Oscar Wilde | I awakened the imagination of our time

The gods gave me almost everything. Talent, fame, status, talent, character. I let art become a philosophy, let philosophy become an art; I change the human heart and the color of things; I say and do everything that amazes people; drama, which is the most objective art form, in my hands has become a way of expressing personal feelings like lyric poetry and shanglai poetry, and at the same time the scope is broader and the characters are richer; drama, novel, rhythmic poetry, prose poetry, subtle and subtle or wonderful dialogue, wherever I write, all show its beauty in new forms of beauty; I let the truth itself not only show its truth, It also reveals that it is false, true and false, and as its natural connotation, it is revealed that whether it is true or false, it is only a form of mental existence. I regard art as the highest reality, and life is nothing more than a fictitious form; I awaken the imagination of this century, and it creates myths and legends around me; the complexity of all things, I can hide it in one word, and the wonder of all things is enough to break through.

In addition to these, I also have some different things. I let myself be tempted, and I fell into the sound of the waves and could not extricate myself, in order to be a clumsy boy, a playboy, a merry figure, and let some unruly little people surround me. Squandering my talents and throwing an eternal youth toss me inexplicably feels happy. Tired of staying at the top of the peak, they went down to the bottom of the valley in search of new excitement. What I see as a paradox in the realm of thought becomes a perverted lust in the realm of passion. Desire, in the end, is a chronic disease, or a madness, or both. I became indifferent to the lives and deaths of others, and as long as I was happy, I was happy, and then I turned around and left. I forgot that every little act of everyday life can cultivate or corrupt character, so what a person does in the dark room will one day be shouted out on the roof. I no longer dominate myself, I no longer control my soul, I don't know it. I let you dominate me, let your father scare me, and finally lost face. There is only one thing left for me: absolute humility; and there is only one thing left for you: absolute humility. You'd better come down and learn this lesson with me in humiliation.

I've been suffering from bars for almost two years. A frenzied despair arose in the depths of my heart, and the state of mourning could not bear to be seen: powerless rage, bitter contempt, weeping without tears, silent pain, wordless sorrow. I have tasted the bitterness of the world, and I can understand the meaning of his verses better than Wordsworth himself:

Suffering is long, hazy, dark

It was endless.

But the thought of my endless suffering, though sometimes painful, I don't want to call myself to suffer for no reason. Now I find that something hidden in the depths of my heart is telling me that nothing in the world is meaningless, and that suffering is the least likely to be meaningless. This thing is hidden in the depths of my heart, like a treasure in the wilderness. It is humility.

What's left in my heart, this is the last thing, and this is the best thing: the ultimate discovery I have reached, the starting point of my willows. Because it was out of my own, I knew it came at the right time. Not too late, not too early. If someone else had told me, I would have refuted it. If someone else brought it to me, I would refuse. Since I discovered it myself, I wanted to keep it in my heart. It has to be that way. Just this one thing contains the elements of life, the elements of new life, contains my new life. Of all the things under the heavens, it is the strangest. You can't give it to others, and you can't give it to others. You can't get it unless you give up everything you have. Only after losing everything can you know you have it.

Now that I have understood the humility in my heart, I know exactly what to do, in fact what must be done. I used the word "must", not to mention any external constraint or command. I don't accept any of this. I am far more of an opinionated egotist than ever before. Unless you come from yourself, anything you have no value to me. My mind is looking for a new way to achieve self-actualization. That's the only thing I care about. And the first thing I want to do is to free myself from any possible resentment toward you.

I was completely penniless and truly homeless. But there is nothing worse in the world than that. To tell you the truth, instead of leaving this prison with resentment towards you or the world, I would happily go door to door to ask for food. If you don't get it from a large family, you will get a little from a poor family. People who have a lot of things are often greedy, and people who have nothing of themselves always share it with others. As long as there is love in my heart, I don't mind spending the night on the cool grass in the summer and sheltering from the cold by the haystack and under the big barn in the winter. What was outside of me seemed meaningless to me. You see, how intense my egoism has reached, or rather, is reaching that point, because the road is still far away, and "the place where I walk is full of thorns."

