De Profundis

by Oscar Wilde

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow.

but I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame.

but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.

Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both.

‘Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark And has the nature of infinity.’

But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility.