WALTER PATER'S GEMLIKE FLAME?
 
 
Walter Horatio Pater, l839-1894,  attended Oxford in 1858; liked it, moved in, spent his career as an Oxford academic, died there. There's scant evidence that Pater practiced his own philosophy.  But who knows? It isn't what you do that measures a life; it's how you think.  Pater wrote:
 
  To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstacy, is success in life.  In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contributions to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.  Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic, dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.....What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions....
 
   
 

We read the "Ballad of the Reading Gaol" in high school but the teacher didn't tell us how the author came to land there. Like a lot of us, Oscar was his own worst enemy. How did he really have the crust to initiate a court case against  Queensberry for leaving a calling card at his club addressed "To Mr. Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite (sic)"? Did Queensberry ever haul in a stream of nasty witnesses: chambermaids at hotels watching for white stains on the sheets, and half of all the grooms and stableboys in London!

But Oscar knew how to live big. It all went sour at the end--two years in gaol at hard labor and a penurious exile to Paris. But he had fun all the way down. And today he he has been vindicated. A plaque has been placed at the St. James Theatre door.  People flocked to see a sympathetic biographical flick.  He is St. Oscar.
What better eulogy than the poem by Brendan Behan:
OSCAR WILDE

After all the strife   
That, alive, he caused,
Ravaged with fear,   
In the half-light stretched, was
born, Dublin.
The gay spark's body
Lies dumb in the dark,
Silent, the funereal
Candles guttering.
The graceful body,
The firm gaze spent
In a cold bare room
With a concierge spiteful
From too much attendance
On a foreign tippler
Who left without paying
The ten per cent service.
Exiled from the Flore
To a saintly desert,
The young prince of sin
A withered churl,
The gold jewel of lust
Left far behind him,
No pernod to brace him,
Only holy water.
The young king of Beauty
A ravished Narcissus
As the star of the pure Virgin
Glows on the water

        Envoi
Delightful the path of sin
But a holy death's a habit.
Good man yourself there, Oscar.
Every way you had it.		  
 
 
 
 

    "I adore simple pleasures. 
   They are the last refuge of the complex."

 

 
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
"Only the shallow know themselves."
"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up."
"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
"Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious."
"The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water."
"When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong."
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