abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head,
the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its
own drink puts gall:- all these were things of which I was afraid.
And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to
taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season,
indeed, no other food at all.

I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I
did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does.
There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of
my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the
sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the
same life would have been wrong because it would have been
limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its
secrets for me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed and
prefigured in my books. Some of it is in THE HAPPY PRINCE, some of
it in THE YOUNG KING, notably in the passage where the bishop says
to the kneeling boy, 'Is not He who made misery wiser than thou
art'? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than
a phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom
that like a purple thread runs through the texture of DORIAN GRAY;
in THE CRITIC AS ARTIST it is set forth in many colours; in THE
SOUL OF MAN it is written down, and in letters too easy to read; it
is one of the refrains whose recurring MOTIFS make SALOME so like a
piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the prose poem
of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure that
liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that
abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been
otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is what one is
going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol,