Page:Wilde - De profundis, 1915.djvu/138

118 we should try to live. Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought; the Imagination can transcend them and move in a free sphere of ideal existences. Things also are in their essence of what we choose to make them; a thing is according to the mode in which we look at it. 'Where others,' says Blake, 'see but the dawn coming over the hill, I see the sons of God shouting for joy.' What seemed to the world and to myself my future I lost when I allowed myself to be taunted into taking action against Queensberry; I dare say I lost it really long before that. What lies before me is my past. I have got to make myself look on that with different eyes, to make God look on it with different eyes. This I cannot do by ignoring it, or slighting it, or praising it, or denying it; it is only to be done by accepting it as an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character: by bowing my head to everything I have suffered. How far I am away from the true temper of soul, this letter in its changing uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations and its failure to realise those