Of course, I knew that I would not go to the side of the road to beg, and if I really lay on the cold grass for the night, it would also be to write a poem for the moon. On the day of his release, Robbie would wait for me at the big iron gate, and what he symbolized was not only his love, but also many others. I believe that for a year and a half I will not go hungry anyway. In this way, even if you don't write a good book, you can at least read some good books. Could there be anything more enjoyable than that? After that, I hope to re-improve my creative ability. But if it backfires: if I become unrelated in this world, and if there is no sympathy for thousands of families and no one to accept, I can only cover myself with a torn robe and a bowl along the door; even so, as long as there is no block in my chest, and I am not trapped by resentment and contempt, I can face life with confidence and calmness, far better than brocade, wrapped in a soul that suffers from hatred. It is really not difficult for me to forgive you. But for me to be happy to forgive you, first you must feel the need for my forgiveness. When you really want to, you'll find it waiting for you.

Needless to say, I don't have to do that, it's easier to do just that. There's more to do. There are much steeper mountains to climb and much deeper valleys to cross. And everything must come out of my heart. Religion, morality, reason, none of them can help.

Morality can't help. I was born a deviant, a person who was different, not a conformist. But I see that a man's fault is not in what he does, but in what kind of person he becomes. Fortunately, I understand this.

Religion can't help. Others believe in what is invisible, and I believe in what can be seen by touch. My God, they live in temples built by hand, and my teachings have reached a state of perfection and perfection within the limits of practical experience, perhaps too complete, because like many or all those who have placed their heavens in this world, I have discovered not only the beauty of heaven in this world, but also the horrors of hell. If I had thought about religion, I would have thought that I wanted to create a religious order for those who could not believe in God, perhaps called the "Brotherhood of the Fatherless." Here, there is an altar with no candles on it, and a priest, with no peace in his heart, who can preside over communion with unblessed bread and a grail without pouring wine. Whatever it is, to be true, it must become a religion. Agnosticism, like faith, has its rituals. It sows its seed of martyrdom, it should bear the fruit of a saint, it should praise every day, thank God that he is hiding from people. But neither faith nor unknowability can be something external to me. Its doctrine must have been created by me myself. Only those who create their own form are spiritual. If I cannot find its true meaning in myself, I will never find it. If I hadn't already found it, I would never have found it.

Reason can't help. To be reasonable is to say that the law that condemns me is a wrong and unjust law, and that the system that makes me suffer is a wrong and unjust system. But I always have to try to make these two things seem both just and fair to me. Just as in art man is concerned only with what a particular thing is to himself in a particular moment; the same is true in the moral evolution of the human character. I have to make everything that happens to me good for me. Hard beds, bad food, hard ropes that grind the tips of people's fingers, slave labor from morning to night, scolding orders that seem to be made out of routine necessity, ugly clothes that make sorrow look strange, silence, loneliness, humiliation—all this, I have to turn

Transform into a spiritual spiritual experience. For every slight degradation of the body, I must try to become the spiritual sublimation of the soul.

I hope to reach that point so that I can say, simply and spontaneously, that there are two major turning points in my life: one is that my father sent me to Oxford, and the other is that society sent me to prison. I don't say it's the best thing for me, because then I would be too bitter to hear. I prefer to say, or to hear people say, that I am the child of this age, so typical that because of my perverse perversion, for the sake of my perverse perversion, I have turned the good in my life into evil, and the evil into the good. However, it doesn't matter what you say or what others say. The important thing, the imminent thing, the thing that I have to do, so that I will not wither and mutilate in the few days that remain, is to absorb into my own mind everything that has been imposed on me, to make it a part of me. If you come, you will be safe, without complaint or fear, nor will you be grumpy. There is nothing more evil than superficiality. Whatever it is, it is understood.

When I first went to prison, some people advised me to forget who I was. It's over when you hear that. Only by understanding who I am can I have peace in my heart. Now some people advise me to forget that I was in prison as soon as I got out of prison. I knew that listening to this would be equally fatal. This means that an intolerable sense of shame will always follow me, and it means that the things I love as much as others — the beauty of the sun and the moon, the splendor of the seasons, the music of dawn, the silence of the long night, the dripping raindrops among the green leaves, the dewdrops that creep up the grass and turn it into a silver glow — all of this will stain my eyes, lose their ability to heal the soul, lose their ability to convey joy. To deny one's own experience is to curb one's own development. To deny one's own experience is to let one's life tell a lie. This is tantamount to rejecting the soul. For just as our flesh absorbs everything, both what has been purified by the manifestation of the priest or the Holy Spirit, and what is unclean in the world, all of them are transformed into strength and speed, into muscular movements, into pleasing skin, into the lines and colors of hair, lips, and eyes; the soul also has its function of ingesting nutrients, and can turn what is originally inferior, cruel, and depraved into noble thoughts and elegant feelings. Not only that, but the soul can find the most dignified way to assert itself in these things, and can often manifest itself perfectly through what is originally intended to blaspheme and destroy.

