Discovering a glimpse of Lord Henry inside
Awaiting for the world to sweep me off my feet, cocooned up in my plans I started a second world, one that I do not often allow in... the world of non-“technical” books. A couple of days ago, I have started reading “The Picture of Dorian Grey” out of curiosity, I might admit, as I found the subject interesting and I thought “Why not?”
Books are like people for me, if they do not make an impression on me the first minutes of our “conversation” or they just give me a weird feeling, I will not bother too much to investigate further. I will say “Hi! and Bye!”
With all the respect for a well-known writer as Oscar Wilde, I do not necessarily like the style with which things are unfolding in his book. But I guess... each author has his/her public and I have to give it to Mr. Wilde: the subject of the book is more than dangerously interesting :o)
Anyway, the point why I am telling you about this book is that I found a very interesting paragraph with a very interested idea. It was shocking to see it written there, as this was something that I truly learnt to accept and cultivate about my being starting 2005. It might sound dangerous, unorthodox, and insanely impure or anything but, I do not care and neither should anybody else! Accepting your own nature and dealing with the new discovery is better than hiding behind common sense and the “the right thing to be done”- routine:
"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream--I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-- to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that marks our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.” (Oscar Wilde- “The Picture of Dorian Grey”, chapter I -Lord Henry Wotton).
When was the last time you pleasured yourself with a hidden desire?
Just a thought... tempted?
Miruna :o)
posted by Miruna @ 7/28/2006 08:25:00 PM
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