From Medium:
“The purpose of life is self-development. To realise one’s natures perfectly. That is what each of us here for. People are afraid themselves now. They have forgotten that the highest of all duties. The duty that one owes to oneself. Think your natural thoughts, or burn with your natural passions. Have virtues that are real to you. Your own sins. Don’t be an actor in a part that isn’t written for you. Let life be your art. Set yourself to music, and your days will be sonnets. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing”.
While Wilde’s highlights the benefits of pursuing one’s goals through the tempting thrills and self-indulgence of aesthetic life, he warns us to be wary of its limits and dangers. Through Basil, Wilde cautions the dangers of submitting to the vices of our nature “my brains, such as they are – my art, whatever it may be worth; your rank and wealth, Harry; Dorian Gray’s good looks – we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly”.
Dorian in his narcissism, has created a beautiful world for himself at the expense of others. One in which he indulges his passions, floating from one pursuit to the next; the study of perfumes, music, jewels, and embroideries, completely at his own whim. A life which, when I imagine a scenario where I am free from obligation, sounds appealing, wafting from one passion to the next. However, its Dorian’s passionate pursuit of pleasure over happiness, which causes him to become a monotonous and vain, indulgent in a never-ending stream of meaningless and trivial debaucher, using “evil as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful”.
More here.
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