Оскар Уайлд - 170
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. 1854 - 1900. Мы его любим не за это. Тем более, что "за это" он пострадал так, как мало кому доставалось. Поэт, прозаик, драматург, и во всех трех видах литературы гениальный.
Надо отметить дату. Воспроизведу то, что тут у меня уже было.
Оскар Уайлд, которого мы любим не за это. De Profundis. Спросите, почему? Во-первых, просто интересно. Во-вторых, мне нужно было обязательно прочитать что-то по-английски, причем на хорошем английском языке, а не судороги сленга. Лучший английский язык, чем у Оскара Уайлда, великого стилиста, гениального поэта, прозаика и драматурга одновременно, найти трудно. Другие его произведения я читал, и не по одному разу. Надо прочитать и это.
Скажу честно, до конца не осилил. Устал от этого крика души, от этой "исповедальной прозы", являющей собой личное письмо предавшему и бросившему его любовнику - будем называть вещи своими именами.
Коллизия известная. Сколько мы знаем случаев, когда незаурядный мужчина губит себя ради недостойной женщины или прекрасная женщина разрушает свою жизнь ради подлеца... Тут то же самое, но в однополом варианте. Причем Уайлд отлично это осознаёт (ниже я привёл яркие характерные цитаты-признания), осыпает сэра Альфреда Дугласа (так звали его партнера) упрёками, потом прощает, потом косвенно признается в любви, уверяет, что ни о чем не жалеет. И так - много-много раз, стилистически блистательно и несравненно. Во всем тексте нет ни капли эротизма, тут вам не пошлая "горбатая гора", Оскар Уайлд вовсе не касается плотских аспектов своей любви, витийствует в чисто духовной и интеллектуальной сфере, не чураясь самолюбования и уничижения паче гордости.
До поры до времени читается с увлечением, но когда автор начинает выстраивает свою личную "теологию" и начинает рассуждать о Христе, явно приравнивая свои муки-страдания страстям Христовым, мне стало скучно, и я отставил книгу. Уж извините, но жанр "мудовых рыданий" имеет свои пределы...
Уайлда очень жаль. Посадили его ни за что, провёл два года в самой страшной и бесчеловечной из европейских тюрем, испытывая отнюдь не только моральные страдания и муки. Дуглас, ради которого он погубил свою жизнь и свой гений, повёл себя как подонок, тоже, кстати, очень, вполне по-английски (Оскар Уайлд был ирландец, на всякий случай). Чего еще ждать от этого змеиного гнезда подлых сэров и пэров.
И еще занятный момент: в интернете я так и не нашел полный текст De Profundis, опубликованный в 60-е годы ХХ века, только кастрированный вариант, впервые выпущенный в свет еще до Первой Мировой войны. Поэтому первые два абзаца из цитат мне пришлось набирать вручную. Наскольо хватило сил и времени. Мне кажется, я дал достаточно полное представление о характере этой прозы, документально-публицистично-нравоучительной.
Please. As you like it
While you were with me you were the absolute ruin of my art and in allowing you to stand persistenly between Art and myself i give to myself shame and blame in the fullest degree.
You couldn`t know, you couldn`t understand, you couldn`t appreciate. I had no right to expect it of you at all. Your interests were merely in your meals and moods. Your desires were simply for amusement, for ordinary and less ordinary pleasures... I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you (лукавит!)
Of course, I should have got rid of you. I should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him.
The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.
. . 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 to communicate 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. . . .
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.
More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a ‘month or twain to feed on honeycomb,’ but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.
Ballad of Reading Gaol
Надо отметить дату. Воспроизведу то, что тут у меня уже было.
Оскар Уайлд, которого мы любим не за это. De Profundis. Спросите, почему? Во-первых, просто интересно. Во-вторых, мне нужно было обязательно прочитать что-то по-английски, причем на хорошем английском языке, а не судороги сленга. Лучший английский язык, чем у Оскара Уайлда, великого стилиста, гениального поэта, прозаика и драматурга одновременно, найти трудно. Другие его произведения я читал, и не по одному разу. Надо прочитать и это.
Скажу честно, до конца не осилил. Устал от этого крика души, от этой "исповедальной прозы", являющей собой личное письмо предавшему и бросившему его любовнику - будем называть вещи своими именами.
Коллизия известная. Сколько мы знаем случаев, когда незаурядный мужчина губит себя ради недостойной женщины или прекрасная женщина разрушает свою жизнь ради подлеца... Тут то же самое, но в однополом варианте. Причем Уайлд отлично это осознаёт (ниже я привёл яркие характерные цитаты-признания), осыпает сэра Альфреда Дугласа (так звали его партнера) упрёками, потом прощает, потом косвенно признается в любви, уверяет, что ни о чем не жалеет. И так - много-много раз, стилистически блистательно и несравненно. Во всем тексте нет ни капли эротизма, тут вам не пошлая "горбатая гора", Оскар Уайлд вовсе не касается плотских аспектов своей любви, витийствует в чисто духовной и интеллектуальной сфере, не чураясь самолюбования и уничижения паче гордости.
До поры до времени читается с увлечением, но когда автор начинает выстраивает свою личную "теологию" и начинает рассуждать о Христе, явно приравнивая свои муки-страдания страстям Христовым, мне стало скучно, и я отставил книгу. Уж извините, но жанр "мудовых рыданий" имеет свои пределы...
Уайлда очень жаль. Посадили его ни за что, провёл два года в самой страшной и бесчеловечной из европейских тюрем, испытывая отнюдь не только моральные страдания и муки. Дуглас, ради которого он погубил свою жизнь и свой гений, повёл себя как подонок, тоже, кстати, очень, вполне по-английски (Оскар Уайлд был ирландец, на всякий случай). Чего еще ждать от этого змеиного гнезда подлых сэров и пэров.
И еще занятный момент: в интернете я так и не нашел полный текст De Profundis, опубликованный в 60-е годы ХХ века, только кастрированный вариант, впервые выпущенный в свет еще до Первой Мировой войны. Поэтому первые два абзаца из цитат мне пришлось набирать вручную. Наскольо хватило сил и времени. Мне кажется, я дал достаточно полное представление о характере этой прозы, документально-публицистично-нравоучительной.
Please. As you like it
While you were with me you were the absolute ruin of my art and in allowing you to stand persistenly between Art and myself i give to myself shame and blame in the fullest degree.
You couldn`t know, you couldn`t understand, you couldn`t appreciate. I had no right to expect it of you at all. Your interests were merely in your meals and moods. Your desires were simply for amusement, for ordinary and less ordinary pleasures... I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you (лукавит!)
Of course, I should have got rid of you. I should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him.
The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.
. . 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 to communicate 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. . . .
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.
Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.
More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a ‘month or twain to feed on honeycomb,’ but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.
Ballad of Reading Gaol