De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
De Profundis
. . . 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
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