I am just an ordinary prisoner in an ordinary prison, and I must accept this honestly; although you may find it strange, one thing I want to teach myself is not to be ashamed of it. I must accept that this is a punishment; if I am ashamed of being punished, the punishment is as if I had never been punished. Of course, there are many things that I did not do and were convicted, but there are also many things that I did and were convicted of, and many more things that I did without being accused. I say in this letter that God is strange and that they punish us not only for our evil deeds and depravity, but also because of our goodness and goodness. In this regard, I must accept the fact that a man is punished not only for the evil he has done, but also for the good he has done. I don't doubt that it makes sense for people to be punished in this way. This helps, or should be, a good or evil understanding of oneself, and does not lead to complacency because of any of them. If I can, as I wish, I am not ashamed of being punished, then I will be free to think, walk, and live.

After being released from prison, many people also took their prisons into the outside world, hiding them secretly in their hearts as shame, and eventually it was as if something on their head had been poisoned, and they climbed into a hole and died pitifully. It is really sad that they have fallen into this step, and society has forced them into this way, which is very undeserved, too undeserved. Society thinks it has the right to inflict heinous punishment on individuals, but it also shows the great evil of superficiality, and it does not realize what it has done. When that person has been punished, society has left him alone, that is to say, abandoned him, and at this time, the most unshirkable obligation of society to that person has begun. Society is really ashamed of its own behavior, and avoids facing the people it has punished, just like someone who hides when he can't afford to pay his debts, or who causes irreparable and irreparable damage to people and then runs away. I demand from my side that if I understand my suffering, then society should also understand the punishment it has inflicted on me, so that both sides can no longer harbor hatred and hatred.

Of course, I know that from one point of view things are more difficult for me than for others; by the nature of the case, it is certainly more difficult. The hard-working thieves and tramps with whom I were imprisoned were in many ways luckier than I was. Whether in gray cities or in green villages, they sin in small streets and alleys after all; to find a place where people have no idea what they are doing does does not require getting out of the distance that the birds can fly between dawn and dawn. But for me, "the world shrinks only the size of a palm", no matter where I go, I see my name written like a lead cast stone carving. For I did not leap from obscurity to a momentary sin, but from an eternal glory to an eternal shame. I myself sometimes find it a point of view, if it is still necessary to explain, fame and infamy are only one step away, if it is still a step away.

As far as my name was spread, people recognized me everywhere, and everyone knew my life as far as the stupid things I did. But even then, I can still see the good side for me. This will force me to show my identity as an artist again, and the sooner the better. With just a good work, I can block the open gun of a malicious attacker, the dark arrow of cowardly ridicule, and uproot the tongue of contempt. If life still embarrasses me, and it must be so now, then I will also make life difficult. People have to adopt a certain attitude toward me, and therefore judge both themselves and me. Needless to say I'm not referring to a specific individual. The only people I have the heart to live with are now artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, those who know what pathos are. I'm not interested in anyone else. I also don't make any demands on life. All this is said about my own psychological attitude towards the whole of life; and I feel that not being ashamed of being punished is one of the first states that must be attained, so that I can be perfect, and because I am so imperfect.

Then I had to learn to be happy. I once intuitively understood happiness, or thought I knew happiness. My heart has always been full of spring. My temperament and happiness are like fish, and life is full of entertainment, like pouring wine to the rim of the glass. Now I am thinking about life from a completely new perspective, and even imagining what happiness is is often extremely difficult. I remember reading Pete's Studies in the History of the Renaissance in Oxford for the first semester, which had a peculiar impact on my life. Seeing that Dante had placed those who were grieving and grieving in the lower levels of hell, he went to the academy library and turned to the section of the Divine Comedy, only to see those who "frowned and bitter faces in the sweet air" lying under the terrible swamp, always chanting with a sigh:

At that time we frowned

And the sweet air in the sun is joyful.

I knew that the church condemned spiritual laziness and melancholy, but at the time it seemed interesting that the whole idea, in this sin, I suppose, was also made up by a pastor who knew nothing about real life. Nor do I understand why Dante, having said, "Sorrow reunites us with God," is so cruel to those who indulge in sorrow, if there are any such people. At that time, I could not have imagined that one day sorrow would become one of the greatest temptations in my life.