All about literature

I just visited the blog of a poet. Its not easy to write something that you have not experienced, especially poetry. It might not be too difficut to write a story, but to write a poem that expresses every emotion.. making you feel like the poet has endured it himself...to bring that out without experiencing it is an art.

According to Oscar Wilde, About 'Art' -

"It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors".

"We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it immensely".

"All art is quite useless"

Right now, I am in an 'Appreciation of Literature' mood. Currently, reading one of the classics by Oscar Wilde (The picture of Dorain Gray)...he is superb! Not just his choice of words, but the ideas he represents, about men, about society, it makes you think. And I must say this book requires a great deal of attention and time, you will never enjoy it if you read it like a Sidney Sheldon Novel! Every sentence, every word, the actual meaning of it all has to be absorbed to be able to appeciate it and fall in love with this classic.

There is some kind of a peace within when I am reading such books. I remember the same feeling coming back to me what I had felt when I read one of Jane Austen's novels. It transforms me into this person I havent met before, this person I dont understand, into something very strange, but I like that person. She is calm, content and happy. She feels she is doing something worthwhile with her days...and she is living her life.

An excerpt from the book...

"Beauty, real beauty ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How pefectly hideous they are! Except of course in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A Bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful".

I dont need to say anything further, for if there is anyone who really appreciates a classic, he will know what I am talking about.

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yeild to it"! - Oscar Wilde

(With a book filled with thoughts like these, the society revolted against the book when it was first published and it had to be revised. Sadly, Oscar Wilde went behind bars and came out penniless, hopeless and wandered around finally dying within a few months).