Reading Redemption

I simply couldn’t remain silent when I saw Banksy’s new work on the wall of Reading jail. Because it’s about the most favourite work of one of my most favourite writers, De Profundis by Oscar Wilde. A book that Wilde wrote while he was in Reading prison.

De Profundis is the self-reflection of an artist who’s been unjustly exiled from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell. It’s a profound piece about frustration, suffering, sorrow, forgiveness, and re-birth.

Banksy’s work aptly suggests that Wilde set himself free through writing De Profundis. I do agree with Banksy given the fact that De Profundis ends like this:

“[Once I’m free] society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed.

She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”