Also a long and depressing rant by Oscar Wilde.
When Wilde was in prison, having been convicted of the love that dare not speak its name (with the Unspeakable Vice of the Greeks for a chaser), he wrote an interminable and unreadable letter to his then-ex lover Alfred Lord Douglas1. The letter was entitled "De Profundis". Wilde was very upset and had a lot of time on his hands, and he spent 92 pages recapitulating their relationship in detail, beating Douglas about the head and shoulders (Douglas richly deserved it), and feeling sorry for himself. Now and then he took a break to ponder the imponderable vis-a-vis The Aesthetic Temperament, aesthetics in general, Life, etc. ad naus.
It's pretty grim. I couldn't get through the whole thing. Oscar Wilde was a brilliant satirist posing as a Victorian moralist posing as an iconoclast; that's what he was good at. It's great to try new things and all, but sometimes it doesn't work.
1 Wilde got himself into prison by suing
Douglas' father for libel when
Douglas' father accused him of being a
homosexual. One thing led to another, and the law took notice of the fact that
Wilde was, in fact,
gay. In
England in the late
19th century, that was a criminal offense. Grim stuff.