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……………I hope to be at least a month
with my friends, and to gain peace and balance, and a less troubled heart, and
a sweeter mood. I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things,
such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that
we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
I discern great sanity in the Greek
attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows
on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the
swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the
shadow that they cast and the forest for its silence at noon. The
vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy that he might keep off the rays of
the sun as he stooped over the young shoots, and for the artist and the
athlete, the two types that Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the
leaves of the bitter laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been of no
service to men.
OSCAR WILDE De
Profundis
