Oh Wilde!

I figure that lately I have been reading far too much literature which makes little sense to my limited understanding. Joyce's 'Portrait of the artist as a young man' and Woolf's 'To the lighthouse' left me fumbling for coherence and made me wish for sentences to be shorter, intentions to be clearer, and flights of imaginations to be slightly more constrained. Since the next book on this list is Ulysses, I thought that it's better to take a break and read something which I would actually understand. So I picked up Wilde's 'Picture of Dorian Gray.' This is the second time I read it because like all great pieces of writings there is much to be discovered in the book by multiple visitations. And I wasn't disappointed.

For those who have never read Wilde, I would introduce him to be a bit like that socially awkward person who doesn't want to talk much and doesn't want to join in your social gatherings, but you know that it's not because he cannot but because life to him is one solid block of glass, its mysteries, its trivialities, its splendor and its hypocrisy are transparent to him, neatly organized in alphabetized folders in his highly competent mind. He has figured out life's vagaries to an extent which most people, with their prejudices and contempt for new knowledge, will never even approach - and this is the chief basis of his reticence and his attraction. We who spurn new knowledge because it often demands stretching the social mores at their seam cannot help but be sinfully drawn to someone who has the courage which we lack.

Wilde's world is one of paradoxes. In his world every concept that one is taught, every idea which is essential to society's survival is turned on its head and presented anew. Presented thus, it has the power to shock one into a state of contemplation and induce in one a better appreciation for the very vague, very gray, and very subjective natures of all the institutions which comprise life. It is possible to view Wilde as a mere smartass who was in a perpetual quest to demonstrate his mental superiority but as Wilde probably would have said, 'it's only smartasses who ever have interesting things to say.' It's futile trying to argue his logic because he speaks to a very select audience, the very people whom he knows would not argue his points. Everyone else, in his eyes, would never get what he's trying to say and hence, by definition, is not worthy of having an argument with. This is not to say that Wilde's ideas are baseless and arbitrary. In fact they are exceedingly precise but Wilde leaves the onus of finding the precise conditions under which his crazy observations hold to the reader. The fact is that almost everything that anyone has ever said has some trace of truth in it. In the craziest of philosophies and the most juvenile of assertions, some part of reality, at some level of approximation, is always present (just like this generalization which I just made). But it isn't worth anything if the existence of this truth is merely an artifact of chance. I have long maintained that intent is more important than action. It's often the only difference between juvenile and brilliant art. While the end forms might be exactly the same, juvenile art creates itself whereas great art is a well thought out and precise expression. And this is why Wilde is special. He manages to say things like 'Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies,' or 'I love acting. It is so much more real than life.' or 'Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect; simply a confession of failure,' and one is left wondering under which conditions these statements might be true, and in doing so realizes that in some corner of his world view, there lay lingering a little thought which, after years of social conditioning, had become invulnerable to questioning. Another support upon which one has built up his shaky understanding crumbles, a few more cracks develop elsewhere, and in some sense, this destruction leaves one more alive than before.