De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde ... it didn't change my life - rather it saved my life.
I first read it properly in 2009, after I had lost custody of my daughter.
I won't tell the story ... it would take too long. But briefly, fear of losing my daughter actually made me lose my daughter - after months of terrifying legal threats and Family Court hearings, I had an "acute stress reaction" and ended up on a mental ward for ten days. My daughter's father therefore got "interim custody" - for over tewo years.
The grief was brutal. It was physical pain. Like a claw sunk into my guts. I was literally writhing with anguish sometimes. In the midst of this, I managed to bump into De Profundis. I am not sure how, because I was incapable of reading most of the time. But I had an old copy of Wilde's Complete Works, and I can remember how my breath was taken away as I read Wilde's account of how it felt to lose his two little sons:
I had lost my name, my position, my happiness, my freedom, my wealth. I was a prisoner and a pauper. But I still had my children left. Suddenly they were taken away from me by the law. It was a blow so appalling that I did not know what to do, so I flung myself on my knees, and bowed my head, and wept, and said, ' The body of a child is as the body of the Lord : I am not worthy of either.' That moment seemed to save me. I saw then that the only thing for me was to accept everything. Since then — curious as it will no doubt sound — I have been happier. It was of course my soul in its ultimate essence that I had reached. In many ways I had been its enemy, but I found it waiting for me as a friend.
This was only one of many passages that gave me such consolation and relief ...
- All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death...
- [Sorrow] is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain. Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
- Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.