自深深处-王尔德

Dear Bosie, After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you. The world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or passion, of remorse or indifference you may choose to send as your answer or your appeal. I have no doubt that in this letter there will be much that will wound your vanity to the quick. If it proves so, read the letter over and over again till it kills your vanity. If there be init one single passage that brings tears to your eyes, weep as we weep in prison where the day no less than the night is set apart for tears. It is the only thing that can save you. Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of man are very different. The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long. You have been such a one too long. Be so no More. Do not be afraid. The supreme vice is shallowness. Everything that is realized is right. Suffering—curious as it may sound to you—is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity. I also had my illusions. I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy, and that you were to be one of many graceful figures in it. The memory of our friendship is the shadow that walks with me here: it follows me into the prison-yard and makes me talk to myself as I tramp round: each detail that accompanied each dreadful moment I am forced to recall: every strained note of your voice, every twitch and gesture of your nervous hands, every bitter word, every poisonous phrase comes back to me. The fact that God loves man shows that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to you a bitter one to hear, let us say that everyone is worthy of love, except he who thinks that he is. There is, I know, one answer to all that I have said to you, and that is that you loved me. Yes: I know you did. No matter what your conduct to me was I always felt that at heart you really did love me.