#16- Read a Classic

NEWS FLASH: I love Oscar Wilde. This, surprisingly, is a relatively new development in my life. To be clear, I never hated the guy. I enjoyed his plays when I read them in school, took to heart the quotes I knew he’d scribbled into existence (so much so that I’m getting a tattoo of one), and recognized the name and most of it’s accomplishments when mentioned in conversation. But I’d never really investigated him or his writings before now. For some reason the impulse had always escaped me. I always The of Dorian Gray down as a book I needed to read, but alas, Harry Potter, those silly vampire books, and other instant pleasure reads always seemed to win the race to my literary trophy shelf.

So I was pretty proud of myself for finally picking up what has become one of my favorite books off of the shelf at B&N last month. I think I always new I was going to enjoy it, but I also knew it was going to be a bit of a challenge for my mildly ADD self to push through what could potentially be a lame plot masked by beautiful language and clever thinking. How very wrong I was. On so many levels: I loved it, the plot was brilliant, he was far far more than clever, and I could hardly put it down. I was and am obsessed.

Now, my original intention for this post was to go through and analyze Wilde’s commentary and the structure and all that boring shit we covered in my advanced placement English classes in high school. It didn’t take me long to realize that a) I was never a fan of that crap and 2) that it would bore you (and more importantly, me) to no end. Yes, I very much enjoyed his commentary on vanity and the twisted way in which he realized it’s negative effect through the painting analogy, but still: anyone who’s read it would have already known what was saying and if they haven’t read it they would have had NO idea what I was talking about. Plus, as cool as the plot was, it was only a minor part of why I loved the book. It was his words that I fell in love with.

So! Instead I chose something that still may bore you but I find very interesting: a few of my favorite quotes from the book. ☺

Now, I am one of those people who at some point in their lives had it ingrained in them that writing in a book was in some way blasphemous. I once saw my friend Emily scribbling in her Complete Works of William Shakespeare with an orange Sharpie and I had to resist the urge to bitch slap the thing out of her hand. I have, luckily for Emily and all page-scribblers everywhere, come to terms with this reflex of mine and actually developed a habit of marking a page or two myself. With Dorian Gray, I kind of went buck-wild. I don’t think I went more than a page or two without underlining three or four of Wilde’s witticisms, well wishes, or words of wisdom. I’m pretty sure I found at least a hundred little gems to remember for future reference.

I won’t write all of them down here. That would probably make you want to murder me in my sleep. That, and I am too lazy to write them all out. Instead, I picked several of my favorites to share with you. I won’t take time explain why I like them so much. A lot of them are obvious. And those that aren’t? Well, my attraction to them is probably a secret I’d like to keep for myself for now. Instead, perhaps you can tell me what you like about some of them? Maybe we can cultivate a good discussion out of them. I’d enjoy that a lot, actually. Maybe I’ll share my affinity for them to you someday. For now, however, I shall keep them, like Dorian his picture, tucked away behind a purple curtain.

Until next time,
Atticus

My quotes:
“All art is quite useless.”

“…to influence a person is to give him one’s soul. He does not think his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to ones self. Of course they are charitable They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it”

“It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place.”

“…the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

“…men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”

“Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”

“To be in love is to surpass one’s self.”

“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take toward life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. “

“It was only in the theatre that I lived.”

“Without your art you are nothing.”

“One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.”

“Life has always poppies in her hands…”

“To become the spectator of one’s life is to escape the suffering of life.”

“Perhaps one should never put one’s worship into words.”

“There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.”

“Life its self was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.”

“Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.”

“Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colors and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having it's bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.”

“My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.”

“Ah, what a nuisance people’s people are!”

“…passion makes one think in a circle.”

“Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.”

“Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination.”

“The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true.”