De Profundis is not a novel or a story. It is an agonizing letter written by Oscar Wilde while he is in prison. When I found out the story of this letter, I wanted to read it right away because it was really interesting to me. Oscar Wilde, who was sentenced for 2 years, was able to hold on to life with a letter he wrote to his lover during that difficult period behind bars. Wilde, who was imprisoned for 2 years in a lousy cell for being gay, wanted to convey his feelings through this letter. This divine and flawless text was very impressive for me. I want to add some parts that impress me so much:
“Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.”
“Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought, the imagination can transcend them and move in a free sphere of ideal existences. Things also are in their essence of what we choose to make them; a thing is according to the mode in which we look at it.”
