“For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything.” — Wilde, De Profundis
Beautiful sentences; but who is suffering secret for? Would most people, for most of world history, say that suffering is “secret”? Of course, before his imprisonment, Wilde had wealth and freedom that would have been unimaginable luxury for almost anyone in world history. And he acknowledges elsewhere in his letter that he used these resources to escape the ordinary griefs and hardships of the human condition: “I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection.”
Suffering may perhaps be a secret, but only to those of us, like Wilde, who can go to extraordinary lengths to live in comfort and entertainment. For most humans at most times, suffering has been as dull and everyday as bread and water. No, much duller.
What’s really secret, then?
“Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.” — Chesterton, Orthodoxy
