Dispatches from Senior Essay Land

Saturday, cigarette #1
Chez Orange, front porch, 8:45pm

Dandyism is always dandyism in relation to God. The individual in so far as he is created can oppose himself only to the Creator. ALBERT CAMUS

For those who don’t know, I'm spending my senior thesis trying to work out some understanding of Oscar Wilde’s Catholicism that makes his final conversion something other than a pose, or a scam. To a mind so preoccupied, this bit from a Borges interview had hooks in it:

I remember a joke of Oscar Wilde’s: a friend of his had a tie with yellow, red, and so on, in it, and Wilde said, “Oh, my dear fellow, only a deaf man could wear a tie like that!”

I remember telling that story to a lady who missed the whole point. She said, “Of course, it must be because being deaf he couldn’t hear what people were saying about his necktie.” That might have amused Oscar Wilde, no?

Some people (naming, of course, no names) are quick to accuse late-in-life converts of falling prey to the fears of old age and finding solace in religion only because they discovered themselves too weak to stare death in the eye when he’s on their doorstep. Wilde is fun to study because this is so obviously not what’s going on, not because he clearly found Catholicism more unsettling than comforting (although this is probably true), but because everybody knows that “the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.” If he'd wanted comfort, he'd have stuck with green carnations.

Speaking of decadent Catholicism: Eleanor Bourg Donlon wraps up her Magdalen Montague series in the Advent Dappled Things, and it sounds straight out of Huysmans. Tantalizing first paragraph:

Marvel once again at my address, dear fellow! After a tedious journey and fitful rest, I am reconciled with my father, and drawn back into the suffocating familial bosom. At the moment, the said bosom consists of my revered Pater (hitherto to be known by the respectful initials m.r.p., like some grandiloquent Latinate abbreviation) and sundry ill-kempt servants. M.r.p. looks upon Domokos, who has followed me home from Budapest like some gargoylean guardian angel, with undisguised suspicion. I could more easily explicate the purpose of the boy’s existence on earth than I could provide an adequate explanation for his attendance on me; therefore I make no explanation at all and laugh at the uproar he unconsciously causes.

Previous installments here and here.