece of aestheticism at the end of the 19th century, which can be called the three best of the "art for art's sake" trend in drama fiction and painting. The beautiful rhetoric and brilliant imagery in this work are attached to perverted characters and absurd plots, so they have long been misunderstood, but in fact, the book has another true meaning.
"From the Depths"
While imprisoned, Wilde wrote this "Brief Letter from the Abyss", a monologue-style text that reveals his feelings with Posey, hatred mixed with love and tenderness, and the book also records the aestheticist spokesman's views on beauty, art, and life. Five years later, Wilde died, and the book became his last masterpiece on earth.
Wilde's Selected Writings: Mirrors, Lies and Moments
This book is a collection of several of Wilde's independent articles, which are divided into three series according to themes: "Proverbs and Prose Poems", "Aesthetic Manifesto", and "The Art of Living".
These words allow the reader to glimpse the hidden corners of his inner world and see a side of it that is often not mentioned by others- a Wilde who often misreads the other, and is often misread by others, hurt by prejudice.
In short, under the labels of novelist, dramatist and aesthetic representative, there is also a rich and diverse, even contradictory Wilde.
Wilde's Strange Tales
Published in 1891, The Crimes and Other Stories of Lord Arthur Savile is a collection of bizarre short stories by Oscar Wilde, whose Chinese simplified translation.
The stories were written between 1887 and 1891 and were also the peak of Wilde's creative prowess. The story in the book analyzes the practical problems of the Victorian era with its humor, absurdity, suspense, horror and romance, and also explores the beauty and ugliness of human nature, explores the complexity and contradictions of the self, and confirms Wilde's reputation as the "master of stories".
poet? Vendetta? Pioneers of aestheticism? Fairy tale writer? These are all labels that belong to Wilde, but none of them fully represent him, and in our view, he is the person who shows the contradictions vividly in this world.
In any case, Wilde used his life as an artistic footnote, challenging the indifference and hypocrisy of the entire era with extreme aestheticism.
Words are the outlet of Wilde's emotions or will be the entrance to our understanding of this great writer.