De profundis by Oscar Wilde

,, ...Suffering is one very long moment. We can't divide it by seasons. We can only record it's moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center 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 minutes detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change (...)

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 fight that creeps down through thickly-muffed glass of small iron-bared window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion, is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writting, and in this manner writing...

A week later,I am transferred here. Tree more months go over and my mother dies. No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her. Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that might take it brutal, and to fools that they might turn into a synonym for folly.

What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.

Three months go over. The calendar of my daily conduct and labour that hangs on the outside of my cell door, with my name and sentence written upon it, tells me taht it is May...

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise what that means. They will know nothing of life do, - and natures like his can realise it.

When I was brought down from my prison, (...) between two policemen, - waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that.

It was in this spirit, and with his mode of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, (...) i have never said one single word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it in the treasure house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. (...) When people are able to understand, not merely how beautiful -'s action was, but why it meant so much to me, and always will mean so much, then, perhaps, they will realise how and in what spirit they should approach me...

The poor are wise, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it..."

...incredible mark of love...