




Transcribed from the 1913 Methuen & Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org.  Note that later editions of De Profundis contained
more material.  The most complete editions are still in copyright in the
U.S.A.





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 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 writing, and in this manner writing....

A week later, I am transferred here.  Three 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 a 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 they might make
it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly.
What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper
to record.  My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I
should hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was,
all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of
so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss.  Messages of sympathy reached me
from all who had still affection for me.  Even people who had not known
me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had broken into my life, wrote
to ask that some expression of their condolence should be conveyed to me.
...

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 that 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.  There is
nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not
vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation