Oscar wilde: The long road

At the start of my travelling-pioneering life, in 1962, the first collection, a monumental edition, of The Letters of Oscar Wilde were published. I was far too busy at the time dealing with 9 subjects in Ontario’s grade 13 curriculum, with my burgeoning erotic inclinations, my incipient bipolar disorder, the nature and direction of the new religio-political commitment I had recently been socialized into over the years 1953 to 19621 and, in October of that same year, a socio-historical event that took our global society as close as it has yet been to a nuclear war.2 –Ron Price: refer to 1the Baha’i Faith and 2 the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That edition of his letters went out of print
but, when I was working in the Northern
Territory of Australia, a new edition became
available. I was still too busy and there was
so much else going on in my life at that time:
work, family, a new Baha’i community, just
getting through the day....and so it was that it
was not until I retired from full-time, part-time
and casual work that I had any idea of your
brilliance, Oscar. Your life was inseparable
from your work; indeed, until that retirement
in my own life, my writing was by far the less
important part of my life, too, by far. I became
like you, Oscar, my own public relations expert,
inventing and reinventing myself, perfecting ads
all over the place. I’ve got to hand it to you, dear
Oscar, you were a clever dude with those words.

You said: I was a problem for which there was
no solution; I can resist everything except, of
course, temptation; if you want to tell people the
truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you;
and, man is least himself when he talks in his own
person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the
truth1-------and on and on you went evolving, as a
conscious process of your self-expression and your
self-dramatization, discovering the artistic context
which best matched your temperament and character,
devoting your career to investigating the most elusive
subject matter: the self, creating an expressive medium
for your findings, for your many voices, many personae
and your wide range of tones and masks....Me, too,
Oscar, me too on the long, stony and tortuous road.

1 Oscar Wilde Quotes, “The Quotations Page,” www.quotationspage.com.

Ron Price
12 June 2009