Sonntag, November 19, 2006

my feelings already written in Dorian Gray

`There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr Gray. All influence is immoral- immoral from the scientific point of view.`
`Why?`
`Because to influence a person is to give him one`s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else`s music, an actor of a part that has not been wirtten for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one`s nature perfectly - that is what each of us is there for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of allduties, the duty that one owes to one`s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungr, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhapss we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us. And yet -`
`Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good boy,`said the painter, deep in his work, and conscious only that a look had come into the lad`s face that he had never seen before.
Ànd yet,`continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of the hand that was always so charcteristic of him, and that he had even in his Eton days, Ì believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the meladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival and the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with ist sins, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. THE ONLY WAY TO GET RID OF A TEMPTATION IS TO YIELD TO IT. Resist it, and your souls grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame -

posted by Was das Leben so mit sich bringt.... @ Sonntag, November 19, 2006