文档介绍：De Profundis
De Profundis
By Oscar Wilde
1
De Profundis
. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by
seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.
With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle
round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every
circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that
we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer,
according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile
quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its
brother, seems municate itself to those external forces the very
essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or
harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers
threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with
broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing
and can know nothing.
For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun
and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold,
but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the
small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard.
It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart.
And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion
is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or
can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again
to-morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little
of why I am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .
A week later, I am transferred here. Three more months go over and
my mother dies. No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her.
Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have no
words in which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my
father had bequeathed me a n