“At every single moment of
one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.” - Oscar Wilde
I have no clue what this is supposed to mean. It's extremely circular in nature and very confusing. Oscar Wilde is a good author, and I like some of his plays, particularly The Importance of being Earnest, but he seems prone to some very long, flowery sentences. There have been times where I've forgotten the beginning of a sentence when I get to the end of it. Admittedly, the above quote is not long, but I can't make sense of it, especially the first sentence.
Some of Wilde's works are great, an filled with a lot of humor as well. As previously stated, The Importance of being Earnest was a good read and a lot of fun. I like his sense of humor and the little jabs at Victorian society. I've read a lot of his works- including some of the children's stories- and they are all well-written. A lot of his epigrams are true as well, and my favorite is "in life there are 2 great tragedies: one is not getting what we want, and the other is". I think he had to be very in tune with human nature to be able to write things still relevant even after the time period and culture they were written in.
Wilde's thoughts are art a bit hard to place. It seemed to me that he liked art for art's sake. He said, in de profundis that he lived for pleasure, and he cited a lot of types of art as he made that point. I would have thought he liked art simply because it existed, and because it was something a bit out of the ordinary. I've never quite gotten, for example, how a painting of what looks like a yellow apple is symbolic of freedom and open fields.
In the last few lines of de profundis, Wilde says, however, that art is a symbol, because man is. I could see the argument for the creation of man being symbolic for whatever man is symbolic for. The problem is I don't think man is symbolic for anything. We can create symbols in our literature and works of art, but that doesn't mean that the literature or art itself is symbolic of something else. People in stories and paintings could be used as symbols, but that doesn't mean the humans, as a species, are a symbol.
Individual humans and individual works of art can be symbolic of something, but not all pieces of art and not all humans are symbolic. A symbol only exists because humans make it into one. This means that while the things humans make can be symbolic to other humans, that doesn't mean the act of creating art, or that art as a whole, is a symbol. I don't see how the creator of symbols- humans- could be symbols themselves.
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