De Profundis

When I was in Paris in April I took a guided tour of Père-Lachaise cemetery, so of course I visited the last resting place of Oscar Wilde.

Our tour guide quoted Oscar, "je n'ai rien d'autre à déclarer que mon génie", baffling some people on the tour who only came for Jim Morrison.

Until the tour I hadn't thought about Wilde for some time, though I'm very familiar with most of his work: Salomé, An Ideal Husband, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and especially The Importance of Being Earnest which I studied for my Leaving Cert and can still quote at length. The one work I'd never engaged with was De Profundis, the long letter he wrote in prison.

A few days later I visited the Pantheon, just out of general interest. There was an exhibition there about the life of Robert Badinter, the French politician who removed the death penalty from the French penal code and decriminalised homosexuality. Badinter was a fan of Wilde, and I learned that he wrote a play based on De Profundis, decrying the injustice of Wilde's imprisonment. 

In May, my favourite literary podcast Backlisted did a re-run of one of their old episodes. Stephen Fry joined Andy Miller and John Mitchinson to discuss...De Profundis. It was a brilliant discussion. Fry can sometimes get on my wick with his incessant hamming up, but here he was erudite and even humble as he discussed Wilde, his literary hero.

It was clear what I had to do next. Andy recommended the audio book of De Profundis, read by Simon Russell Beale, and I thoroughly enjoyed it and wondered at its insightfulness.

People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going.  They can’t know.  In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge.  But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.  The final mystery is oneself.  When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself.  Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?  

Wilde's insights didn't lead him to any kind of salvation, but his pathetic destitution in Paris doesn't take anything away from the truths he told through his art.

When I was in Dublin a few weeks later I paid my respects at his statue in Merrion Square, a few footsteps from the house where he was born.