I spent an
evening in the drawing room and this is what I realized. You cannot insulate
yourself from who you are for way too long. Despite your efforts to deceive
yourself, the real ‘you’ remains unscathed. I chanced upon the eyes of hell and
what did I see- a dark blue book that has a picture of a retiring gentleman who
never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally. There was a sense of mystery when
I looked at that book. It filled me with profound thrill so much so that I could
not articulate what it was, that threw me in a state of wicked frenzy. To this
day when I examine myself, I am all the more certain that this dark moment
marks the turning point of a dangerous kind of innocence. It is unknown and
unheard off. It is revealed only to those who wish to reject the tree of good
and evil and discover the tree of life.
The Picture
of Dorian Gray is in the mirror. It is sufficient to open your eyes to the
mental sensation. There is no need to visualize the descriptions of the
passages in the novel. Wilde is not quite at home with his sensitivity because
he feels that the world is not ready for the poetry of warm emotions. Yet he
cannot deny them. How does he bear this conflict? His novel is testimony to how
the split occurs. Does it occur in one’s psyche or is there a conscious sense
of disparity in one’s being? How would acceptance follow? His only novel
undresses the binaries that human beings have come to sublimate. It is more
than what Wilde could be because ‘’mystery is in the visible and not in the
invisible”. If you cannot see, you do not know what is
there. If you can conceive of that which you cannot see, then it exists devoid
of enigma as an idea in print. If you can see an image and would like to
understand it, you would like to judge it all the same. It is enigmatic and
hence arrests your curiosity.
In ‘’The
Picture of Dorian Gray”, Lord Henry is a hypnotic cynic who speaks to the young
male reader. His words are at once flippant, witty and petulantly profound. He
mocks at the tendency to worship virtues that are simply practices of
convenience. This work is relevant even today when old dogmas are replaced by
new ones. What was considered noble, is now barbaric; what was once considered
romantic is now perceived to be a sign of weakness but one gets the feeling
that beneath the tough exterior of the machine age, there is a craving for the
natural processes that keeps us warm devoid of the alienation that we have
hitherto come to experience.
Hypocrisy in
contemporary times lies in denying this craving for personal reunion and
holding in high esteem professional supremacy. The smart phones, social
networking sites and instant messages have substituted personal interaction by
promoting technology-enabled extroversion. We live thus in monumental
stereotypes groping in the evanescence of trends worshiped and fashioned by
the dictates of commerce. In so doing, we lose all vitality and synthesize our
appetites. Thinking has taken a back seat and the new age iconoclast is a human
being of quaint tastes inexorably socialistic. Such has come to define the
times we live in. We do not know what anti-hypocrisy is because we never fully
understood hypocrisy. A nice individual is considered to be a confidence
trickster. Hypocrisy has merely assumed different forms. These forms are more
complicated than ever. Duality of Victorian England that Wilde reveals is just
fundamental to the complexities governing our existence. They multiply with
experience till sincerity becomes elusive. As Wilde himself says, “Little
sincerity is a dangerous thing; too much sincerity would prove fatal.” Every time
I read this novel, my perspectives only increase because there is in it a thought
much larger than what a message can convey. It is inconsistent and inconstant,
which is why it cannot be brought down to a terrible moral that Wilde said
would be revealed not to the puritan but only to those who are pure at heart.
It is the picture of a timeless young man.
