I find Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms distasteful and even boring, for they remind me of my own flirtations with Nietzsche, among others. The mixture of frivolity and pathos tires me, perhaps because it is involuntary. Exempli gratia: “Only the shallow know themselves.”[1] The fact that this comparison is historically ludicrous, or simply childish, considering the issues of precedence, etc., etc., is irrelevant here. We are all contemporaries today as ever, as my very disposition toward Wilde directly testifies. Every further elaboration of this simple proof, for it is a proof, would be most discouraging and irritating. Besides, magister dixit: “One should always be a little improbable.”[2]

Footnotes

1. Wilde, O., “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, New York: Random House, 1968, p. 434.

2. Loc. cit.