Where was Oscar when we last looked in on him in Frank Harris's account of his life? At trial, anticipating prison.
Now, in Chapter 18 of
Oscar Wilde, he's in the final weeks of his two years of squalid incarceration, slimmed from prison food, chastened by the system's cruelty and instructed morally by its suffering and the kindness of some of the guards. In Oscar's words, from a conversation with Harris in prison about what prison had taught him:
[My mother] felt about prison as you do, Frank, and really I think you are both right; it has helped me. There are things I see now that I never saw before. I see what pity means. I thought a work of art should be beautiful and joyous. But now I see that that ideal is insufficient, even shallow; a work of art must be founded on pity; a book or poem which has no pity in it, had better not be written. [p. 210 in Chapter 18]
By his final weeks in Reading Gaol, he had apparently achieved even a lightness of heart. A prison warder described Wilde at that time:
No more beautiful life had any man lived, no more beautiful life could any man live than Oscar Wilde lived during the short period I knew him in prison. He wore upon his face an eternal smile; sunshine was on his face, sunshine of some sort must have been in his heart. People say he was not sincere. He was the very soul of sincerity when I knew him....[p. 216 in Chapter 19]
Harris added his impressions of Oscar:
All this seems to me, in the main, true. Oscar's gay vivacity would have astonished any stranger. Besides, the regular hours and scant plain food of prison had improved his health [except for an injury in one ear from a fall, which is believed to have led to his death about three years later, at age 46] and the solitude and suffering had lent him a deeper emotional life. But there was an intense bitterness in him, a profound underlying sense of injury which came continually to passionate expression. Yet as soon as the miserable petty persecution of the prison was lifted from him, all the joyous gaiety and fun of his nature bubbled up irresistibly. There was no contradiction in this complexity. A man can hold in himself a hundred conflicting passions and impulses without confusion. At this time the dominant chord in Oscar was pity for others. [ibid]
My way of reading is to look for instruction or provocation to examine myself, especially these days, when I'm examining the apparent conflict between my outspokenness on religion and my essential compassion for others.
Wednesday's visit with Spinoza (his view of the Bible) made me realize that a better man than I could be both critical of religious beliefs and respectful of them. And Oscar Wilde's hard-won sense of pity reminds me of my own compassion, which it seems I can set aside when necessary to pursue other items on my agenda.
Another conflict has also come under the microscope of my self-analysis. It arose out of
an exchange of comments in the Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at UNC-Chapel Hill. As I mentioned on the day my wife and I "
did the state fair," there was going to be a football game that [Thursday] night in Chapel Hill. To alleviate traffic and parking problems, the university asked certain employees to leave work early and to expect to make up the time later or not be paid for the missed hours. A letter to the editor of the
DTH on Monday complained of this bitterly. On the newspaper's website, I commented "bravo" for the writer of the letter and used the occasion to rail briefly against sports fanaticism, which I said I had "realized in high school (fifty years ago) derogated sport and corrupted values," and I said that the university's arrangements for the day were an illustration. I implied that UNC alumni should maybe stop corrupting themselves by rooting for one team against another; they were maybe "in need of getting a life." I was (predictably, I can now see) attacked as "bitter" (even "bitter old man") and as exhibiting "elitism and false superiority." They thought that it was
I who needed to get a life!
It wasn't the first time I'd been accused of thinking myself superior. In 2004, a cousin my age out in Arizona emailed a group of his church friends
and me that he was confident "the Lord would tell us how to vote." I replied-to-all that I sure as heck wasn't going to vote for George W. Bush. I told them in no uncertain terms (as I have said a few times on this blog) that I despised George W. Bush. I probably also said that if God advised anyone to vote for Bush, then he would thereby undermine his followers' claims that he was wise or omniscient. A bit more was said, and one of my cousin's wife's friends told her (and she copied me) that "he thinks he's superior." I remember thinking,
Yes, you're right; I'm do think I'm superior to you. (This cousin subsequently started blocking all email from me; we have not spoken since. We may have played as children and teenagers, but we feud as responsible adults.)
The apparent conflict surrounding my sense of superiority is illustrated right here on my blog. I wonder whether anyone has noticed it? Under my picture at the top of the right column is that quotation from Emily Dickinson (in response to the "about me" prompt in my profile):
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?
How can I at the same time be both nobody and superior to others? A feeling of superiority to others seems in strong conflict with my understanding of compassion as "feeling no more deserving than the next person"—a definition I've shared more than once on this blog.
I'm not sure that I should let myself by absolved by Frank Harris's assurance that this is "no contradiction," for a person's "dominant chord" alternates with other chords over time. That view seems to deny the possibility of personal, moral integrity. But Harris's view does suggest that I might let up and not be so hard on myself for the recent occasions of my outspokenness. As I concluded my final comment on the
Daily Tar Heel:
Trying to discuss sports fanaticism might be rather like trying to discuss religion. The best option would seem to have been to keep my mouth shut.
On both topics!
