Friday, January 17, 2014

Oscar Wilde's last Paragraph of De Profundis ("From the depths") 1897

Oscar Wilde’s last paragraph of his long yet beautiful letter, De profundis (“from the depths”), was written from Jail between January and March 1897, and moves today as strong as it did then.

“All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole again.”

Oscar Wilde

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