Day Eighty-One

6/21

The Book: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

ISBN: 1-59308-025-5

Suggested By: Brenda Mora

Where: The car, next to the raspa stand

When: 10:20-10:45P

Music: None

Company: The Family

Pages: 163-229 (66)

The Lead In: Oooh. This book is fantastic. Dorian is a great character. Love the pull of good and evil and the underlying discussion of what beauty is and how it should be appreciated. I forged ahead and finished it today, as the book’s narrative was gliding along.

The 411 on the 55: So Dorian kills Basil. Stabs him in the stinking neck! He has another man burn the body so no one can find it (his accomplice kills himself later because of the guilt) and moves on with life. Later, while in an opium den, he runs into his dead ex-fiancé's brother. But, since Dorian hasn’t aged in 18 years, the brother is convinced it was someone else. After Dorian escapes, the brother is told that he has made a deal with the devil and doesn’t age.

Later, Dorian is at a friend’s house, and, his friend, while hunting for rabbit, shoots Sybil’s brother, who was hiding in the grass, accidently. Dorian feels a huge weight lifted off his chest and decides to change his ways. When he tells Lord Henry this, he is laughed at.

Later, he is home, debating whether he can change his life or not. He pulls back the curtain, and the painting is even worse. The hands are stained with blood and he is creeped out beyond anything previous. He decides he will chop up the painting with the same knife he killed Basil with. Upon stabbing it, he falls down dead, withered, old and hideous. The End. Awesome.

The 20/20: Classics like this one get me excited for the others I have missed. It is a great book with complex, interlocking layers of philosophy and aesthetics, all plugged into a great story. At times, it borders in horror and mystery, yet other sections read like Socratic discussions of beauty and value. This is an excellent work of fiction, an even better discussion of the worth of true beauty.

Line of the Day: “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.” pg 184

“The book the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” pg 224

Fact on the Fiction: After the insanity of his trial for his homosexuality, his incarceration, and his short time after his relief, his grave stone is not without its own story. “The modernist angel depicted as a relief on the tomb was originally complete with male genitals which were broken off and kept as a paperweight by a succession of cemetery keepers; their current whereabouts are unknown. In the summer of 2000, intermedia artist Leon Johnson performed a forty minute ceremony entitled Re-membering Wilde in which a commissioned silver prosthesis was installed to replace the vandalised genitals.” Wikipedia