The Importance of Being Oscar: for Toads

A Ballad on the Importance of Being Oscar

To love oneself is the beginning

of a lifelong romance.

I have the simplest tastes:

I am alway satisfied with the best.

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t

understand a single word of what I’m saying.

There is only one thing in life

worse than being talked about,

and that is not being talked about.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good,

but it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live,

it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad:

people are either charming or tedious.

I can resist everything except temptation.

A man who does not think for himself

does not think at all.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing,

and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

Oscar Wilde quotations, brainyquotes.com

There is no need to write anything about Oscar Wilde: he has written about himself so many times, one need only string a few of his quotations together in order to paint a portrait of the man: a flamboyant, controversial, irreverent poet, author, and playwright, who made an enemy of the Marquess of Queensberry (yes, he of the rules of boxing) by having an affair with the man's son. Not long after that, Wilde was sent to prison for homosexual activities, then quite illegal. From his two years' imprisonment came his long poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Other titles familiar even to many who aren't Wilde fans are Lady Windermere's Fan, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the oft-performed play, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Marian has told us about a new opera based on the life of Oscar Wilde which is now playing in Santa Fe, starring acclaimed countertenor David Daniels, and asked us to write about whatever she has mentioned in her challenge, as our contribution to The Imaginary Garden with Real Toads today.

Wikipedia photo

Oscar Wilde went to Santa Fe

he went there on a very hot day

he was forced to remove his coat

which then was eaten by a goat,

revealing undressedness beneath,

and Oscar Wilde was forced to say

in a very North American way:

"This, my dear, is all she wrote." *

* not a quotation from Oscar Wilde

One of my favorite Oscar Wilde sayings has always been this wry statement: "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

I could say that to my parents when they were young and I, of course, younger, and they would laugh. After they died, I couldn't have said it at all. Now that they've been gone a few years, and I've come to grips with the situation, I can say it again.

Thus we have Oscar Wilde, the man for whom the Academy Award statue may or may not have been named—nobody knows for sure. And, to sum it up, "Life imitates art

far more than art imitates life."