Draft script of the Video (LONG VERSION)

The unreal world of art

…that beautiful unreal world of art where once I was King…
              
I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived.

The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder. Whatever I touched made beautiful in a new mode of beauty; to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

I used to live entirely for pleasure.  I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind.  I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible. They were not part of my scheme of life.  They had no place in my philosophy. I did not want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and watching for a more bitter dawn. I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates had in store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do little else.

The extraordinary reality of sorrow

Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sackcloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall: I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all.

‘Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark and has the nature of infinity.’

The beauty of sorrow

But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning.  Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all.  

There is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific reality.

For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow.  There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.  Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

And if the world has indeed 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.

I have said that behind sorrow there is always sorrow. It were wiser still to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul.

The discovery of the soul

I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at.

I bore up against everything with some stubbornness of will and much rebellion of nature till I had absolutely nothing left in the world but [my son] Cyril. Suddenly he was 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. That moment saved me. It was 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. When one comes in contact with the soul it makes one simple as a child, as Christ said one should be.

The Man of Sorrow

There is something so unique about Christ. He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something. And everybody is predestined to his presence. Once at least in his life each man walks with Christ to Emmaus. All who come in contact with his personality, even thought they may neither bow to his altar nor kneel before his priest, yet somehow find that the ugliness of their sins is taken away and the beauty of their sorrow is revealed to them.

A share in Sorrow

I have a right to share in Sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world, and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God’s secret as anyone can get.

When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer’s day.  And so a child could.

Incomplete, imperfect, as I am, yet from me you may have still much to gain. You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty.