Me and Dorian Gray

I am a practitioner of Romanticism and while I admit to it I still recognize its failings as a philosophy to live by. Romanticism butts heads with Realism more and more as one grows older.

I view the book "The Picture Of Dorian Gray" as fiction of course but I cannot ignore the similarities of the ideas expressed in the work and my own feelings about life. As a young man I barely recognized my actions as being in line with a particular predictable pattern but as an older adult now, its hard not to. Romantics have a freedom that allows them to ignore logic and reason and yes... even morality. The mind and body want what they want, with no apology. I embraced it in my twenties not really knowing that I was becoming a hedonist in the process. I looked at love as a casual affair, something I couldn't do as a teenager. I was devoted and true to one but at the cost of being the victim of love's fickleness myself. I dabbled in romantic betrayal and drug induced euphoria that allowed me to walk away from the unpleasantness of reality but certainly not without some regret. That is the curse of the romantic, that sense of longing about what could have been if only your heart was more grounded in reality. Eventually the romantic , in his waning years, wishes for someone...someone that would stay, and offer true comfort and love on a level that playwrights and poets would echo and hail through time. It is the paradox of profundity and superficiality that exists side by side in the romantic mind.

I do love me some women and I love it when they are beautiful. Honestly, sometimes it actually makes my heart beat faster (even now) when one merely passes me on the street. And I like all kinds, but I'm mostly attracted to women who project an air of purity and innocence. I've had the good fortune of being involved with such women but, like Dorian Gray, I allowed myself to be controlled by my own untapped decadence. That need to explore those feelings came out of my sheltered youth where religion was an invitation to conform and be clean and uncorrupted. To ignore the compulsion to explore those feelings would have been hypocritical on my part. What does it say about a person who is willing to corrupt innocence. It's despicable unless you look upon it as unintentional corruption. It is Experience being drawn back to what it once had in the way of purity. Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde saw it as a perfect coupling of two souls...one old and one new. And that was me too, for a while. If there is a point to this thing we call Life, and I think there is, it is this. Life should be a process of purification but not at the expense of others. Pleasures of the flesh and other dark places in the human heart make that process a tricky proposition. At the end of his life Oscar Wilde tried to redeem himself by embracing religion practically on his deathbed, but I doubt that it really works that way. Romanticism is not necessarily a part of hedonism, but it was for Dorian Gray and a little for me too. I hope that before I die I can finally find that missing thing...that piece, that person, that true epiphany that maybe I saw once but didn't recognize it at the time for what it was.