Ah, goodness, why must virtue always insist on wearing such dreadfully tedious clothes? It is hardly what one would call good taste. Now, please, everyone, lend me your ears. This is a confession of a certain man—far more cynical and more poignantly relatable than the tragic end of a certain Happy Prince.
Once in London, there lived a dandy whose weapons were exquisite silver plate and a sneer polished even brighter. He once remarked that the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Ah, quite right. My own life has been a tapestry of complex eccentricities, far removed from anything pure. Drinking champagne in the morning, nibbling on despair at noon, and casting off the moth-eaten overcoat of morality to vanish into the velvet darkness of night—that, I told myself, was life. I would wink at my own reflection, wondering what else could possibly matter.
However, the giant monster known as Society does not so easily forgive our aesthetic sensibilities. No matter how perfect an epigram I might toss out, the masses hurl back hideous, practical questions like, “Does that put food on the table?” or “Whom does that save?” How utterly rude. Should beauty not be forgiven for every sin simply by virtue of being beautiful?
One day, I picked up a peculiar novel. It told the story of a beautiful youth who remained forever young while his portrait aged in his stead, bearing the hideous scars of his soul. I struck my knee in delight. This is it! This is our ideal! To keep one’s face as clear as morning dew while the soul beneath rots and reeks as it pleases. I lost myself in the story, only to realize with a start: I myself was that very portrait.
You see, you have all misunderstood what happiness is. Happiness is not running through a meadow with a pure heart. It is found in that fleeting moment when you successfully hide your inner ugliness behind a magnificent satin cravat. Yet, tragedy always makes its entrance at the most exquisite timing. The moment my tie slipped just a fraction, a lady beside me asked innocently, “Oh, my, what do you have hidden under there?” I froze. For beneath it lay a shabby bruise called “goodwill”—a thing so trite and irredeemable I had hidden it for years.
How shameful! For a cynic like me, harboring something as damp and sentimental as “kindness” was a humiliation more unbearable than any scandal. I hurried to smear it over with sarcasm and layered cold words to mask the spot, but once seen, it could not be unseen.
In the end, the most “useful” lesson in life is perhaps this: no matter how much one puts on airs, every human is born with that fatal flaw called “humanity.” And the harder we try to hide it, the more we are made to dance like the buffoons in Oscar’s comedies.
Leave beauty to art, truth to the prison cell, and love—well, let love reside in the curls of cigarette smoke. Now, in an empty room, staring at a single sunflower, I find myself transcribing all the moral maxims I once denied in beautiful calligraphy. This is my new “vice.” Tell me, are you amused? My soul is now more beautiful than ever, and quite hopelessly stained.