Bitterness can be a Snake

'For my own sake I must forgive you. 

One cannot always keep an adder in ones breast to feed on one

nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of ones soul.'

 (Oscar Wilde cited by Hughes in Forgiveness in Victorian Literature: Grammar, Narrative, and Community, 2015, p149).

Bitterness will poison me slowly and destroy my soul, so forgiveness will save me according to Wilde. 

Hughes (2015) talks about the therapeutic value of forgiveness and likens resentment to a poison or toxin, citing Anne Lamott's suggestion that: 'not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die' (p.134 cited in p.149, 2015).

C.3.3: 120 Years Ago Today

Irish author, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, was sentenced to two years in prison with hard labour on the 25th of May 1895, because his identity as a gay man was equated with the criminal offence of 'gross indecency'.

It has taken 120 years for Ireland to look for marriage equality for the Wildes of today, and although 62% voted YES, 38% still voted NO. There is some movement but not enough or fast enough.

Oscar Wilde wrote many great works like The Importance of Being Earnest and  Picture of Dorian Gray and children's short stories such as The Happy Prince. The following verse is a glimpse of the epic poem,  the Ballad of Reading Gaol , the last thing he wrote before he died:

'I never saw sad men who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

We prisoners called the sky,

And at every careless cloud that passed

In happy freedom by.'

 Oscar Wilde 1897

This verse could refer to Wilde or anyone in prison, physically or figuratively. So many people in the world today are prisoners of their circumstances or the context in which they live. And we are all the prison guards, in our actions, words and inaction.

Today one more door in one more jail lock is opened. Perhaps one day we can throw away all the keys.

Note: In prison Oscar Wilde lost everything including his name, he was referred to as C.3.3.

10 Reasons We Should Make Mistakes

"Make glorious, amazing mistakes" was Neil Gaiman's advice in his New Year Wish, "because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something."

 

Many amazing inventions (and possibly inventors) have been born of mistakes, from penicillin to Xrays. We think of mistakes as things that are problems and cause injury and death. We think of things aa mundane as spelling mistakes, as worring as forgetting to turn the gas off to tragedies like the sinking of the Titanic.

We don't think of mistakes as learning tools, as ways of experimentation, as ways to find out what works from what doesn't work. It's not call 'trial and error' for nothing!

Quite a few people, according to Quote Investigator have thought similarly about mistakes over the last 150 years:

1. He who never made a mistake, never made a discovery. (Samuel Smiles, 1859)
2. The man who never makes enny blunders seldum makes enny good hits. (Josh Billings, 1874)
3. A man who never makes a mistake will never make anything. ( Mr. Phelps, 1889)
4. It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes. (Joseph Conrad, 1896)
5. The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything. (Theodore Roosevelt, 1900)
6. The man who does things makes many mistakes, but he never makes the biggest mistake of all—doing nothing. (Poor Richard Junior’s Philosophy, 1903)
7. Every man makes mistakes; they say a man who never makes mistakes never makes anything else. (G.K. Chesterton, 1927)
8. The man who never makes a mistake must get tired of doing nothing. (Will Rogers, 1993)
9. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. (Albert Einstein, 1995)

10. In 1891 Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.” 

As Gandhi said:

“Freedom is not worth having 

if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”

(Cited in Inspirational Quotes and Thoughts, 2013 by G. Beri)

Imagine More Than We Know As It Will Be So

Giving my daughter 10p extra, when she went out to play in the 90s as emergency money for a phone call, I would not have imagined that we would all be carrying pocket size portable phones with us today. Someone did.

Einstein, in an interview in 1929 said, 'Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.'  As Oscar Wilde said in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 'To define is to limit.' Is that what we do when we name and categorize?

Are our young adult books like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner and Divergence seeking to push past those limitations and boundaries, to think outside the box, while commenting on our habits of putting people into boxes, creating boundaries and limits? Are they warning us of our possible futures if we continue?

Sunset and Moonlight on Brighton Beach

Oscar Wilde wrote in The Critic as Artist that 'a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.' Will we listen to the dreamers who see the dawn before us or will we just have to wake up and see it with our own eyes when it will be too late to do anything about it, in the cold light of day?

Or can we be dreamers too?

Einstein, A.(1929) What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck, The Saturday Evening Post, October 26 1929 ,Saturday Evening Post Society, Indianapolis, Indiana. 
Wilde, O.(1881, 1997) The Critic as Artist, Green Integer 
Wilde, O.(1890, 1998) The Picture of Dorian Gray, Random House